WTI and Brent Rise as Geopolitics and Washington Rattle the Market
Written by admin on January 14, 2026
By Julianne Geiger – Jan 13, 2026, 2:17 PM CST
Oil prices pushed higher on Tuesday afternoon, with traders weighing a familiar but combustible mix of Middle East risk and Washington-driven policy uncertainty.
As of 2:34 p.m. ET, U.S. benchmark WTI crude was trading around $61.10 per barrel, up roughly 2.7% on the day, while Brent crude climbed to about $65.41, gaining just over 2.4%. The gains capped a steady intraday grind higher rather than a knee-jerk spike, suggesting the market is responding to a cluster of risks rather than one clear catalyst.
On one side of the oil price ledger is geopolitics. Protests in Iran have resurfaced as a market concern, reviving long-running questions about internal stability in a country that remains a sizeable OPEC producer and strategic choke point for global oil flows. Even when oil is still flowing, unrest inside Iran has a way of injecting risk premium into prices.
Traders are also reacting to fresh policy noise out of Washington. President Donald Trump’s renewed talk of tariffs and public pressure on the Federal Reserve has reintroduced macro risk into the oil market — the kind that doesn’t show up as an immediate supply disruption, but still matters. Tariffs raise the risk of higher costs, slower trade, and retaliation, all of which can bleed into oil demand expectations and currency moves.
This is why crude oil prices are higher without the kind of violent move befitting a single, clear shock. There’s no refinery outage, no pipeline rupture, no confirmed supply loss. Instead, traders are layering in geopolitical and policy risk a little at a time.
The market will be watching to see if today’s gains stick into settlement. The open question is whether this is the start of a broader risk repricing, or just another reminder that crude remains highly sensitive to political signals on both sides of the Atlantic.
Prices are higher not because one thing happened on Tuesday, but because enough uncomfortable things are happening all at once.
By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com
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Julianne Geiger
Julianne Geiger is a veteran editor, writer and researcher for Oilprice.com, and a member of the Creative Professionals Networking Group.
