Most economists believe a significant increase in oil prices instigated by the war with Iran shouldn’t cause a recession. President Trump says a temporary spike is a small price to pay to secure peace.

Don’t bank on the economists, but Trump is right.

In February, Brent Crude was $71 a barrel, and the national average price of gasoline was $3.04. Each $10 increase for oil should push up the price of gasoline 15 to 20 cents

That hurts working families, but gasoline and diesel are only about 3% of the Consumer Price Index.

Twenty cents translates into a 0.2% boost to the CPI, which should reverse when fuel prices fall back after the war and normal production and trade resume.

Households will cut down on other purchases, but that money doesn’t leave the economy

As net oil exporter, incomes in the U.S. petroleum sector will increase and instigate more investment or cash returned to stockholders through dividends and stock buybacks.

Still, Americans spend less on other stuff fairly quickly, but more spending and bigger cash distributions in the oil patch arrives with some lag.

Wells Fargo’s economists estimate a 50% increase in the price of oil would reduce consumer spending by a full percentage point. By itself, that shouldn’t be enough to cause two quarters of negative GDP growth.

Wars have unforeseen consequences.

By supporting the Houthis, Iran has been terrorizing shipping around the Suez Canal and by attacking other Gulf States, it has effectively shut down passage through the Straits of Hormuz.

Qatar has halted LNG exports, and Korea and Taiwan are significantly dependent on that gas to generate electricity.

Korea makes more than half the DRAM and NAND, and Taiwan makes about 70% of the advanced processing chips that go into smartphones, personal computers and data centers.

Even before the war, the Artificial Intelligence boom was creating shortages of memory chips.

Other Asian economies are also dependent on Gulf natural gas.

These nations could develop alternative supplies—for example, U.S. gas. But building new capacity on the scale needed to replace Gulf exports would take years not months.

Many Europeans and American progressives are aghast that the United States and Israeli would attack a sovereign state. But Iran long ago morphed into a terrorist enterprise threatening the West by enabling rogue groups to criminally disrupt global commerce.

Leaving Iran unchecked, would give it significant leverage on the global economy.

Oil price spikes in 1973, 1980, 1990 and 2008 helped instigate U.S. recessions but not in 2022, when households and small business were flush with COVID shutdown aid.

The Wall Street Journal has observed that some other negative assist must occur for an oil price spike to cause a recession.

The dependence of the Asian supply chain that makes the guts of electronic devices may have metastasized into a standing-ready negative assist to multiply the effects of a jump in oil prices.

That gives Iran a foot on the throat of the global economy if it continues to have the power to shut down Persian Gulf exports.

Persian Gulf countries have diversified their economies.

Nowadays, they host many data centers, supply one fifth of the aluminum used by the U.S. economy and are major a sources of nitrogen fertilizer for global agriculture and helium to manufacture semiconductors.

These are supply chain challenges, like those confronted when Russia attacked Ukraine, and supplies of natural gas and fertilizer had to be replaced.

Importing nations found ways around these dependencies but not quickly

Also, the U.S. economy is laboring under other new supply chain stresses.

On-again, off-again tariffs are forcing uncertain adjustments on American businesses that have frozen new plant construction in much of manufacturing.

Stricter immigration policies are exacerbating labor shortages for factories, construction and elsewhere in the economy.

During the first Trump and Biden administrations, the U.S. labor force added 4.5 million foreign workers. During the first 13 months of the second Trump presidency, it has lost 600,000.

Immigrants fill about one-fifth of STEM positions, and over two-fifths of doctoral level science and engineering roles.

We must successfully conclude the war to secure the global economy, but that will require us to accept higher inflation and perhaps weather a recession.

Multiplying those costs, the loss of Middle Eastern oil and LNG has strengthened Russia’s economy and hand in Europe.

That’s not pretty but we can’t let the Axis—Russia, China, Iran and North Korea—maintain such a chokehold on the U.S. and broader global economy.

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Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.