Fracking for U.S, oil has helped bring Iran to heel, as Tehran's leaders recognize they can no longer hold the world to ransom with the power of oil, Ret. Adm. Dennis Blair claimed Thursday.
"Our ability to put the sanctions on Iran was made partially possible by the fact that the U.S. was putting more oil into the market," Blair, who co-chairs the Commission on Energy and Geopolitics, told MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
Technological improvements in oil production have been made possible during the last several years by fracking, a process that extracts natural gas from shale.
The increased oil production capabilities enabled the U.S. to threaten to equal the amount of oil Iran produced, Blair said. He indicated this would not have been possible until very recently.
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"Five years earlier, if you talked to the people in the Bush administration, when they looked at the same set of measures, they couldn't do it, because the market was too tight," he said.
The U.S.
brokered a peace plan with Iran in November over its nuclear production capabilities. Economic sanctions the U.S. imposed in Iran were a motivator for Iran to engage in peace talks.
The increase in U.S. oil production "helps in little ways to help in big ways," Blair explained. He suggested the U.S. should be more aggressive in working with consumers and producers as the scope of the impact of the rise in U.S. oil production emerges.
Blair, a former Director of National Intelligence, said the impact of an increase in domestic oil production on foreign policy and national security was detailed in a new book. "Oil Security 2025: U.S. National Security Policy in an Era of Domestic Oil Abundance" published by the commission on which Blair serves.
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