When the United States and its closest military ally, Israel, attacked the Islamic Republic of Iran, there were four solid reasons: Iran’s nuclear program, its stockpile of long-range ballistic missiles, its sponsorship of terror proxies, and the mass murder of tens of thousands of innocent Iranians.
After nearly a month of war, thanks to the might of the American and Israeli air forces and their successful cooperation, significant progress has been made on all four of those fronts.
So why is there no end in sight to the war?
The answer is that Iran made a clever move on March 2, when it declared the Strait of Hormuz closed and shifted the war’s focus. Within days, oil broke $100 a barrel for the first time in four years, peaking at $126.
Americans are now paying $3.72 a gallon on average, up 80 cents in three weeks. And as long as the strait stays closed, there is no market force that will bring those prices down on its own.
The world’s largest oil producer is being held hostage by Iran’s blockade of a 21-mile-wide chokepoint as President Donald Trump decides how to deal with the strait’s closure by military means or diplomatic pressure.
But maybe the right answer is to do neither. Perhaps the United States need not risk its soldiers by putting boots on the ground or America’s geopolitical capital with unnecessary diplomatic compromises. Maybe the US doesn’t even need oil from the strait at all.
The United States produced a record 13.6 million barrels of oil per day in 2025, more than Saudi Arabia and more than Russia. The Permian Basin alone averaged 6.6 million barrels per day, a volume that would rank it as a top-five oil-producing nation if it were a country.
On a net basis, the United States exports more petroleum than it imports. We are not a nation scrambling for energy. We are paying panic prices anyway.
Here is why. Today every barrel of American oil, whether it comes out of West Texas or North Dakota, gets priced on the global market alongside oil from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. There is no separate American price.
When a crisis hits the Persian Gulf, the price of every barrel on earth goes up, including every barrel produced in the United States. A family filling up in Ohio pays the same crisis premium as a buyer in Tokyo or Berlin.
Several major oil-producing nations, including Mexico and Saudi Arabia, maintain domestic pricing structures that insulate their own consumers from global panic pricing. America does not, and Americans are paying for that choice right now.
When the Arab oil embargo hit in 1973, the United States had already kept crude exports minimal for decades through a patchwork of regulations. Congress formalized that approach, and the protection held for four decades.
Then in 2015, Congress repealed it. US crude exports exploded from near zero to 4 million barrels a day by 2025, 85 times the 2011 level.
What Congress failed to do was build any consumer protection to replace the ban. The industry got full access to global markets. American consumers got nothing in return.
The solution is straightforward. American oil fulfills domestic demand first, at a price set by American supply and demand conditions.
The surplus is sold abroad at world prices. The premium earned on those export barrels gets shared back to producers proportionally by production volume.
To keep a strong incentive for domestic production, a price floor would guarantee producers a reasonable return on domestically sold oil, protecting consumers from panic pricing above, while ensuring producers are never exposed to ruinous lows below.
These are not price controls. Jimmy Carter tried those until 1979, and it failed. This is a domestic market obligation, the same principle that several of the world’s largest oil-producing nations use to protect their own consumers.
The net result: the bulk of American oil, roughly two-thirds of what our refineries process, gets priced at domestic levels, not Persian Gulf panic levels. The remaining gap filled by imports still carries the world price, but averaged across the total supply, the blended price at the pump drops substantially.
Producers earn their world market premium on the surplus. The base belongs to American consumers first. This is not about physically redirecting barrels. It is about breaking the link between what an American refinery pays for American crude and what a panic-stricken global market demands on any given day.
The president does not need new legislation to make this happen. The 2015 law that lifted the export ban preserved presidential authority to restrict exports under a national emergency or if the Commerce Secretary finds domestic supply shortages and adverse price effects.
Both conditions exist today. That authority is sufficient to get this framework off the ground. The domestic pricing architecture can be built from there.
Gas prices are too high, and they will not fix themselves. Polling consistently shows cost of living as the defining political issue of this era. An administration that has no answer to $4 gas, caused by a war it is fighting, will feel that at the polls.
The Middle East has held America hostage at the gas pump before. We wrote a law to stop it. Then we repealed it. It is time to act like we learned something.
The writer is the chairman of Religious Zionists of America, president of the Culture for Peace Institute, and a committee member of the Jewish Agency for Israel. He currently serves as a member of the US Holocaust Memorial Council, appointed by President Trump. The views expressed here are his own. Martinoliner@gmail.com