The Desert King’s Tantrum: Saudi Arabia Threatens to Drown Its Friends in a Sea of Cheap Oil


The world is currently witnessing the geopolitical equivalent of a group of heroin addicts arguing over who gets to hold the needle, except the needle is a pipeline and the heroin is the sweet, sweet crude that keeps our dying civilization twitching. Saudi Arabia, the self-appointed high priest of the Church of Hydrocarbons, has finally reached its limit with its fellow cult members. It seems the "allies" within OPEC+—a collection of regimes that would sell their own mothers for an extra barrel of capacity—have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar, or rather, their drills in the seabed. Riyadh is currently engaged in a spectacular display of petro-masochism. The threat is simple, elegant, and entirely insane: if the rest of you losers don't stop overproducing, we will open the taps so wide that oil will be cheaper than bottled water, and your fragile economies will crumble like a stale pita. It’s the "nuclear option" for a kingdom that realizes its grand dreams of a futuristic desert utopia are currently sinking into the sand.
Let’s talk about Vision 2030, shall we? Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman wants to build "The Line"—a 100-mile-long mirrored skyscraper in the middle of nowhere. It’s the kind of project a bond villain would dream up after a three-day bender on high-grade stimulants. But to turn a desert into a literal Cyberpunk 2077 map, you need money. Specifically, you need oil to stay comfortably around $100 a barrel. When the price dips, the mirrors get dusty, the servant class gets restless, and the "sustainable" neon lights start to flicker. The irony of using the world's most carbon-intensive industry to fund a "green" futuristic city is apparently lost on the House of Saud, but then again, self-awareness has never been a primary export of the Arabian Peninsula.
The problem, of course, is that the other members of the cartel—Iraq, Kazakhstan, and the UAE—actually have bills to pay and people to feed, or at least oligarchs to satisfy. They look at Saudi Arabia’s demands for production cuts and see a suggestion rather than a command. They agree to the cuts in the boardroom with all the sincerity of a politician promising lower taxes, then scurry back to their respective capitals to pump every last drop they can sneak onto a shadow tanker. It’s a game of chicken played with supertankers, and Riyadh is tired of being the only one holding the brakes. The Saudis are realizing that being the "swing producer" is less about being a leader and more about being a sucker.
The sheer intellectual bankruptcy of the situation is breathtaking. Here we have a collection of nations whose entire existence is predicated on a liquid that the rest of the world is ostensibly trying to stop using. They are fighting over the scraps of a dying feast. The Saudis are trying to maintain a monopoly in a world that is slowly, agonizingly, trying to move toward renewables, yet they are doing so by threatening to flood the market with the very substance they want to keep expensive. It’s a logic loop so tight it could choke a camel. If they crash the price to punish the cheaters, they bankrupt themselves in the process. It’s the economic equivalent of burning your own house down because your roommate didn't do the dishes.
And then there’s the "Plus" in OPEC+. Russia, the ultimate wild card, is currently using oil to fund a meat-grinder war in Ukraine. Do we honestly think Putin cares about Riyadh’s long-term price stability or their desire for a mirrored city in the sand? He needs cash today, not a stable market tomorrow. The Saudis are trying to herd cats, but the cats are all armed with nuclear weapons and have significant debt problems. Every time Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman gets on a stage to wag his finger at the "cheaters," he looks more like a substitute teacher who has lost control of a classroom full of juvenile delinquents with access to offshore drilling rigs.
The global audience watches this psychodrama with the same morbid fascination one reserves for a multi-car pileup on the highway. The "West," with its performative climate goals and private jet-setting elites, panics every time the price of gas goes up by five cents. We pretend to hate the "petrostates" and their human rights records until we need to fill up the SUV to drive three blocks for a kale smoothie. We are all complicit in this farce. The markets are currently pricing in the fear of a Saudi-led glut, proving once again that the global economy is just a series of reactions to the temper tantrums of various hereditary monarchs and despots.
In the end, Saudi Arabia’s threat to crash the price is a confession of weakness, not a display of strength. It’s a sign that the cartel is a hollow shell, held together by nothing but mutual greed and the looming fear of irrelevance. Whether the price goes to $100 or $50, the result is the same: a slow slide into the abyss as the world tries to figure out how to function without the black sludge that built the 20th century. Buckle up, children. The desert king is angry, the mirrors are expensive, and the oil is still flowing, whether we want it to or not. It’s a race to the bottom, and everyone is winning their way to an early grave.
This story is an interpreted work of social commentary based on real events. Source: The Economist