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Perhaps more than any other country today in the

21st century, Saudi Arabia has the most uncertain future ahead of itself.

The country truly has almost countless problems ahead of it that it must overcome in order to survive.

And they've only been able to overcome all of these problems so far because of their dominance over a critical resource that everyone in

the world has wanted for the past 100 years, but from which the world is currently starting to move away from.

The Saudi Arabian state is 1 that is nearly utterly defined by its control over this black liquidity resource.

As recently as 2018, the petroleum business in

the country accounted for a whopping 87% of the government's annual budget, 90% of the country's export earnings, and a massive

This is because Saudi Arabia is known today to control approximately a quarter of all the proven oil reserves in the world.

the world's countries, second only to Venezuela.

But unlike Venezuela's technically larger oil reserves, which are highly crude, difficult, and expensive to access, Saudi Arabia's only slightly smaller reserves

are located under pressure just beneath the earth's surface,

and they are extremely easy and cheap to access and they're much easier to refine.

This is why, for decades, Saudi Arabia was the largest producer of oil in the world, and is currently

the world's second largest producer just barely behind

Alongside Russia, these 3 countries are collectively referred to as the big 3 of global oil production today, because no single other country comes anywhere close to matching them, and they combined produce approximately 40% of all the oil in the world.

But America's population is 332 million, and so most of

America's oil production is consumed within

Which is why America is only the world's 14th largest oil exporter.

has just about a tenth of the American population, but produces nearly as much oil as it, meaning that they simply have far more that

they can never possibly consume on their own, and so they have far more left over to export to other countries.

Saudi Arabia is thus by far the largest exporter of oil in the world, and oil continues to provide roughly a third of all the energy that humanity collectively consumes worldwide.

Countries like India, China, Japan, South Africa, and numerous European states all import enormous volumes

of their own oil supplies from Saudi Arabia, and are thus all heavily reliant on keeping those flows of oil continuing for now.

It is this simple calculus that has given Saudi Arabia enormous geopolitical power and clout over the past century because they've just got more oil to give others than anybody else.

Saudi Arabia is the 1 most capable of influencing the global price of oil, either negatively or positively.

This is because besides being by far the largest exporter of oil, Saudi Arabia also has by far the largest spare capacity of oil production.

is what truly gives the Saudi state its unbelievable levels of global power.

in the oil business refers to the number of oil wells that a country possesses

that are not currently being used, but which can

be brought online again in a very short notice to rapidly increase production.

and a half to 2000000 barrels per day of oil production reserved in

By rapidly turning the spare capacity back online, Saudi Arabia can rapidly increase its globally significant oil production and dump those extra supplies onto the world market, thus decreasing global prices of oil.

And by doing the reverse, by shutting more wells offline and increasing its available spare capacity, Saudi Arabia can rapidly decrease its globally significant oil production and restrict global oil supplies, thus increasing worldwide oil scarcity and increasing global oil prices.

This is why Saudi Arabia is often referred to as the central bank of world oil, and it's how the Saudi state can exert significant leverage over every single country in the world, including the world's most powerful country, the United States.

of its oil supply from Saudi Arabia these days, overall oil prices in

the United States can still be severely impacted by the

whims of the absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia.

After the Russians invaded Ukraine in February of

the Western world immediately passed a series of sanctions against Russia that shut that country's oil supply out of their markets.

Which obviously reduced the supply of oil in their markets and led to a rise in oil prices.

And when oil prices rise, it tends to increase inflation in every other sector

of the economy, because nearly every business in the world relies on oil at some point in time in

Which means that when oil prices go up, businesses have to raise their prices in order to offset their increased production costs.

So, after the Russians invaded Ukraine and the global price of oil shot up, and inflation rates went up along with it, The

Biden administration in the United States requested that Saudi Arabia turn more of their spare capacity on and ramp up production to place more oil onto the global market,

But the Saudis instead did the complete opposite.

of their production over and over these past several months, adding more wells to their offline spare capacity and decreasing the supply of global oil in coordination with Russia,

which is increasing oil prices around the world, which is enabling the Russians to earn more money on their own oil sales that is being plowed into waging their war in Ukraine, and it is increasing inflationary pressures and gasoline prices in the United States.

As of May 2023, the American Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or SPR, The usually massive emergency stockpile of petroleum that the United States keeps stashed away in tanks in Louisiana and Texas to release during an oil supply crisis has been gradually depleted every single day since the invasion of Ukraine began, to the lowest level seen in 40 years right now since 1983.

Doing so has helped tame gasoline prices in

the country for now, but with the reserve now heavily depleted, Washington possesses very little other options available to keep gasoline prices from spiraling upwards leading up to

other than calling Saudi Arabia and requesting them to turn more of their spare capacity back online, which

This is precisely how Saudi Arabia is able to wield its oil might and exert geopolitical influence across the entire world in the process.

But Saudi Arabia's great challenge in the 21st century is that this greatest of its powers has a finite lifespan remaining, and at a certain point in the future, a day will come when this power will completely evaporate altogether.

the next several decades as countries around the world steadily continue moving their economies away from oil as

an energy source, Saudi Arabia's great advantage of being

the global oil business's central bank will matter less and less.

