I see he started with a carrot.
Well, yesterday he said he's very pissed at Putin, and that if Putin doesn't play nice Trump will slap tariffs on any country that buys Russian oil.
This is new of course. Russia has 27,560 sanctions applied against it (according to a recent count, and this is more than all the sanctions applied against everyone else in the world combined). But there hasn't been as much sanctions against our trading partners. So... it is new.
The problem is - as I'm sure even a child can understand - that this will not work.
If you take 10 million barrels off the market, it won't appear from a new place tomorrow. What will happen instead is probably not what Trump wants.
1) First stop - $150 oil. Say hello to a further and massive spike in inflation.
2) Second stop - legal challenges from every corner of the world over the legality of Trump's secondary sanctions.
3) Final stop - an effective increase in Russian budget revenues, because at the end of the day we'll find a way to sell the oil - but now at much higher prices. Why? Because there is simply no way that a country like India or China will kneecap itself just to please Trump. This would no longer be a question of "upholding rule of law", but a fundamental question of "how do I keep the lights on for a one and a half billion people".
