{"id":8265,"date":"2026-03-24T20:26:49","date_gmt":"2026-03-24T20:26:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=8265"},"modified":"2026-03-24T20:26:49","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T20:26:49","slug":"opinion-how-iranian-oil-controls-u-s-foreign-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=8265","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | How Iranian Oil Controls U.S. Foreign Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div id=\"\">\n<p class=\"css-8hvvyd\">One of the moves the Trump administration has made is to desanction Russian and Iranian oil and gas. Now, to the extent I know anything about our current foreign policy, it\u2019s that we have been trying very hard to sanction Russian and Iranian energy exports. So what is going on there? I think we are showing in this conflict the limits of the willingness of the American people, the American government, to bear pain in energy markets, pain at the pump to pursue foreign policy objectives. That has always been the case. I worked in the Obama White House when the original sanctions were put on Iran. And the big question was: How do you take Iran\u2019s oil off the market? That was around one and a half, two million barrels a day. And not send oil prices skyrocketing in the process. How do you impose the pain on them but not impose it on us? And so we\u2019ve always been reluctant. And Iran is realizing that now, they know that, that\u2019s why they\u2019re doing what they\u2019re doing in the Strait of Hormuz. So because oil prices are going up so much, the administration is looking to pull every lever it can to find some relief. And one of those sources of relief is Russia has produced a lot of oil that is sitting, floating on the water, so to speak. It\u2019s in tankers looking for a buyer. It was having to discount that oil a lot to find a buyer, because people don\u2019t necessarily want to touch sanctioned oil. You have to use a shadow economy to do it. And they\u2019re saying now, please take those barrels as fast as you can, get them into the market to bring prices down. And now they\u2019ve done the same thing for at least the next 30 days for Iran. OK, I\u2019m sorry, but that\u2019s insane. Just as a 30,000 foot \u2014 that we are bombing the country into rubble, that, as we speak right now, threatening to destroy their power plants, and desanctioning their oil, like, it really shows something here was unplanned for or is off. And also that if we\u2019re at a place now where we are waiving sanctions on Iranian oil for 30 days so that they can put that oil in the market as fast as possible, it probably would have been sold eventually anyway, but let\u2019s do it faster. And, again, they\u2019re going to get a better price for it. We may be running out of good options to bring oil prices down. And I just think, again, this is why oil has always been such a key geopolitical weapon and such a key geopolitical vulnerability.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the moves the Trump administration has made is to desanction Russian and Iranian oil and gas. Now, to the extent I know anything about our current foreign policy,&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":8266,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[6150,1285,8808,2490,57,2026,668],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Opinion | How Iranian Oil Controls U.S. Foreign Policy - Frisco Times<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=8265\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Opinion | How Iranian Oil Controls U.S. Foreign Policy - Frisco Times\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"One of the moves the Trump administration has made is to desanction Russian and Iranian oil and gas. 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