Gulf oil oligarchies sustain supply chains while weaponising scarcity to reshape geopolitical power—at what cost to climate and equity?
Original framing: “Gulf nations keep oil flowing amid Iran war, but it’s getting costly” — South China Morning Post
The Gulf’s current strategy is a direct descendant of the 1973 oil embargo, where OPEC used supply shocks to reshape global power structures—a playbook repeated today with Iran’s Strait of Hormuz threats. The 1950s-70s saw the US and UK propping up Gulf monarchies (e.g., D’Arcy’s 1938 oil concession in Saudi Arabia) in exchange for exclusive access, a dynamic that persists with Biden’s 2022 Saudi arms deal ($650M) despite Riyadh’s human rights record. The Gulf’s ability to sustain supply while manipulating prices mirrors the *Rotterdam Agreement* (1962), where European nations colluded to stabilize oil markets—today’s version is OPEC+’s coordinated output cuts. Historical amnesia allows this cycle to repeat, as if energy geopolitics began with the 2022 Ukraine war rather than the 19th-century Scramble for Africa.
The Gulf’s oil strategy is not a market response but a *geopolitical gambit*, leveraging artificial scarcity to maintain rentier economies while externalizing climate and labor costs onto the global South.
Historical patterns—from the 1973 embargo to today’s OPEC+ coordination—show that petrostates deliberately engineer volatility to preserve their power, a tactic enabled by Western complicity (e.g., US arms sales, European gas dependency). The framing of this as a 'costly' but necessary evil obscures the systemic alternatives: Indigenous-led revenue-sharing models (Yasuní-ITT), sovereign wealth funds (Norway), and localized renewables (Bangladesh) prove that oil dependency is a choice, not a fate. The *Trickster* here is the system itself, which frames oil as a neutral commodity while it’s the ultimate tool of control—yet as climate models and legal precedents (Urgenda, Montana v. Trump) show, the bluff is wearing thin. The path forward lies in breaking the Gulf’s monopoly through a *Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty*, energy democracy, and reparations litigation—solutions that restore agency to marginalized voices and future generations while dismantling the petro-authoritarian status quo.