Jason Bordoff

And they were looking at places like Iraq and Libya and going back to some of these geopolitically risky places.

And I suspect people might be rethinking a little bit of those plans now, or at least assigning a bigger kind of geopolitical risk premium to those investments.

What about Russia?

You know, 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.

In 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, we did not use every tool we had in our toolkit to put pressure on Putin.

We had some efforts to deprive it of some oil revenue, but we did not impose full sanctions to try to prevent Russia from selling all of its oil to the global market because Russia just exports too much.

And you would have sent oil prices through the roof for all of us if we had tried to do that.

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's oil off the market?

That was on 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've always been reluctant, and Iran is realizing that now.

They know that.

That's why they're doing what they're doing in the Strait of Hormuz.

Because we're part of an interconnected global oil market, our options are limited to pursue foreign policy objectives targeted at big oil-producing states if the result of that is you send oil prices through the roof and impose pain on ourselves in the process.

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 the sources of relief is Russia has produced a lot of oil that is sitting floating on the water, so to speak.

It's in tankers looking for a buyer.