Saudi Arabia's Catastrophic "Everything" Problem

Transcript
0:00 · this video was made possible by nebula use the link down in the description below to support real life floor directly by signing up where you can
0:05 · watch 26 additional and exclusive full-length videos in my ongoing nebula modern conflict series covering recent
0:11 · major Wars and crises including this video's next part covering how Isis was defeated in Iraq and Syria perhaps more
0:17 · than any other country today in the 21st century Saudi Arabia has the most uncertain future ahead of itself the
0:23 · country truly has almost countless problems ahead of it that it must overcome in order to survive and they've
0:29 · only been able to overcome all of these problems so far because of their dominance over a critical resource that
0:35 · everyone in the world has wanted for the past 100 years but from which the world is currently starting to move away from
0:41 · oil the Saudi Arabian state is one that is nearly utterly defined by its control
0:46 · over this black liquidy Resource as recently as 2018 the petroleum business
0:51 · in the country accounted for a whopping 87 percent of the government's annual budget ninety percent of the country's
0:58 · export earnings and a massive 42 percent of the country's entire GDP this is
1:04 · because Saudi Arabia is known today to control approximately a quarter of all the proven oil reserves in the world the
1:10 · second largest reserves of all the world's countries second only to Venezuela but unlike Venezuela's
1:16 · technically larger oil reserves which are highly crude difficult and expensive to access Saudi Arabia is only slightly
1:23 · smaller reserves are located under pressure just beneath the earth's surface and they are extremely easy and
1:29 · cheap to access and they're much easier to refine this is why for decades Saudi Arabia was the largest producer of oil
1:36 · in the world and is currently the world's second largest producer just barely behind the United States
1:41 · alongside Russia these three countries are collectively referred to as the big three of global oil production a day
1:47 · because no single other country comes anywhere close to matching them and they combined produce approximately 40
1:53 · percent of all the oil in the world but America's population is 332 million and
1:59 · so most of America's oil production is consumed within the country and not exported abroad which is why America is
2:05 · only the world's 14th largest oil exporter Saudi Arabia has just about a tenth of the American population but
2:11 · produces nearly as much oil as it meaning that they simply have far more that they can never possibly consume on
2:18 · their own and so they have far more left over to export to other countries Saudi Arabia is thus by far the largest
2:24 · exporter of oil in the world and oil continues to provide roughly a third of all the energy that Humanity
2:30 · collectively consumes worldwide countries like India China Japan South Africa and numerous European States all
2:37 · import enormous volumes of their own oil supplies from Saudi Arabia and are thus
2:42 · all heavily reliant on keeping those flows of oil continuing for now it is
2:47 · this simple calculus that is given Saudi Arabia enormous geopolitical power and clout over the past Century because
2:54 · they've just gotten more oil to give others than anybody else and more than any other country Saudi Arabia is the
3:01 · one most capable of influencing the global price of oil either negatively or positively this is because besides being
3:08 · by far the largest exporter of oil Saudi Arabia also has by far the largest spare
3:14 · capacity of oil production and this is what truly gives the Saudi State its
3:19 · unbelievable levels of global power spare capacity in the oil business refers to the number of oil wells that a
3:25 · country possesses that are not currently being used but which can be brought online again in a very short notice to
3:31 · rapidly increase production Saudi Arabia wields the largest bear capacity of oil production in the world and they usually
3:38 · keep around one and a half to two million barrels per day of oil production reserved in this spare
3:43 · capacity by rapidly turning this fare capacity back online Saudi Arabia can rapidly increase its globally
3:49 · significant oil production and dump those extra supplies onto the World Market thus decreasing Global prices of
3:55 · oil and by doing the reverse by shutting more Wells offline and increasing its
4:01 · available spare capacity Saudi Arabia can rapidly decrease its globally significant oil production and restrict
4:06 · Global oil supplies thus increasing worldwide oil scarcity and increasing Global oil prices this is why Saudi
4:14 · Arabia is often referred to as the Central Bank of world oil and it's how the Saudi State can exert significant
