De Borchgrave: $400 Oil Imminent With Mideast Upheaval

d-winning journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave tells Newsmax that the increasingly volatile situation in the Middle East could quickly push the price of oil to $300 or even $400 a barrel.

De Borchgrave, who has interviewed Moammar Gadhafi six times, also says the Libyan leader is manic-depressive and is currently going through a manic phrase where he is “taking on the world.”

A 30-year veteran of Newsweek magazine, de Borchgrave is now director of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, editor-at-large at United Press International and The Washington Times, and a Newsmax correspondent.

In an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV, de Borchgrave discussed the impact that the uprisings in Libya, Iran and other Middle Eastern nations could have on the price of oil.

“This could get pretty bad because of what’s going on in Libya,” he says. “Libya pumps about 1.8 million barrels a day,” some of which is pumped out of the eastern region around Benghazi “which has now in effect seceded.

“Libya supplies around 74 percent of Europe’s oil and if that is cut, which it could very well be in the next few days, oil will be spiking again.”

The United States does not buy oil from Libya, but de Borchgrave points out that “oil is a global commodity and what hurts in one part of the world is bound to have an impact on other parts of the world.

“If you remove 1.8 million barrels per day, that’s taking quite a chunk out of the world oil market. To tell you to where the prices could spike, I really can’t tell. But if we were to have any trouble in the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, you could see oil going up to two or three hundred dollars a barrel very quickly.”

Oil was selling at over $95 a barrel on Tuesday afternoon, and there’s no telling where prices at the pump — currently around $3.17 a gallon — could rise to if per-barrel oil prices soared to those levels, according to de Borchgrave.

Events in Iran, which has also recently been rocked by popular unrest, could in fact “drive oil up to $300 or $400 a barrel very quickly because we’re dealing with the Straits of Hormuz through which about 28 percent of the world’s oil passes every day,” de Borchgrave tells Newsmax.

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