Washington has a handy scapegoat for stubborn pump prices. Real culprit is not in a boardroom, but on a map.

Shortly after midnight on a Wednesday night in late June, the President of the United States logged in to his social platform and accused the nation's largest energy companies of "robbing" motorists. Crude oil was falling rapidly, and pump prices weren't keeping up, he wrote. He alleged that drivers were being "gouged. The Justice Department was ordered to do an investigation by dawn. In the White House, hours later, he recited the names Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and said the price for regular should be $2.25. The national average was almost double that that morning.

This choreography was all too familiar to anyone who has followed the American political process in an oil shock. One price that nearly every home watches weekly, posted on a sign at eye level on the morning commute, is the price of gasoline. With November's midterm elections looming, a president has plenty of reason to appear to be swinging at it. Not to mention the investigation itself is something akin to ritual. During Clinton's, Bush's, Obama and Biden's terms, investigations of fuel prices were conducted, but as Axios pointed out in its own reality check, none resulted in evidence of widespread anti competitive practices, except in a handful of local situations. The issuance of a subpoena starts making headlines. Does not form a barrel.

The next morning, Chevron's finance chief, who spoke with CNBC from Europe, resisted the bait but didn't deny that it hurt. She said she was "sympathetic with drivers on both sides of the Atlantic" and that the majors were "doing everything we can," but noted there is a lag time between the price of cheaper crude and cheaper fuel. In fact, her company is expanding, she noted, with production anticipated to increase by 7 to 10 percent in 2016. The American Petroleum Institute put it more simply: Gasoline and crude do not move together, particularly during a global disruption that has yet to be felt in supply, refining and inventories.

This isn't corporate bull. It has been measured by economists for decades and they even have a nickname for it: “rockets and feathers.” When crude prices jump, pump prices go up like a rocket, when crude prices fall, pump prices go down like a feather. A study in the Journal of International Money and Finance suggests that only about 13 percent of the price rise or decline of oil is passed on to the pump within a week, some 37 percent within three months, and around half over the long run. The reasons are earthly. Even with the higher price yesterday, stations are still selling fuel at yesterday's price. Much of the price a motorist pays for gasoline, in fact far more than the price of the crude is attributable to taxes, refining margins and distribution, as a Columbia University economist told CNBC viewers this week.

The facts behind the quarrel speak for themselves. Crude has declined by some 27 percent, from roughly $104 a barrel a month ago, to less than $76. The national average price of gasoline was about $3.93, down from about $4.52 over the same period closer to 13 percent although still below $4 for the first time since late March. The drivers' average price per gallon is still close to 70 cents higher than a year ago, when it neared $3.22. The President's $2.25 target, meanwhile, speaks of a world that doesn't exist even UBS has said that Americans have a anchor price around $3, closer to the prewar price. But no one is going to $2.25 by sending a hard letter to four chief executives.

The part of the blame game that's missing and that's where it all matters. Oil prices don't move around randomly and aren't determined in Houston boardrooms. A very small stream of water, running between Iran and Oman, is the single biggest reason that today a gallon costs what it does. The Straits of Hormuz were a conduit for nearly 20% of the world's traded oil, and over the past few months it turned into a weapon. The fighting between Iran and a U.S.-Israeli coalition, when it began, slowed the flow to a trickle, the mines and missiles swept the shipping lanes, and crude surged past $120 a barrel from its starting price of around $65 a barrel at the beginning of the year. The interim U.S.-Iran deal to reopen the waterway has been half successful. Exports are operating at about three-quarters of prewar rates, hundreds of tankers are stuck in the Gulf and insurers are still wary about dispatching crews through.

Now the truce is in danger. In the last few days, Iran hit a container ship, the U.S. responded by hitting a vessel transporting Qatari oil, Iran responded again, and Washington hit back in a tit-for-tat that briefly pushed crude to four-month lows to $69, but it rebounded toward $70 on Monday after both sides agreed to temporarily halt the conflict ahead of negotiations in Doha. In spring, the chief executive of ExxonMobil said the impact of the disruption hasn't been felt by the market yet and that oil in transit, release of holdings from strategic reserves and inventory drawdowns all buffers that narrow over time were helping to buffer the impact. More than three-quarters of economists now believe the Federal Reserve will keep rates unchanged through 2026, in part because of the oil shock, a Reuters poll shows. None of this can be rectified by a Justice Department investigation.

Take a moment to remove the American as a pump and the image becomes clearer, one that the Washington argument barely registers. It wasn't an American issue alone, it was a stress test of who's reliant on whom. India, the world's fourth biggest refiner, turned more to cheaper Russian oil, introduced export taxes on diesel and jet fuel to make sure fuel is available domestically, and saw lines form for cooking gas, as about 60 percent of its liquid petroleum gas comes in through Hormuz. Thailand locked the price of diesel and asked people to dress down to reduce the use of power. Australia prepared for the prospect of rationing. Looking at the world's urea fertilizer exports, some 30 percent of the stuff comes out of the Gulf, which means the price of bread is just as threatened by a closed strait as is the price of petrol, and there was a quiet return of stagflation language to forecasts from Manila to Melbourne. In times such as these, energy becomes leverage, not a commodity, and the countries with the fewest loose screws pay first and pay more.

The relief that is now coming is geopolitical, not a gesture of corporate goodwill. Saudi Arabia has resumed the loading of tankers at Ras Tanura; the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar are pushing barrels out amid a shortage of ships to carry them; and Iraq is pushing OPEC for a larger quota to make up for sales lost during the war. Meanwhile, the summer driving season is boosting demand while governments are compelled to replenish their stockpiles after drawing on them. These are the levers that really move a fill-up, not one of which is on a chief executive's desk.

There is an irony in the targeting which must be said. The industry that now appears as the bad guy poured money into the system and installed this administration, giving them deregulation and an estimated $18 billion in tax loopholes in last year's signature spending bill, to name just a few. To make policy based on a round on those same companies at a price not of their choosing is less policy, more pantomime: a search for a domestic culprit to blame for a foreign catastrophe, timed for an election.

That is the uncomfortable fact for any government and not just this one: The pump is a hostage and is not a lever. The chokepoint holder holds the price and those that rely on it take the risk. If the ceasefire continues and the tankers continue to roll, prices are likely to continue to slowly decline. If one of those ships catches fire in the strait this week, they will spring into action again and neither investigation nor headline nor $2.25 target will have made a difference. The more effective though less popular response is the "slow" one that's no campaign wants to live on diversified supply, real reserves, home-grown refining capacity, and an honest assessment of the map. We've heard from the oil market and it has told us where the power is. It's not in a California boardroom. It is on a shipping lane, which most drivers will not be able to locate on a globe.

The reasoning that the oil price is not random, that this is statecraft and chokepoint leverage not Boardroom greed, the import dependent economies of the wider world paying first the LPG queues in India, the Diesel freeze in Thailand, the knock-on to fertilisers and food etc. etc. runs through it.