4:20 · leverage over every single country in the world including the world's most powerful country the United States while
4:27 · America only Imports a fraction of its oil supply from Saudi Arabia these days overall oil prices in the United States
4:33 · can still be severely impacted by the whims of the absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia after the Russians invaded
4:39 · Ukraine in February of 2022 the Western World immediately passed a series of sanctions against Russia that shut that
4:45 · country's oil supply out of their markets which obviously reduced the supply of oil in their markets and led
4:51 · to a rise in oil prices and when oil prices rise it tends to increase inflation in every other sector of the
4:57 · economy because nearly every business in the world relies on oil at some point in time in its production process which
5:03 · 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
5:10 · invaded Ukraine and the global price of oil shot up and inflation rates went up along with it the Biden Administration
5:15 · in the United States requested that Saudi Arabia turned more of their spare capacity on and ramp up production to
5:21 · place more oil onto the global market in order to decrease oil prices that would help tame Global inflation but the
5:27 · Saudis instead did the complete opposite they ended up cutting more of their production over and over these past
5:34 · several months adding more Wells to their offline spare capacity and decreasing the supply of global oil in
5:40 · coordination with Russia which is increasing oil prices around the world which is enabling the Russians to earn
5:46 · more money on their own oil sales that is being plowed into waging their war in Ukraine and it is increasing
5:52 · inflationary pressures and gasoline prices in the United States as of May 2023 the American strategic petroleum
5:58 · Reserve or spr the usually massive emergency stockpile of petroleum that the United States keeps stashed away in
6:04 · tanks in Louisiana and Texas to release Syrian oil supply crisis has been gradually deplete needed every single
6:10 · day since the invasion of Ukraine began to the lowest level seen in 40 years right now since 1983. doing so has
6:18 · helped tame gasoline prices in the country for now but with the reserve now heavily depleted Washington possesses
6:24 · very little other options available to keep gasoline prices from spiraling upwards leading up to the November 2024
6:30 · presidential election other than calling Saudi Arabia and requesting them to turn more of their spare capacity back online
6:37 · which the Saudis will surely only do if they are given certain favors this is
6:43 · precisely how Saudi Arabia is able to wield its oil might and exert geopolitical influence across the entire
6:49 · world in the process but Saudi Arabia's great challenge in the 21st century is that this greatest of its powers has a
6:57 · finite lifespan remaining and at a certain point in the future a day will come when this power will completely
7:03 · evaporate altogether because over the next several decades as countries around the world steadily continue moving their
7:08 · economies away away from oil as an energy source Saudi Arabia's great advantage of being the global oil
7:13 · businesses Central Bank will matter less and less and if the country does nothing
7:19 · to change itself between now and whenever that uncertain future date arrives it will only be left with sand
7:25 · one of the worst human rights records on the planet an archaic religious absolute monarchy than most of the outside world
7:31 · finds repugnant and a lack of protection from the United States while being
7:36 · surrounded by countless enemies from both within and without if Saudi Arabia does nothing to change Saudi Arabia will
7:44 · no longer exist At All by the end of the century but change is also going to be very very hard and uncertain and if you
7:52 · want to understand where Saudi Arabia is going in the future you've got to understand where Saudi Arabia came from
7:58 · in the first place and why the country would have almost certainly never managed to exist at all in its current
8:03 · form were it not for the very fortunate discovery of oil very early on into its
8:09 · history for thousands of years the Arabian Peninsula was divided between various different tribes Sheiks Kings
8:15 · and Empires there was very little to note about the lands in the center of the Arabian peninsula where the house of Assad first originated in history a
8:22 · little more than 300 years ago in a region known as the najt the overwhelming majority of Saudi Arabia's
8:27 · 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
8:34 · be found within it rainfall across most of the country's land is extremely scarce and so fresh water for drinking
8:40 · and agriculture have historically been extremely difficult to come by Across the south of the modern country is a
