Beautiful Virgin Islands

Saturday, Aug 30, 2025

What will a post-oil Middle East look like?

What will a post-oil Middle East look like?

'The only officials present were American and Saudi," tweeted the Saudi Arabian foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, but he was lying. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu really did fly in to Saudi Arabia to spend a few hours with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
We owe this knowledge to that indispensable journalistic resource, the flight-tracking websites. They revealed that the private plane Mr Netanyahu usually charters for secret visits abroad departed from Tel Aviv on Sunday and flew to Neom in Saudi Arabia, taking off for the return flight three and a half hours later.

Once upon a time this would have been headline news around the world. "US superpower and oil-rich Saudi Arabia get together with embattled Israeli leader to carve up the Middle East", or something along those lines. Whereas today this "summit", if you can call it that, barely gets noticed.

Mr Netanyahu is indeed embattled, but it's corruption charges he's fighting, not a foreign enemy. Mr Pompeo is a soon-to-be-unemployed politician polishing up his CV for a senatorial nomination in 2022 or the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Prince Mohammed bin Salman is still effectively the dictator of Saudi Arabia, but that no longer cuts much ice in the rest of the world. The meeting was meaningless.

Some of this collapse in relevance is temporary. Mr Netanyahu will eventually go to jail or retire, but Israel will still be the dwarf superpower that bestrides the Middle East militarily.

Mr Pompeo and his employer will soon be out of office, and the United States will recover some of its former position as a "world leader", at least for a while.

But Saudi Arabia will never be back as a mover and shaker. The decline is permanent, because "oil-rich" is a phrase destined to become as obsolete as "carbon copy". The oil revenue of the Arab producers has fallen by more than two-thirds, from US$1 trillion (30.3 trillion baht) in 2012 to only $300 billion this year, and it's never coming back up. The decline so far has been driven mostly by a steep fall in oil prices -- demand rose steadily but oil production persistently rose faster -- but now an absolute collapse in demand looms as well.

As the climate emergency deepens, motor vehicles (which account for half of all oil use globally) are switching to electricity instead. The UK and France are now committed to end all sales of new cars with internal combustion engines by 2030, which means in practice that nobody there will buy a new petroleum-fuelled car after 2025. Many other countries are debating similar measures.

So what happens to a country like Saudi Arabia, where four-fifths of the government budget comes from oil revenues? Budget-cuts are already happening, of course, but revenues will continue to fall. Moreover, the population in almost all the oil-producing Gulf states is still growing fast.

The extraordinary stability of these states -- not a single change of regime in the six "oil-rich" monarchies of the Arabian peninsula in the past 50 years -- has been based entirely on the ability of the traditional rulers to buy the acquiescence of their subjects. Once the wealth goes, so does the stability.

The Arabian peninsula has been briefly a major centre of power only twice in world history: once in 632-661 CE, after which the capital of the early Islamic empire moved to Damascus, and once from 1973 to the present -- but not for much longer.

Even the unity of Saudi Arabia itself, which was imposed by force less than a century ago, may not survive the transition. The dominant power centres of the post-oil Middle East will be exactly where they were for most of the past thousand years: Turkey, Egypt and Iran. And at no time in the last thousand years have any two of those three powers been able to cooperate for long.

They do have some things in common: Islam (although in two different and generally hostile versions), relatively modern, semi-industrialised economies, and around 100 million people each. But they are divided by language (Turkish, Arabic and Farsi have nothing in common except loan-words), distance (the capitals are more than 2,000 kilometres apart), and by history and politics. Egypt occasionally got conquered by one of the other two, but that doesn't count as collaboration. So it might be argued that the "Middle East" itself is about to disappear as a meaningful concept. No great loss, really.
Newsletter

