NATO allies and other Western nations pushed back Monday on U.S. President Donald Trump's demand that military alliance members help reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the critical conduit for crude oil Iran has effectively closed.

After being forced to flee with his family from Israeli air raids on southern Lebanon, Hussein Fakih searched in vain for an apartment, amid strict measures imposed by hotels and landlords afraid that guests might be targeted by Israel.

Every day more than $4 billion worth of goods cross the United States' borders with Canada and Mexico – U.S. auto parts headed for car factories in northern Mexico, cartons of Mexican avocados bound for California supermarkets, Canadian aluminum destined to become cans of Campbell Soup.

Much of this bustling cross-border commerce is duty-free, thanks to the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, that President Donald Trump negotiated with America's northern and southern neighbors during his first term.

Fears of a global energy crisis rose Monday as the war in the Middle East raged on, with more U.S.-Israeli strikes on the Iranian capital and Israel's bombardment of Lebanon. An Iranian drone strike temporarily shut Dubai's airport, a crucial global travel hub, underscoring the threats to the world economy.

Since the United States and Israel attacked Iran more than two weeks ago, Tehran has regularly fired on Israel, American bases in the region, and Gulf Arab countries' energy infrastructure with drones and missiles.

Iran threatened Saturday to reduce U.S.-linked oil facilities to "a pile of ashes" as the two-week-old Middle East war spilled over into a global oil price crisis.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday said that stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons was more important to him than controlling oil prices.

Unrelenting Iranian attacks on shipping traffic and energy infrastructure pushed oil above $100 a barrel Thursday, as American and Israeli strikes pounded the Islamic Republic with no sign of an end to the war in sight.

Iran hit a container ship off the coast of Dubai, caused a blaze near Bahrain's international airport, targeted a major Saudi oil field with a drone and forced Iraq to halt operations at all of its oil terminals after attacking its port of Basra on the Persian Gulf.

The International Energy Agency agreed Wednesday to release the largest volume of emergency oil reserves in its history, in a bid to counter the effects on energy markets of the war in the Middle East.

The Paris-based organization said it will make 400 million barrels of oil available from its members' emergency reserves. It's a larger stock than the 182.7 million barrels that were released in 2022 by the IEA's 32 member countries in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The rising prices causing winces of pain at gasoline pumps are due, in large part, to the impact of the Iran war on the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial passageway for oil and gas from the Persian Gulf. The narrow waterway off Iran's coast, now effectively closed by the war, is so vital for the global economy that governments are working on blueprints to speedily reopen it to shipping when the shooting stops.

In Europe, French President Emmanuel Macron is leading an international effort to unblock the energy chokepoint, so oil, gas and goods could flow freely again "when circumstances permit." He envisages countries using warships to escort tankers and container vessels through the strait when fighting is no longer raging so intensely, whenever that maybe.

Iran vowed on Tuesday that not one liter of oil would be exported from the Gulf while its war with the United States and Israel continues, in a stark rebuke to President Donald Trump's boast that the conflict was all but over.

Trump's argument that the war would be "ended soon" helped reverse the Monday's spike in oil prices, which have surged since Iranian attacks on shipping closed the Strait of Hormuz in response to the U.S.-Israeli strikes that killed its supreme leader.