WASHINGTON — For weeks, the President of the United States floated the idea that America might stop selling its diesel to Europe. On Friday, the G7 announced it would release up to 100 million barrels of oil and fuel from its emergency stockpiles, starting with what the group called a “substantial diesel release within the first 20 days.” The threat worked. The world blinked. And the markets, for once, told the truth about it.

Here is the sequence, because the sequence is the story. Diesel hit record prices in the United States and, across the Atlantic, the UK crossed £2 a litre for the first time in history. European governments pushed back against the American export-ban talk. And then the G7, meeting with all the coordination that international bodies can summon, agreed to do exactly the thing that makes an American export ban unnecessary. Economists call this deterrence. The rest of us can call it what it is: America said one thing at a meeting, and fourteen countries rearranged their fuel reserves.

The details of the deal are the kind of thing that only energy reporters get to see, and they are beautiful. The release will run as much as 100 million barrels over four months. The G7 will also coordinate refinery maintenance schedules so that multiple refineries do not shut down at the same time — an agreement, in plain English, that everyone agrees to take turns being offline, which is the most adult sentence ever issued by a summit communiqué.

"One sentence from one President, and the industrialized world scheduled its refineries around each other. That is not a threat. That is a calendar."

DIESEL DIPLOMACY: THE SCOREBOARD

  • The ask: America might stop selling diesel to Europe.
  • The response: A coordinated 100-million-barrel drawdown across the G7.
  • Timeline: Substantial diesel within 20 days. The rest over four months.
  • UK diesel before the war: 142.38p a litre. Now: 200.01p. The RAC keeps this list so you don't have to.
  • Estimated UK price if America had actually banned exports: £3 a litre, per Capital Economics. The ban did not happen. The price of the ban happened.

Some commentators called the export-ban talk reckless. Those commentators have never negotiated anything, including their own restaurant bills. The point of a threat is that it costs nothing until it is executed, and the point of the other side acting is that the threat never has to be. The President got a global fuel release without releasing a single barrel of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, without a vote in Congress, and without a new agency. The agency was the microphone.

At press time, the White House announced it was considering a follow-up threat about jet fuel, purely to see what happens.