OREANDA-NEWS. As the US Senate deliberates a new round of sanctions on Iran, two former Obama advisers make a compelling case for a powerful policy lever that is not even on the table — US crude exports.

The economic arguments for exporting US crude are fairly well-known and the main ones are trotted out by oil industry groups. But the foreign policy benefits of exports are not as widely talked about.

Former National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon last week laid out several reasons why the restrictions, often incorrectly referred to as a total ban, should be lifted immediately.

The first is in many ways the most interesting.

Stories about the export “ban” almost always say that restrictions came about as a result of the oil embargo in the 1970s. Domestic oil was in short supply, so it had to be hoarded to protect against any future cutoff from hostile trading partners, or so the story goes.

Not entirely true.

A new report from the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy gives a clear history of US policy regarding oil exports. The report, co-written by Jason Bordoff from Columbia and Trevor Houser from the Rhodium Group, points out that export restrictions were first imposed by Richard Nixon as a way to prop up price controls on oil.

When Nixon first imposed price controls, US crude was selling at a discount to global prices. In 1974, global prices rose, giving US producers an incentive to sell their oil abroad. Restricting exports, a move that was later made permanent by Congress, was a way to avoid undermining those price controls.

“Of course we haven’t had price controls in the United States on crude oil since Ronald Reagan’s first executive order in January of 1989,” Donilon said at a Columbia event last week. “The rationale for the ban is no longer relevant.”