Last week, Trump reportedly dialed in unannounced to a meeting between a delegation of EU sanctions experts and US officials, during which he called for the EU to enact steep tariffs on India and China. While their strategic dependence on the United States is well known, it is fundamentally against their interests to be perceived as so dependent that they have no say on their commercial relations with India and China. In this struggle, the volumes covered by the oil sanctions exemption for Hungary and Slovakia are small—about 500,000 barrels per day. It will take six-to-nine months for the United States to ramp up supply, and there are only a million spare Saudi barrels per day at present. It’s moved from overheating to recession in just six months due to low oil prices.