If you’ve filled up your gas tank recently, you already felt the war before anyone explained it to you. Oil prices have blown past $100 a barrel. In parts of Asia, barrels are reportedly selling for $160. United Airlines’ CEO has said his company is preparing for $175 — which would be the highest oil price in history.
Three weeks into the U.S. war on Iran, Americans are paying more at the pump, watching grocery prices climb, and wondering what this war is actually accomplishing. A former State Department official just provided an answer that should make everyone uncomfortable.
Iran Is Getting Paid to Fight Back
Edward Fishman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Choke Points: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, pointed to something in a recent CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria that sounds almost too absurd to be true.
The Trump administration announced Friday that it would pause sanctions on 140 million barrels of Iranian oil sitting on tankers at sea. The idea was to bring down oil prices after Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow waterway that carries 20 percent of the world’s oil — in retaliation for U.S. strikes.
In other words, the U.S. is at war with Iran and easing sanctions on Iran at the same time.
Fishman didn’t mince words about what that means.
“Iran now has gotten more sanctions relief from closing the Strait of Hormuz for a couple weeks than it got for all of the nuclear concessions it made under the Iran nuclear deal,” he told Zakaria.
Think about that. In 2015, Iran spent years negotiating, agreed to dismantle centrifuges and open its facilities to inspectors — all for roughly $29 billion in frozen assets. Now it’s getting comparable relief just for fighting back.
And the incentive that creates is the part that should worry everyone. “It’s only going to incentivize them to attack more energy infrastructure, to disrupt shipping even more, to do everything it can to push oil prices up more to get more concessions from the United States,” Fishman said.
Russia Made $8.3 Billion in Two Weeks
Here’s where it gets worse.
Before this war, American sanctions on Russian oil were actually working. Russia’s revenues had fallen to their lowest since it invaded Ukraine in 2022, and Moscow had to sell its crude for $30 less per barrel than Saudi oil just to find buyers.
The Trump administration has threatened and cajoled Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, so far to no avail. What’s next for oil prices and global trade? I discussed with @edwardfishman, author and senior fellow at @CFR_org: pic.twitter.com/4hh2gqt30Z
— Fareed Zakaria (@FareedZakaria) March 22, 2026
Then the U.S. bombed Iran, oil prices spiked, and the administration eased sanctions on Russian oil too — trying to keep markets from spiraling. Almost overnight, that $30 discount vanished. According to Fishman, buyers started paying more per barrel for Russian crude than for Saudi. Same oil. Completely different price tag. He estimated Moscow began netting $150 to $200 million more per day than before the war began.
The numbers bear it out: Russia earned roughly $8.3 billion from fossil fuel exports in the first two weeks of March — a 14 percent jump from February. Zelenskyy warned Moscow had already clawed back $10 billion of its projected 2026 deficit.
So if you’re keeping score: the U.S. went to war to weaken Iran and has spent years sanctioning Russia — and three weeks later, both countries are making more money than they were before the first bomb dropped.
Why This One Is Different
Some on Wall Street have been betting this would end the way Trump’s trade wars usually end — with a retreat. They even have a nickname for it: TACO, or “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
But Fishman explained why that thinking doesn’t apply here. Trump can pause a tariff with a signature. He can’t unpause the Strait of Hormuz. Iran is the one blocking it, and Iran has no reason to stop — not when the blockade is working better than any deal it ever signed.
“The reason oil prices are high is because the Strait of Hormuz is blocked,” Fishman said. “And who’s blocking the Strait of Hormuz? It’s Iran. It’s not the United States.”
That waterway doesn’t just carry oil. A third of the world’s helium — needed for the semiconductors in your phone — passes through it. So does a third of the world’s fertilizer. Over 3,000 ships are stuck in the Persian Gulf waiting for a resolution that isn’t coming.
Trump issued a 48-hour ultimatum Saturday demanding Iran reopen the Strait or face strikes on its power plants. Iran said if he follows through, it’ll close the waterway completely.
The war is three weeks old. Gas prices are climbing. Two of America’s biggest adversaries are cashing in. And as Zakaria put it on CNN, this is “a war of choice that nobody can really still explain to me why we got into.”