On March 17, Fox Business host Dagen McDowell blasted the Biden administration for “knowingly allowing Iran to export oil, particularly to China, as a de facto sanctions waiver because they wanted Iran to come back to the table with the nuclear negotiations, and they wanted to keep fuel prices down.” McDowell called it “the insanity of enriching a terrorist regime,” in contrast to the Trump administration’s urgency to “take out Iran” and “finish the job.”

Now, as the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran entered its fifth week and gas prices hit a national average of $4 a gallon on March 31, McDowell advocated on Fox Business' The Big Money Show to “waive all of the sanctions on Iran's oil sales.” She continued, “Say hey, have at it, produce as much as you want. Sell as much as you want. If you come to the table, you get rid of your ballistic missile program, you get rid of your nuclear program, and we will let you sell oil, the Strait of Hormuz will automatically reopen.”

Further complicating McDowell's suggestion is that right-wing media were already split on Trump’s March 20 decision to ease some sanctions on Iran. At the time, experts suggested the move would not actually add a “significant amount of additional oil supplies to the market.” The New York Times warned it “could give Iran a $14 billion windfall at the same time the United States is waging a war on the country.” To McDowell's earlier point on enriching the terrorist regime, National Review’s Andrew McCarthy (also a Fox contributor) pointed out that lifting sanctions on Iran would “underwrite the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ continuing combat operations against the United States, Israel, and U.S.-friendly Gulf states.”