During their visit to Kyiv in September, US President Donald Trump’s envoys urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to consider restarting the pipelines that once carried Russian gas to Europe, The New York Times reported on 17 October. They presented it as part of a peace deal with Russia. In the weeks that followed, they pressed the idea with European officials, while Washington freed Russian diesel and spared Russia’s oil buyers from new US penalties.

Energy sales fund Russia’s war, and Ukraine’s halt of transit in January 2025 left TurkStream as Gazprom’s only pipeline route into the EU. Meanwhile, Russia has kept bombing Ukraine’s grid through the energy truce Washington declared on 11 October.

The pitch in Kyiv

Envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner put the idea to Zelenskyy when they met him in Kyiv, the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the talks. Trump officials argued that transit fees, which Ukraine gave up at about $1 billion a year, would benefit Kyiv, and that European voters would eventually want cheaper energy. Russia’s share of EU gas imports had fallen from 45% in 2021 to 13% last year.

The envoys presented renewed Russian gas sales as one of the economic incentives in a wider settlement covering Russia’s relationship with NATO, security guarantees for Ukraine, and territorial control. Some European and Ukrainian officials suspected Washington would seek a cut of the profits. The White House denied that the Nord Stream pipeline had been a subject of recent discussions. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed that resuming energy cooperation is in Russia’s interest and, right now, even more in Europe’s.

Germany pushes back

At Ukraine talks the envoys hosted in Florida last week, Günter Sautter, security adviser to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, forcefully opposed the idea. German lawmakers have called a return to Russian deliveries a disaster for European security, even treason, as the far-right AfD courts Gazprom to bring the gas back. Former Economy Minister Robert Habeck, who steered Germany off Russian gas after 2022, said Trump “seems to have more sympathies with Vladimir Putin than he has with the Ukrainians.”

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One concession after another

Rather than pressure Putin or strengthen Ukraine, the administration has spent much of its peace effort on economic incentives for Russia, the newspaper wrote. The US Treasury cleared imports of Russian diesel on 9 October. On 16 October, Trump waived the penalties on Russia’s oil buyers that Congress had passed in the Graham Act. Washington is also weighing relief for sanctioned shadow fleet tankers. And the White House ordered limits on the military satellite service Ukraine’s forces rely on, Reuters reported.

Putin’s economic envoy Kirill Dmitriev claimed the ice had broken and more joint initiatives would follow, including data centers powered by Russian nuclear energy. The talks also cover the sale of Lukoil’s foreign assets to a group that includes the US government, the newspaper reported earlier this month. Zelenskyy, who had heard the pitch in Kyiv, alluded to it in a Financial Times interview this week.

“The question will be when will the next deal be? Maybe it will be gas. Definitely it will be gas,” he said.

Reopening the pipelines could hand Moscow back significant revenue and strengthen its sway over Europe’s energy market, Liga noted. Each new concession lowers the price Russia pays for continuing the war.

America's interminable war with Iran has killed thousands, disrupted commerce that flows through the Strait of Hormuz, and raised prices on the home front.

But there may be one silver lining. In an attempt to lower gas prices that spiked because of the war, the Trump administration has repeatedly issued waivers of the Jones Act, a century-old law that requires all goods moved between American ports to be carried on American-built, American-crewed ships.

With the law (temporarily) not being enforced, commerce has exploded.

Just look at how much propane has been shipped from the mainland United States to Puerto Rico, says Colin Grabow, a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute and perhaps the nation's foremost advocate for abolishing the Jones Act.

Since March, when the first waiver was issued, Puerto Rico has imported more than 800,000 barrels of propane from the mainland. That's more than twice the amount of American propane shipped to Puerto Rico in the last 22 years combined.

America is one of the world's leading producers and exporters of propane, but the lack of Jones Act–compliant ships capable of carrying gas means that it has been nearly impossible to ship propane from the mainland to outlying parts of the country. In the past, Puerto Rico has imported gas from Nigeria, Chile, and elsewhere because those deliveries don't have to comply with the Jones Act.

For years, libertarians have argued that the Jones Act unfairly impoverishes American consumers and businesses that want to buy and sell things within the same country in order to artificially inflate the price of moving those things across water. Waiving the law seems to have proven that point: There are plenty of ships capable of moving gas and oil around the country as long as the government gets out of the way.

"The instant the Jones Act no longer applied to energy shipments, mainland propane displaced foreign imports, suggesting it had been the cheapest option all along," says Grabow.

Puerto Rico is hardly the only winner.

The Jones Act waivers are offering a glimpse into a world where the law doesn't exist. From March through mid-August, there had been 210 voyages completed that otherwise would have been deemed unlawful without the waivers, according to an analysis of Maritime Administration data by the Institute for Energy Research.

It's a world where American oil and natural gas can be more easily shipped from the Gulf Coast to New England, which had previously been importing energy from Russia and Europe. Another big winner is California, which had been importing gasoline from as far away as the Bahamas because it was nearly impossible to legally ship gas from Texas or Alaska to the West Coast.

President Donald Trump reupped the Jones Act waiver in mid-May. Another extension, issued in August, will last for 90 days but applies only to ships carrying energy products such as gas and oil. Before that waiver expires in November, lawmakers ought to kill the Jones Act permanently.

There is some irony in the fact that one of Trump's most successful policy maneuvers has paused a protectionist law that limited commerce, when so much else of his economic policy has been focused on erecting barriers to trade. It's also amusing that it was a war in the Middle East—something Trump pledged to avoid—that triggered this change.

Still, the proof is in the shipping. The free traders were right all along.

The post Trump's War With Iran Pushed Him To Waive a Century-Old Shipping Law. Commerce Boomed. appeared first on Reason Magazine.