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The Trump administration late Friday lifted sanctions on approximately 140 million barrels of Iranian crude oil already loaded on tankers at sea, issuing a 30-day waiver that allows the oil to be purchased, transported, and refined globally — a measure that simultaneously represents the most aggressive step taken by the White House to suppress oil prices that have climbed 60 percent since the war began and constitutes an acknowledgment, criticized from multiple directions within hours of its announcement, that the administration has exhausted most of its conventional economic options for managing the energy shock it created.
The Treasury Department issued the license after markets closed Friday, restricting it to Iranian oil already loaded onto vessels as of March 20, with the authorization expiring on April 19.
“Today, the Department of the Treasury is issuing a narrowly tailored, short-term authorization permitting the sale of Iranian oil currently stranded at sea,” Secretary Scott Bessent announced. “By temporarily unlocking this existing supply for the world, the United States will quickly bring approximately 140 million barrels of oil to global markets, expanding the amount of worldwide energy and helping to relieve the temporary pressures on supply caused by Iran,” Bessent said. He added that Iran would “have difficulty accessing any revenue generated” and that maximum financial pressure on Tehran’s access to international banking systems would be maintained — a claim that critics, including sanctions policy experts, immediately questioned.
The framing Bessent deployed publicly stripped the measure of any appearance of concession. “In essence, we will be using the Iranian barrels against Tehran to keep the price down as we continue Operation Epic Fury,” he wrote on X, portraying a sanctions waiver on a country the United States is actively bombing as a form of economic aggression rather than relief. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz reinforced that narrative, describing the authorization as “very temporary” and saying its purpose was to defeat what he called “the Iranian strategy of driving energy prices so high” — a framing that cast Iran as the architect of its own oil revenue boost.
Bessent separately described the move as designed to prevent Iran’s stranded oil from being “hoarded by China on the cheap,” arguing that releasing it into global markets at or near the world price would both increase supply and redirect revenue away from Chinese refiners who had been the primary discount buyers of sanctioned Iranian crude. Independent Chinese refineries have, since the reimposition of comprehensive U.S. sanctions on Iran in 2018, absorbed the majority of Iranian oil exports at discounts typically ranging from 10 to 20 percent below global benchmarks — a commercial relationship that the waiver is intended to disrupt by making the same oil accessible to Japan, India, South Korea, and European buyers at market prices.
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This is the third time in 23 days that the Trump administration has temporarily waived sanctions on oil from nations it otherwise treats as adversaries. On March 5, a specific license was issued permitting India to purchase sanctioned Russian oil stranded at sea.
A broader 30-day waiver for Russian oil followed, which Treasury estimated added approximately 130 million barrels to global supply. The pattern — Russia first, Iran second — drew immediate comment from sanctions specialists who noted that the combined effect of the waivers represented a rapid, sequential dismantling of the energy sanctions architecture that multiple administrations had constructed over years.
Nicholas Mulder, a sanctions expert and professor at Cornell University, said the administration appeared to be conceding in war what it had been unwilling to give in peace.
“The U.S. has to dial back sanctions to offset the second order effect of war,” he said. Energy analyst Brett Erickson of Obsidian Risk Advisors was more direct about the strategic implication: “The easing of sanctions raises concerns about the rapid depletion of Washington’s economic toolkit. If we’ve reached the point of loosening sanctions on the country we are at war with, we’re really running out of options.”
Trump administration officials privately conceded the assessment was correct, with three people familiar with internal White House discussions telling CNN that officials now estimate the higher energy prices triggered by the war could linger for months, particularly given that the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed and fighting in the Middle East continues to intensify.
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The administration has already exhausted most of its conventional policy levers: coordinating a 400-million barrel release from G7 strategic reserves, issuing a 60-day Jones Act shipping waiver, and now issuing back-to-back oil sanctions waivers against both Russia and Iran.
Bessent on Thursday ruled out direct government intervention in oil markets and said a further Strategic Petroleum Reserve release, while discussed, was not imminent — though the existing coordinated reserve release will itself take months to reach the market.
The blunt bottom line, in the words of Landon Derentz, a former national security and energy official who served in the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations: “The nuance here is there isn’t nuance. If they pursue this strategy and allow buyers to buy off this oil on the water, it’ll go quickly. Then we’ll be faced with the interesting proposal of dropping sanctions on Iranian oil generally.”
Congressional reaction was immediate and divided along predictable but unusually sharp lines. Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called the move “sickeningly, shamefully stupid,” accusing the administration of fueling Tehran’s war effort “with windfall cash” in exchange for “a minimal benefit to oil prices.”
Victoria Taylor of the Atlantic Council’s Iraq Initiative said she found it “unfathomable” that the United States would waive sanctions while simultaneously conducting bombing operations against the same country. On the other side of the debate, Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, praised the decision. “We’ve worked on sanctioning Iran’s oil industry for years. This is a smart move to help win the fight against the regime,” he wrote on X.
The political driver of the administration’s price management effort is explicit and acknowledged. With midterm elections in November and Republican congressional majorities at stake, a sustained oil price shock feeding directly into gasoline and diesel prices at the pump would pose significant electoral risks. Brent crude was trading around $111 per barrel heading into the weekend — nearly 60 percent above pre-war levels on February 28. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said supplies from the newly unlocked Iranian barrels could reach Asian markets within three to four days and hit the refined product market within six to eight weeks — a timeline that, if it holds, would not deliver consumer price relief before the April 19 expiration of the waiver itself.
The White House spokeswoman said Trump “has considered all the options on the table to mitigate these short-term disruptions and has quickly taken action when necessary,” adding that once military objectives are completed, “oil and gas prices will drop rapidly again, potentially even lower than before the strikes began.”
No date for the completion of those military objectives has been stated by any official. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed.
