BNOJETSUSOXLE
Analysis
U.S. President Donald Trump’s United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) speech next week will land amid a Middle East war that is driving global energy prices higher in Europe and at home.
The uncertainty is also testing an increasingly fractured UN that lacks the capacity to mediate the very crisis destabilizing markets.
World leaders will gather in New York for several days of high‑level debate starting Tuesday. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian is scheduled to address the General Assembly on Wednesday. His trip comes more than half a year after the United States and Israel went to war with Tehran.
The White House will attempt to frame its foreign‑policy record as confronting "complex problems head-on," U.S. Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz said, including "the importance of ensuring that Iran never has a nuclear weapon."
Trump’s remarks come as geopolitical instability deepens. The Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed to normal commercial shipping. Iran‑backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have intensified attacks on Saudi Arabia and its oil infrastructure.
Gulf Diplomacy Matters Beyond his UNGA remarks, Trump is expected to meet leaders from the Gulf Cooperation Council. The administration sees this as essential to maintaining direct lines with regional partners as the conflict widens.
A senior U.S. official said the president "values hearing their concerns."
Those diplomatic efforts come as the war’s economic toll continues to mount, and as security itself deteriorates on the ground. In the Saudi capital of Riyadh, phones lit up Friday night with air‑raid alerts. These were the first such warnings issued in the capital since Houthi attacks escalated.
That alarms were triggered in Riyadh itself, not just border regions, underscores how the conflict’s risk perimeter is widening. Markets have not yet priced in the conflict’s expansion.
Markets Misprice War Risk The ongoing uncertainty is making it difficult to forecast future oil prices, according to JP Morgan Chase & Co.
The bank said it cannot reliably model the economic endgame of the US-Iran war. Oil prices, inflation, and borrowing costs have moved beyond the bank’s earlier assumptions.
JP Morgan pegs oil’s “fair value” at roughly $90 a barrel versus its current $100+ price. The premium is based on continued Gulf disruption, not resolution. Any de-escalation at UNGA could compress it. Another attack on Saudi infrastructure would likely widen it.
The widening Brent premium is now functioning as a proxy for geopolitical risk, reflecting traders’ belief that supply stability cannot be restored through diplomacy alone.
Traders positioning on geopolitics can monitor WTI/Brent futures (CL, BZ) or ETFs like USO (NYSE:USO), BNO (NYSE:BNO), and XLE (NYSE:XLE) for energy exposure. That compares to fuel-sensitive JETS (NYSE:JETS) on the downside.
Saudi Supply Shock Nowhere is the Middle East disruption more visible than in Europe.
Saudi oil company Saudi Aramco has told at least two European refining customers they will receive no crude oil next month. The decisions follows an attack on Saudi Arabia’s key pipeline to the Red Sea, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The shortfall is forcing refiners toward pricier alternative grades from West Africa or the U.S. Gulf Coast. This will tighten global spare capacity further and add upward pressure on Brent relative to WTI.
Saudi Arabia shut its East-West pipeline last week after a drone attack. A person familiar with the matter said on Wednesday the line is expected to return to full operation within six weeks, Reuters reported.
The 1,200-km East-West Pipeline had been carrying 4 million to 5 million barrels per day to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. That is equivalent to 4%–5% of global oil supply.
Europe’s Inflation Hit The fallout from these supply shocks is showing up in prices in Europe’s biggest consumer.
Germany’s prices of energy products were 10.5% higher in August 2026 than in the same period last year, according to official German government statistics.
“In August, higher energy prices were again the primary drivers of overall inflation,” Ruth Brand, President of the Federal Statistical Office, said on September 10. “The rise in energy prices, caused primarily by the war in Iran, was particularly noticeable in the case of motor fuel prices."
The conflict is driving producer prices of mineral oil products up 40.5% in August, year on year. The sustained rise in European energy costs is feeding directly into rate expectations, with traders increasingly pricing out near‑term ECB cuts.
The United States is not insulated either. Average diesel prices hit another new all-time high of $6.45/gallon on Friday.
UN Capacity Erodes The UN heads into this year’s General Assembly under serious strain.
The International Crisis Group warned leaders “will find an organisation trapped in an open-ended institutional crisis,” saying UN diplomacy “is largely paralysed, while a second year of cost cutting has weakened the organisation’s capacity to respond.”
The Trump administration has squeezed the UN financially while pushing reform, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said on Friday. Washington moved to cut most U.S. funding for international organizations and ordered a halt to participation in 31 UN entities in January.
The UN says its overall resource base has shrunk by $16 billion over two years.
With the UN’s capacity eroding and no credible diplomatic backstop in sight, markets are being forced to price geopolitical risk as a structural feature of the global economy rather than a temporary shock.