Jason Bordoff

It was having to discount that oil a lot to find a buyer because people don't necessarily want to touch sanctioned oil.

You have to use a sort of shadow economy to do it.

And they're saying now, please take those barrels as fast as you can, get them into the market to bring prices down.

And now they've done the same thing for at least the next 30 days for Iran, which is, as you said, a bit odd to be pursuing a military campaign against Iran.

And one of the tools we have to take to deal with high oil prices is to let Iran sell more oil, not just to sell more, but even more importantly, to get a better price for the oil that may have otherwise been sold in that sort of shadow economy.

And also that if we're 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's do it faster.

And again, they're going to get a better price for it.

we may be running out of good options.

And we could talk about what some of the other options are 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.

Well, and there's nothing new about energy being used as a weapon.

Lord Curzon in World War I famously said the Allies floated to victory upon a wave of oil and the ability to cut off the supply of oil for the military in World War I, World War II.

These were key sources.

I mean, one of the reasons Japan attacked Pearl Harbor was it had lost access to oil supply before that.

Yeah.

So trying to go after energy supply has always been central to that.

It was why Winston Churchill famously moved the British Navy from coal to oil, which was a much more efficient fuel.

The Navy could be faster, but it also exposed it to new vulnerability because you had a lot of coal in the UK up near Newcastle, but now you needed to depend on places like Persia for your oil.

So geopolitics of energy became an issue that in a way it hadn't been before.