eualive.net
Trump wants Europe’s diesel reserves spent before the midterms
The Trump administration has told Germany and France to draw down emergency diesel stocks or face a possible ban on U.S. diesel exports. Washington wants the EU to release about 120 million barrels over six months — more than a third of the bloc’s reserves — to ease a global shortage and bring down pump prices before the U.S. midterms.
The request follows an earlier one in the same register. In September, Trump asked Ukraine to stop striking Russian diesel refineries, blaming those attacks for record US prices and insisting the war he began with Iran was not the cause. Energy analysts and even the Kremlin have described the disruption in the Gulf as the larger driver. U.S. diesel has risen by roughly two-thirds since the strikes on Iran in late February.
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Europe is now being asked to spend strategic stocks built for supply shocks in order to cushion an American electoral problem created, in large part, by that war. A negotiated end to the fighting, or a credible plan to restore Gulf flows, would do more for prices than a forced release of reserves. Neither is on offer. EU leaders still prefer quiet coordination with Washington to an open row. That caution reads, at home, as deference. In Germany and France, the two countries holding the largest stocks and now first in line for the demand, extremist parties are already using the cost of fuel and the sight of governments taking instructions from Washington as proof that those in office cannot defend either household budgets or national interests.
The rise of those parties is not an accident the administration is trying to prevent. Trump’s Washington is more comfortable with populist leaders who treat alliances as transactions and international rules as optional than with European governments that still talk about law, multilateral institutions and collective defence. A weaker, more divided EU, led or constrained by parties that share his impatience with norms, is easier to pressure on trade, energy and Ukraine than a bloc that answers with a common position. The diesel demand fits that pattern: extract a concession now, and leave the political cost to incumbents whose loss of credibility is, from this point of view, not a problem to be solved.
Caption: Close-up of fuel nozzles at a gas station in Nice, France, 15 September 2026. Diesel prices in France have surged toward record highs following recent conflict and crude oil supply disruptions in the Middle East. EPA/SEBASTIEN NOGIER