Related Articles

Beautiful Virgin Islands
0:00
0:00
Close
Federal Reserve Independence Questioned Amid Trump’s Push to Reshape Central Bank
British Politics Faces Tumultuous Autumn After Summer of Rebellions and Rising Farage Momentum
US Appeals Court Rules Against Most Trump-Era Tariffs
UK Sought Broad Access to Apple Users’ Data, Court Filing Reveals
UK Bank Shares Dive Over Potential Tax on Sector
Germany’s Auto Industry Sheds 51,500 Jobs in First Half of 2025 Amid Deepening Crisis
Bruce Willis Relocated Due to Advanced Dementia
French and Korean Nuclear Majors Clash As EU Launches Foreign Subsidy Probe
EU Stands Firm on Digital Rules as Trump Warns of Retaliation
Getting Ready for the 3rd Time in Its History, Germany Approves Voluntary Military Service for Teenagers
Argentine President Javier Milei Evacuated After Stones Thrown During Campaign Event
Denmark Confronts U.S. Diplomat Over Covert Trump-Linked Influence in Greenland
Starmer Should Back Away from ECHR, Says Jack Straw
Trump Demands RICO Charges Against George Soros and Son for Funding Violent Protests
Taylor Swift Announces Engagement to NFL Star Travis Kelce
France May Need IMF Bailout, Warns Finance Minister
Chinese AI Chipmaker Cambricon Posts Record Profit as Beijing Pushes Pivot from Nvidia
After the Shock of Defeat, Iranians Yearn for Change
Ukraine Finally Allows Young Men Aged Eighteen to Twenty-Two to Leave the Country
The Porn Remains, Privacy Disappears: How Britain Broke the Internet in Ten Days
YouTube Altered Content by Artificial Intelligence – Without Permission
Welcome to The Definition of Insanity: Germany Edition
Just a reminder, this is Michael Jackson's daughter, Paris.
Spotify’s Strange Move: The Feature Nobody Asked For – Returns
Manhunt in Australia: Armed Anti-Government Suspect Kills Police Officers Sent to Arrest Him
China Launches World’s Most Powerful Neutrino Detector
How Beijing-Linked Networks Shape Elections in New York City
Ukrainian Refugee Iryna Zarutska Fled War To US, Stabbed To Death
Elon Musk Sues Apple and OpenAI Over Alleged App Store Monopoly
2 Australian Police Shot Dead In Encounter In Rural Victoria State
Vietnam Evacuates Hundreds of Thousands as Typhoon Kajiki Strikes; China’s Sanya Shuts Down
UK Government Delays Decision on China’s Proposed London Embassy Amid Concerns Over Redacted Plans
A 150-Year Tradition to Be Abolished? Uproar Over the Popular Central Park Attraction
A new faith called Robotheism claims artificial intelligence isn’t just smart but actually God itself
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner Purchases Third Property Amid Housing Tax Reforms Debate
HSBC Switzerland Ends Relationships with Over 1,000 Clients from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Qatar, and Egypt
Sharia Law Made Legally Binding in Austria Despite Warnings Over 'Incompatible' Values
Italian Facebook Group Sharing Intimate Images Without Consent Shut Down Amid Police Investigation
Dutch Foreign Minister Resigns Amid Deadlock Over Israel Sanctions
Trump and Allies Send Messages of Support to Ukraine on Independence Day Amid Ongoing Conflict
China Reels as Telegram Chat Group Shares Hidden-Camera Footage of Women and Children
Sam Nicoresti becomes first transgender comedian to win Edinburgh Comedy Award
Builders uncover historic human remains in Lancashire house renovation
Australia Wants to Tax Your Empty Bedrooms
MotoGP Cameraman Narrowly Avoids Pedro Acosta Crash at Hungarian Grand Prix
FBI Investigates John Bolton Over Classified Documents in High-Profile Raids
Report reveals OpenAI pitched national ChatGPT Plus subscription to UK ministers
Labour set to freeze income tax thresholds in long-term 'stealth' tax raid
Coca‑Cola explores sale of Costa coffee chain
Trial hears dog walker was chased and fatally stabbed by trio
×