Trump's promised drop in oil prices arrives as prices head toward their highest level in months.

…(cont) By the 12th he was explaining the no. The Houthis, he said, "don't want to fight us." They'd called him. They'd told him so. A militia that had just knocked out a chunk of a country's oil export capacity, he described as basically at peace with the United States, mid-blockade.

By Tuesday the militia and the kingdom were publicly accusing each other of new attacks. The Houthis said they'd downed a Saudi jet. The Saudi coalition said it had shot down a Houthi drone in the airspace south of Mecca before it reached the city. Islam's holiest site, under an intercepted strike, four days after the one man who could authorize a response chose not to.

That's the order: promise, pipeline, phone call, refusal, drone. And global oil is now pointed at its highest price in months — not despite that sequence, in it.

Nobody who filled up a tank this week got the drop. What they got was the guy supposedly winning a war telling the ally under fire, twice, on the phone, that he'd sit this one out — and telling the country prices were headed down anyway. The money for the sanctions, for the strikes, for whatever's funding the "strategic clarity" being described on television this week, exists. It's being spent. It is just not coming back out the other end as a lower number on the sign outside the gas station. It never was going to. That was never the deal. The deal was the sentence, and the sentence was built to make you stop reading after "precipitously." The barrel doesn't care what he posted. The barrel counts the pipeline that's shut, the request he turned down, and the drone that got as far as Mecca before somebody else's air defense — not his — knocked it down.