Europe is being pushed to open its emergency fuel stocks, and it is starting to comply. Washington has told governments to release strategic diesel or risk limits on US diesel exports. The threat lands on a continent already paying heavily for fuel since war broke out in the Middle East.
The pressure is public. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Washington would "love to have a collaborative response". Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was blunter: Europe should speed up delivery of commitments it has already made and "make additional supplies immediately available".
France put a plan to the EU's energy coordination group in a virtual meeting on Friday. It proposes a joint release of 100 million barrels of petroleum products: 50 million barrels of diesel from Europe and 50 million barrels of crude from members of the International Energy Agency. EU ambassadors were summoned to an unscheduled meeting in Brussels the same day to discuss the diesel market.
President Emmanuel Macron had spoken overnight with Donald Trump and Canada's Mark Carney, and convened a call of G7 leaders for the afternoon. The Commission also held high-level talks on Thursday with France, Italy, Germany and Ireland, which holds the EU's rotating presidency.
Europe has moved more slowly than the US in releasing stocks. Germany and Spain first signalled reluctance to free up more barrels. Berlin's economy ministry said any step must rest on a "careful joint assessment of the situation" within international procedures, and insisted that Germany's supply of crude and petroleum products is secure.
The hesitation matters. Germany and France between them hold more than a third of the EU's strategic diesel reserves, which puts both at the centre of the US demand.
The motive is domestic. Spiralling pump prices threaten Republican hopes in next month's US midterm elections. The export-ban talk has drawn strong pushback from American energy companies, which stand to lose European sales. Brent crude fell about 3% on Friday to around $99 a barrel, still near the level that keeps diesel expensive.
Euro-zone inflation meanwhile rose by more than expected last month to its highest in three years, strengthening expectations that the European Central Bank will raise rates again.
The squeeze is reaching national budgets too. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has written to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen asking for more room under the EU's fiscal rules to spend windfall tax revenue on cushioning households and businesses from high energy prices. She warns that current euro-zone spending ceilings may not allow for higher-than-expected inflation. Italy wants the issue taken up at a meeting of finance ministers next week.
Europe is being asked to spend reserves it built for emergencies to ease a price problem that Washington partly shares and partly controls. That is awkward. Writing in the Financial Times, the Lex column said Europe should take the export-ban threat "seriously, if not literally", because it shows the continent can no longer count on the US as an unconditional fuel supplier.
The practical test comes next week. Do governments sign up to the French plan? How fast do barrels actually move? Does Berlin's caution survive a direct threat to its fuel supply? Expect the diesel fight to bleed into the finance ministers' talks on fiscal flexibility.
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