U.S. oil prices rose to their highest levels in a month Friday following a U.S. missile strike on a Syrian airbase. Oil exchange-traded funds such as the United States Oil Fund LP (ticker: USO) and the United States Brent Oil Fund LP ( BNO) were also higher on Friday after WTI crude prices pushed above $52 a barrel and Brent oil prices traded at more than $55 a barrel.
The U.S. attack on Syria comes just several days after a poison gas attack in Syria, which the U.S. government believes involved the use of nerve agent sarin, killed 70 people.
“Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack,” President Donald Trump said of the poison gas attack. “No child of God should ever suffer such horror.”
[See: Oil ETFs: 8 Ways to Invest in Black Gold.]
Even former Trump rival Hillary Clinton supports the U.S. air strikes.
“I really believe we should have and still should take out [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s] air fields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drip sarin gas on them,” Clinton said in an interview at the Women in the World Summit this week.
While Syria isn’t a major oil producer, its Middle East location and alliances with other oil producers have investors concerned about the potential fallout from the U.S. strikes.
Russia, the second-largest global oil producer, has already condemned the U.S. strikes as illegal aggression.
Investor concerns about conflict escalation in Syria and rising tensions between the U.S. and Russia could drive oil and other commodity prices higher in coming days. From a fundamental market perspective, U.S. oil prices have also been supported by a production outage in Canada following a plant fire.
WTI crude oil prices broke back above $50 per barrel in recent weeks for the first time since renewed oversupply fears drove prices from a 2017 high of around $55 a barrel to as low as $47 in March.
GasBuddy analyst Dan McTeague says the U.S. missile strike “brings forth risk and uncertainty on a global scale.”
[See: The 10 Best Energy ETFs for an Eventual Bounce.]
“Oil’s rise … is based on geopolitical circumstance, and as a benchmark commodity and a hedge, it is likely its value will rise in proportion to developments,” he says.
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Oil Investors Nervous About Syria Strike Fallout originally appeared on usnews.com
