SCIENCE said:

good news

The result is gasoline and diesel moving from the US to Australia and the resource hungry economies of Asia looking to the US, Latin America and West Africa for resources. “That isn’t a typical flow, you know, across the whole world,” he said. “So we’re seeing a whole armada of empty tankers heading to the US to load. We’re seeing record exports out of the US, both of crude and products.”

so it wasn’t about getting hands on more oil after all it was just about selling the oil they had

Nine-dimensional chess, so who (other than the protagonists) knows?