8:46 · vast desert known as the Rob Alkali better known in English as the empty quarter it is the largest continuous
8:52 · expanse of sand that can be found anywhere in the world it is nearly completely devoid of life and it is
8:57 · larger in area than the entirety of France the region of najed deep within the interior of the Arabian Peninsula
9:03 · was an extremely sparsely populated and isolated Backwater separated from the rest of the World by vast empty deserts
9:10 · and high mountains with nothing of value to offer anyone in the outside world it was a place hardly anyone paid any
9:16 · attention to and its extreme isolation from the rest of the world was partially why an extremely strict interpretation
9:23 · of Sunni Islam gradually developed there now sometimes known as wahhabism it was
9:28 · an unlikely place from which one of the most powerful nations of the modern world would arise from but so it did
9:34 · regardless across the 18th and 19th centuries two small and largely unknown family Clans within the Naj region
9:41 · cemented an alliance between themselves the house of sod who had run the politics and day-to-day governance of
9:46 · the lands they controlled and the clan of wahab who had run the land's religious Affairs based upon their own
9:51 · extremely strict interpretation of Sunni Islam the previously mentioned branch of the faith that is sometimes referred to
9:56 · as wahhavism after joining forces facade and wahab Alliance went on to carve out the first Saudi state that survived
10:03 · between 1744 and 1814 before it was ultimately destroyed by the Ottomans a
10:08 · group of survivors managed to take back the solid's ancestral Capital at Riyadh in 1818 and from there they carved out
10:13 · the second Saudi state to survive for most of the rest of the 19th century until 1891 when catastrophic infighting
10:20 · among the royal family in conflict with a rival family Clan known as the rashidis led to the state's ultimate
10:25 · collapse the surviving Saud family members were forced to flee from riyada's Exiles into nearby Kuwait for
10:31 · they were powerless without any lands and without any wealth but with a very good historical claim to the supposedly
10:36 · worthless lands of nodged in the interior of Arabia there and then the Saud family probably would have vanished
10:42 · into her irrelevance never to be seen or heard from again were it not for the Ambitions of a young man of the family
10:48 · who would ultimately become known as IBN Saad the man who would create the modern day Kingdom of Saudi Arabia determined
10:55 · to restore his family's position of power a 27 year old IBN Saud In 1902 led a party of a couple dozen loyal men from
11:02 · Kuwait to recapture his family's ancestral seat in Riyadh from the Rival rashidi Clan it was the beginning of a
11:08 · decades on campaign of Conquest waged across Arabia for the young man but at first very few people from the outside
11:14 · world paid any attention to it the lands that now constitute Saudi Arabia back then in the early 20th century may have
11:20 · only been home to as few as 2 million people who are almost entirely very poor desert roaming Nomads and so the
11:27 · squabbling between two rival Clans in these lands was hardly noticed by any of the great powers of the day but things
11:33 · began shifting during World War One the rashidi clan was Allied to the Ottoman Empire and after the war broke out the
11:39 · British began supplying weapons and cash to IBN Saad who was fighting against them that combined with ibenstad's own
11:45 · Alliance to the ultra Sunni wahhabi clan that provided tens of thousands of fanatical and now well-armed troops
11:52 · proved decisive by the early 1920s the najed region of Arabia had been entirely
11:57 · conquered but the campaigns weren't quite finished yet after World War one's conclusion and the collapse of the
12:02 · Ottoman Empire in the Middle East the British appointed the Arab hashemite family as the new reigning monarchs in three newly created Kingdom jumps Iraq
12:10 · Jordan and the hijabs which crucially included the two holiest cities in Islam
12:15 · Mecca and Medina but relations between the British and the hashemite family quickly soured after the war's
12:20 · conclusion after the British transformed Jordan and Iraq into Colonial mandates and began letting Jews settle in
12:26 · Palestine the hashemites ruling the kingdom of hijaz refused to ratify the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and so the
12:31 · British withdrew their support for the family and backed up their other Arab wartime Ally even Saad and his expanding
12:37 · Kingdom in the naged emboldened even Saad launched a new military campaign by invading the kingdom of ajaz in 1924
12:44 · which was fully conquered within only a single year by 1925 the modern territory