And if the country does nothing to change itself between now and whenever that uncertain future date arrives, it will only be left with sand, 1 of the worst human rights records on the planet, an archaic religious absolute monarchy that most of

the outside world finds repugnant, and a lack of protection from the United States, while being surrounded by countless enemies from both within and without.

If Saudi Arabia does nothing to change, Saudi Arabia will no longer exist at all by the end of the century.

going to be very, very hard and uncertain.

And if you want to understand where Saudi Arabia is going in the future, you've got to understand where Saudi Arabia came from in the first place, and Why the country would have almost certainly never managed to exist at all in its current form were it not for the very fortunate discovery of

For thousands of years, the Arabian Peninsula was divided between various different tribes, sheiks, kings, and empires.

There was very little to note about the lands in the center

of the Arabian Peninsula where the House of Saud first originated in history a little more than 300 years ago, in a region known as the Najd.

The overwhelming majority of Saudi Arabia's current lands are completely uninhabitable.

The country is, after all, the largest in the world today

that doesn't have a single river anywhere to

Rainfall across most of the country's land is extremely scarce,

and so fresh water for drinking and agriculture have historically been extremely difficult to come by.

Across the south of the modern country is a vast desert known as the Rub Al Khali, better known in English as the Empty Quarter.

It is the largest continuous expanse of sand that can be found anywhere in the world.

and it is larger in area than the entirety of France.

The region of Najd deep within the interior

of the Arabian Peninsula was an extremely sparsely populated and isolated backwater separated from the rest of the world by vast empty deserts and high mountains with nothing of value to offer anyone in the outside world.

It was a place hardly anyone paid any attention to, and its extreme isolation from

the rest of the world was partially why an extremely strict interpretation of Sunni Islam gradually developed there, now sometimes known as Wahhabism.

It was an unlikely place from which 1 of the most powerful nations of

Across the 18th and 19th centuries, 2 small and largely unknown family clans within the Najd region cemented an alliance between themselves.

run the politics and day-to-day governance of

the lands they controlled, and the clan of Wahhab, who had run

the land's religious affairs based upon their own extremely strict interpretation of Sunni Islam, the previously mentioned branch of the faith

that is sometimes referred to as Wahhabism.

After joining forces, the Saad and Wahhab alliance went on to carve out the first Saudi state that survived between 1744 and

before it was ultimately destroyed by the Ottomans.

A group of survivors managed to take back the

Saud's ancestral capital at Riyadh in 1818,

and from there they carved out the second Saudi state to survive for most of the rest of the 19th century until 1891, when catastrophic infighting among the royal family in conflict with a rival family clan known as the Rashidis led to the state's ultimate collapse.

The surviving Saud family members were forced to flee from Riyadh's exiles into nearby Kuwait, where they were powerless without any lands and without any wealth, but

with a very good historical claim to the supposedly worthless lands of Najd

There and then, the Saud family probably would have vanished into irrelevance, never to be seen or heard from again, Were

it not for the ambitions of a young man of the family

who would ultimately become known as Ibn Sa'd.

The man who would create the modern day kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Determined to restore his family's position of power, a 27 year old Ibn Sa'd in 1902 led a party of a couple dozen loyal men from Kuwait to recapture his family's ancestral

seat in Riyadh from the rival Rashidi clan.

It was the beginning of a decades-long campaign of conquest waged across Arabia for the young man,

the outside world paid any attention to it.

The lands that now constitute Saudi Arabia back then in the early 20th century may have only been home to as few as 2 million people,

who were almost entirely very poor desert-roaming nomads.

And so the squabbling between 2 rival clans in these lands was hardly noticed by any

But things began shifting during World War I.

The Rashidi clan was allied to the Ottoman Empire and after the war broke out,

the British began supplying weapons and cash to Ibn Sa'd who was fighting against them.

That combined with Ibn Sa'd's own alliance to the ultra-Sunni Wahhabi clan that provided tens of thousands

of fanatical and now well-armed troops proved decisive.

By the early 1920s, the Najd region of Arabia had been entirely conquered, but the campaigns weren't quite finished yet.

After World War I's conclusion and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, the British appointed the Arab Hashemite family as the new reigning monarchs in 3 newly created kingdoms, Iraq, Jordan, and the Hejaz, which crucially included the 2 holiest cities in Islam, Mecca and Medina.

the Hashemite family quickly soured after the war's conclusion.

After the British transformed Jordan and Iraq into colonial mandates and began letting Jews settle in Palestine,

of Hejaz refused to ratify the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, and so the British withdrew their support for the family and backed up their other Arab wartime ally, Ibn Sa'd and his expanding kingdom

Emboldened, Ibn Sa'd launched a new military campaign by invading the

was fully conquered within only a single year.

the modern territory of Saudi Arabia was fully under the control of Ibn Sa'd after more than 20 years worth of nearly constant warfare, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

1932, Ibn Sa'd proclaimed the creation of a brand new kingdom over all

of these lands, and he named it after himself and his family, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with himself naturally as the new kingdom's absolute monarch.

The third Saudi state had been born, covering a large amount of the lands that the previous 2 Saudi states from the 19th and 18th centuries had also encompassed.

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Saudi Arabia’s Catastrophic “Everything” Problem