War & Peace Quote by Daniel Yergin

Yergin’s sentence performs a soothing sleight of hand: it acknowledges the nightmare word “war,” then immediately corrals it into a tidy, almost managerial forecast. The specifics - “$5, $6 a barrel” - are doing rhetorical heavy lifting. They’re not just numbers; they’re a promise of containment, a way to shrink geopolitical violence into a brief, priced-in market flutter. By choosing a modest range, he invites the listener to feel sophisticated rather than alarmed, as if the right mental model turns catastrophe into a rounding error.

The subtext is faith in the market’s reflexes. War may disrupt, but “extra supplies… available elsewhere” will dutifully “come into the world,” like understudies stepping onstage. That phrasing quietly naturalizes a global oil system where barrels flow around conflict the way capital flows around regulation: friction exists, but it’s temporary, and the system is bigger than any single shock. It’s also a subtle assertion of Western energy security thinking from the post-Cold War era into the 2000s: the belief that diversification, spare capacity, and trade routes can buffer almost anything.

His intent reads like crisis communication for an anxious public and for policymakers: don’t panic, don’t overreact, don’t assume scarcity. Yet the calmness carries a moral chill. By translating war into a transient price spike “until” markets rebalance, the human and political costs vanish behind logistics. The line doesn’t argue that war is acceptable; it implies that the oil market has learned to live with it.