12:49 · of Saudi Arabia was fully under the control of IBN Saad after more than 20 years worth of nearly constant Warfare
12:55 · including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina a few years later on in 1932 IBN
13:01 · Saad proclaimed the creation of a brand new kingdom over all of these lands and he named it after himself and his family
13:07 · the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with himself naturally as the new Kingdom's absolute
13:13 · monarch the third Saudi state had been born covering a large amount of the lands that the previous two Saudi States
13:19 · from the 19th and 18th centuries had also encompassed the very basis of idensod's argument and later the Saudi
13:25 · State's argument right up into the 2020s today that he was merely restoring his own family's historical territorial
13:32 · claims but his new kingdom entered in a life in 1932 as a severely troubled one
13:37 · the kingdom had been created through decades worth of violent Warfare and conquest at many of the lands IBN saw
13:43 · now controlled were forcefully conquered and included many people who found his alliance with the extremely Orthodox
13:49 · wahhabists as off-putting Shia Muslim minority populations were found in the Eastern Province near the Red Sea and in
13:56 · the South near Yemen who often felt religiously persecuted by the Sunni fundamentalist wahhabi Allied regime and
14:03 · even less strict fellow Sunni Muslims in the now conquered Kingdom of hijaz felt on edge moreover over the exiled and
14:10 · Furious hashemite family continue to rule Kingdoms in neighboring Jordan in Iraq with very good claims to the hijaz
14:16 · region internal instability within the New Kingdom was Rife and to try and preserve the peace IBN Saad married a
14:23 · daughter of every one of the other tribes he had conquered 20 wives and all who would go on to produce more than a
14:28 · hundred children for him including 45 Sons six of whom would go on to later Rule the Kingdom after his death
14:35 · including the current 87 year old King today in 2023 who was born when ibn's
14:40 · sod was 60 and after Decades of Warfare the new Kingdom's finances were in a
14:46 · pretty terrible state with nothing but a tiny tax base of 2 million impoverished people the only actually important thing
14:52 · that IBN saad's New Kingdom controlled to earn money from was its control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina
14:59 · which only brought in modest amounts of religious tourism to the state's struggling coffers at this point in time
15:05 · it was far more likely that either Egypt or Iraq with their plentiful agricultural Farmland around the Nile
15:11 · and Tigris Euphrates rivers would emerge as the dominant source of the Arab world's geopolitical power in the 20th
15:18 · century just as they had both been for literally all of human history beforehand but of course the discovery
15:24 · of oil suddenly changed everything you see oil had been discovered previously in commercial quantities in nearby Iran
15:31 · Iraq and Bahrain and even Saad had convinced himself that there was still oil to be discovered within his kingdom
15:37 · nearby as well but it was the British who had discovered oil in Iran Iraq and
15:42 · Bahrain and even saw didn't exactly trust the imperialist and Colonial Tendencies of them so instead IBN Saad
15:50 · went to the Americans to get them searching for oil in his kingdom in 1933 the year after his kingdom was
15:56 · proclaimed Standard Oil Company of California or SoCal later known as Chevron was granted the exclusive
16:02 · contract to begin the search it was only five years later in 1938 when they made the first discovery of oil in Saudi
16:08 · Arabia at a well known as dhamum number seven right by the Persian Gulf initially SoCal created a wholly owned
16:15 · subsidiary assigned to the oil they discovered in Saudi Arabia that would eventually be named arabian-american Oil Company AKA aramco after Saudi Arabia
16:24 · managed to take full control over the subsidiary company itself later on it became simply known as Saudi aramco the
16:31 · modern state-owned Saudi oil giant from 1938 onwards more and more oil fuels
16:37 · were steadily discovered across Saudi Arabia's sparsely populated Eastern Province and production steadily
16:42 · increased up to the point where the country was the 22nd largest producer of oil in the world significant enough to
16:48 · begin attracting the attention of the American government during World War II oil was becoming more important than
16:54 · ever before during that war and the American president of the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew that America and
17:00 · the post-war washington-led Alliance structure needed as much oil as they could possibly get to compete with the
17:06 · Soviet Bloc in the war's aftermath IBN Saad was a man who still had many enemies with a british-backed hashemite
