Oil prices climbed for a fourth consecutive session Thursday as the US-Iran standoff refused to move toward resolution, with Brent crude hovering near $106 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate trading around $97 — levels that reflect a market that has stopped waiting for a diplomatic breakthrough and started pricing in a prolonged disruption.

The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas normally flows, remains effectively closed to international commercial traffic. Iranian gunboats have been reported firing on vessels attempting transit.

The US naval blockade continues to target ships linked to Iran. Major Gulf producers — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE and Iraq among them — have seen their export capacity severely constrained, with storage facilities filling and tankers sitting idle rather than loading.

The ceasefire that was supposed to create space for diplomacy has instead created a new category of dispute. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has described the American blockade as a violation of the truce’s terms, a characterisation Washington rejects. Trump announced this week that the ceasefire would remain in place indefinitely — an open-ended extension that removed the immediate threat of resumed strikes but did nothing to resolve the underlying impasse. Iran has given no firm indication it intends to return to the negotiating table. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said dialogue remained welcome but that the ongoing blockade and continued threats constituted obstacles that made meaningful engagement impossible in present conditions.

The sticking points are not new, and they are not small. Washington’s demands include verifiable constraints on Iran’s nuclear programme and a severance of Tehran’s support for proxy forces across the Middle East — conditions that touch the foundations of the Islamic Republic’s regional strategy and its deterrence posture.

Iran’s demands include lifting the blockade, reparations for war damage and a new legal framework for Hormuz transit that preserves Iranian leverage over the waterway. The distance between those two positions has not visibly narrowed since the Islamabad talks collapsed without agreement earlier this month.

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Israel’s continued military operations in Lebanon add another layer of complexity that has consistently frustrated efforts to isolate the US-Iran dimension from the broader regional conflict.

Tehran has linked any comprehensive settlement to Israeli behaviour in Lebanon and Gaza, conditions that Washington either cannot deliver or will not attempt to, deepening the sense that the diplomatic track is navigating obstacles that the current configuration of actors cannot remove.

American supply data offered a counterweight to the geopolitical pessimism. The Energy Information Administration reported declines across major refined product categories this week, a signal of strong domestic demand that has been driving record US oil and fuel export levels as buyers scramble for non-Gulf supply. American producers have been the primary beneficiaries of the Hormuz disruption, filling gaps left by constrained Gulf exports at prices substantially above what prevailed before the war began in late February.

The US strategic petroleum reserve, which has been drawn down significantly in recent years, has provided some additional buffer, as has the coordinated IEA reserve release that was among the largest in the agency’s history. But those mechanisms cushion rather than replace the Gulf volumes that are not moving, and their effectiveness diminishes the longer the disruption persists.

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Market analysts have largely stopped modelling a quick resolution. The combination of a ceasefire with no enforcement mechanism, diplomacy with no agreed framework, a blockade that one side considers lawful pressure and the other considers an act of war, and a strait that handles a fifth of global energy trade sitting in effective lockdown — that combination does not resolve on a timeline that markets can reasonably anchor to.

Volatility, in that environment, is not a risk to be managed. It is the condition. Every statement from Tehran or Washington, every report of a gunboat incident, every ceasefire extension announcement moves prices by percentages that would have been considered extreme before February 28. The market has recalibrated its sense of normal to account for a war that was supposed to be brief and has instead become a sustained feature of the global energy landscape.

Brent near $106 and WTI near $97 represent where the market has settled while it waits for something to change. What changes first — a diplomatic opening, a military escalation, an internal shift in Iranian politics, or a unilateral American decision to end the blockade — will determine which direction prices move when they finally move decisively. For now, they are moving up, session by session, as the world’s most important oil chokepoint stays closed and the talks stay stalled.