Beautiful Virgin Islands

Tuesday, Jun 24, 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
“You Have 12 Hours to Flee”: Israeli Threat Campaign Targets Surviving Iranian Officials
Macron and Merz: Europe must arm itself in an unstable world
Germany and Italy Under Pressure to Repatriate $245bn of Gold from US Vaults
Airlines Evaluate Flight Cancellations Amid Escalating US-Iran Tensions
Starmer Invites Innovators to Join Government Talent Scheme
UK Economy’s Strong Opening Quarter Shows Signs of Cooling
Harrods Seeks Court Order to Secure Al Fayed Estate for Victims
BA and Singapore Airlines Cancel Dubai Flights Amid Middle East Tensions
Trump Faces Backlash from MAGA Base Over Iran Strikes
Meta Bets $14 B on Alexandr Wang to Drive AI Ambitions
WATCH: Israeli forces show the aftermath of a massive airstrike at Iran's Isfahan nuclear site
FedEx Founder Fred Smith, ‘Heart and Soul’ of the Company, Dies at 80
Chinese Factories Shift Away from U.S. Amid Trump‑Era Tariffs
Pimco Seizes Opportunity in Japan’s Dislocated Bond Market
Labubu Doll Drives Pop Mart to Status as China’s Most Valuable Toy Maker
Global Coal Demand Defies Paris Accord Goals
We have new information and breaking details to share about what is shaping up to be a historic air campaign tonight
Six Massive Bombs Dropped on Fordow; Trump: 'A Historic Moment for the U.S., Israel, and the World'
Fordow: Deeply Buried Iranian Enrichment Site in U.S.–Israel Crosshairs
United States Conducts Precision Strikes on Iran’s Nuclear Sites
US strikes Iran nuclear sites, Trump says
Pakistan to nominate Trump for Nobel Peace Prize.
BBC Demands Perplexity AI Immediately Stop Using Its Content
Telegram Founder: I Will Leave My Fortune to Over 100 of My Children
Political Turmoil Resurfaces in Belgium Amid Economic Concerns
Fed policymakers divided on timing of interest rate cuts
Trump signals imminent agreement with Harvard University
Inheritance tax referendum alarms Swiss billionaire community
Japan cancels bilateral security meeting amid US defence demands
AI skeptic Emily Bender warns that ‘the emperor has no clothes’
Israel Confirms Assassination of Quds Force Commander in Tehran
16 Billion Login Credentials Leaked in Unprecedented Cybersecurity Breach
Senate hearing on who was 'really running' Biden White House kicks off
Iranian Military Officers Reportedly Seek Contact with Reza Pahlavi, Signal Intent to Defect
FBI and Senate Investigate Allegations of Chinese Plot to Influence the 2020 Election in Biden’s Favor Using Fake U.S. Driver’s Licenses
Vietnam Emerges as Luxury Yacht Destination for Ultra‑Rich
Plans to Sell Dutch Embassy in Bangkok Face Local Opposition
China's Iranian Oil Imports Face Disruption Amid Escalating Middle East Tensions
Trump's $5 Million 'Trump Card' Visa Program Draws Nearly 70,000 Applicants
DGCA Finds No Major Safety Concerns in Air India's Boeing 787 Fleet
Airlines Reroute Flights Amid Expanding Middle East Conflict Zones
Elon Musk's xAI Seeks $9.3 Billion in Funding Amid AI Expansion
Trump Demands Iran's Unconditional Surrender Amid Escalating Conflict
Israeli Airstrike Targets Iranian State TV in Central Tehran
President Trump is leaving the G7 summit early and has ordered the National Security Council to the Situation Room
Taiwan Imposes Export Ban on Chips to Huawei and SMIC
Israel has just announced plans to strike Tehran again, and in response, Trump has urged people to evacuate
Netanyahu Signals Potential Regime Change in Iran
Juncker Criticizes EU Inaction on Trump Tariffs
EU Proposes Ban on New Russian Gas Contracts
×