WASHINGTON/LAHORE: US President Donald Trump has said oil and petrol prices will fall “very rapidly” once America wins its war with Iran, predicting a return to roughly $3 a gallon for American motorists and, eventually, a price below $2 — a claim advanced as global crude markets pushed towards $100 a barrel.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, the President said prices would come down sharply after victory and repeated his position that Iran would not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons in future.
The claim sits uneasily against the market data. Brent crude climbed towards $98 a barrel on Monday, 7 September, its highest level in three months, with West Texas Intermediate trading above $92. The rally extended the previous week’s gains, when Brent rose more than 7 per cent, and reflected renewed US-Iran exchanges around the Strait of Hormuz, tight diesel supplies, falling US crude inventories and an OPEC+ decision to hold October production steady.
Shipping data reported by Reuters put commodity vessel transits through the Strait at an average of about ten a day over the most recent ten-day period — the lowest rate since May. The waterway ordinarily carries roughly a fifth to a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil.
At the American pump, the numbers have moved in the opposite direction to the President’s forecast. The national average for regular petrol has stayed above $4 a gallon every day since the start of August, according to the American Automobile Association, against $2.98 shortly before the war began at the end of February. The national average diesel price set an all-time record last week, surpassing the peak recorded in June 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Washington has responded with a historic drawdown from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is now at its lowest level since the early 1980s, alongside regulatory easing to speed fuel deliveries.
Analysts treat the sub-$2 projection as a campaign-season aspiration rather than a market forecast. Whether prices normalise depends on three variables the White House does not fully control: the duration of the conflict, the restoration of unimpeded traffic through Hormuz, and the willingness of OPEC+ producers to add barrels. Refining capacity is a separate constraint — diesel tightness reflects the state of the world’s refineries as much as the availability of crude.
Pakistan imports the bulk of its crude, refined products and LNG, and a very large share of those cargoes originate in or transit the Gulf. Every sustained dollar on the barrel feeds through to the import bill, to pressure on the rupee and to the fortnightly ex-depot price notification issued by the government.
The transmission is not instant. Domestic prices are set from Platts benchmarks, exchange rates, premiums, freight and a fixed structure of petroleum levy, margins and taxes. But the direction of travel is unambiguous: elevated Brent, higher war-risk insurance and thinner tanker traffic all raise the landed cost of fuel at Karachi and Port Qasim.
Higher freight and insurance costs also raise the price of imported industrial inputs, edible oil and fertiliser — inputs that eventually surface in Punjab’s food and transport inflation. Business groups in Lahore have for months pressed for a review of the petroleum levy on precisely this argument, a demand that has also become a central plank of the Jamaat-e-Islami sit-in on Mall Road.
The Lahore Times independently verified the Brent, WTI and AAA figures cited above against market and industry data for 7 September 2026.
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