17:12 · still in power in Iraq and Jordan and many Saudis within the country who didn't like his and the wahhabist's
17:17 · absolute Rule and so it eventually became time for him and FDR to finally meet they did so upon a ship in the Suez
17:24 · Canal in February of 1945 mere weeks before FDR's own death and their agreement became the basis for the Saudi
17:31 · American relationship that has largely endeared ever since the United States despite being a secular constitutional
17:38 · republic would back the ultra-islamic absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia
17:43 · because both had something the other desperately wanted America wanted access to the increasingly important Saudi oil
17:50 · fields both for itself and for its allies all around the world while the Saudis wanted America's security because
17:57 · as a sparsely populated country with nothing of value whatsoever besides for oil they knew they could never hope to
18:04 · defend themselves or their oil on their own either against their own people or their EX Eternal Rivals but who would
18:10 · ever dare to attack them if they had the backing of the most powerful country in the world over time this basic
18:17 · Arrangement between America and Saudi Arabia security guarantees in exchange for oil has continually evolved but
18:23 · remained more or less the same ever since IBN Saw died in 1953 and his sons
18:29 · have ruled the kingdom as absolute monarchs ever since eventually more oil fields were discovered around the
18:34 · initial demo number seven well like sophonia in the Gulf the largest offshore oil field ever discovered in
18:40 · the world and the mighty gavar field the largest onshore oil field ever
18:45 · discovered and the largest single source of human energy that we as a species have ever so far discovered it turned
18:52 · out that the lands even sod had conquered for his kingdom were not so worthless or useless after all because
18:59 · they contained within them the most valuable oil fields that have ever been discovered on the planet money began
19:06 · flooding into the kingdom as the oil field continue to be developed but the true era of wealth only came after the
19:13 · 1973 oil crisis after Israel defeated the combined Arab armies of Egypt and
19:18 · Syria during the Yom Kippur War the OPEC oil cartel made up of major oil producing countries from all around the
19:24 · world decided to embargo many of Israel's most major supporters including the United States Saudi Arabia briefly
19:31 · participated in that embargo and the global price of oil subsequently quadrupled and remained high for more
19:37 · than a decade afterwards the flood of money into Saudi Arabia suddenly became a deluge of money over the following
19:44 · decade and the kingdom became one of the wealthiest countries in the world and the house of sod became one of the
19:50 · wealthiest families in the world it was with this unbelievable money that Saudi Arabia made its great bargain with the
19:57 · people of the Kingdom the centuries-old alliance between the house Assad and the clan of wahab remained intact meaning
20:04 · that the Saudi state was governed by a set of extremely fundamentalist Sunni Muslim values that a lot of the state's
20:10 · minority groups like The Shia and less fundamentalist sunnis didn't exactly get along with very well which in a vacuum
20:17 · would have led to domestic instability but the enormous revenues that the state was earning from its Oil Business
20:23 · enabled the government to basically just bribe all of its citizens into complicity and so Saudi Arabia
20:29 · essentially became a massive welfare state for all of its citizens zero taxes
20:35 · were levied on anything or anyone because oil was paying for all of the government's budget a flood of money
20:41 · went into subsidizing everything for Saudi Arabia citizens from Health Care education food water fuel electricity
20:47 · and whatever else you could possibly think of nearly all of the citizens needs were completely being covered by
20:53 · the government and in exchange it was expected that all of the citizens would accept some of the strictest and most
20:59 · totalitarian religious laws anywhere in the world and more importantly except
21:04 · the house of sod's absolute legitimacy to rule a medieval Kingdom in a 20th
21:10 · century world as the 20th century continued progressing oil production in the United States diminished while
21:15 · production in Saudi Arabia only increased to the point where the kingdom even overtook America to become the
21:21 · world's largest oil producer for decades America became increasingly committed to
21:26 · protecting the kingdom strategically important oil supply and by 1991 as production in the United States
21:31 · continued to flounder America found itself importing nearly a third of all
21:36 · of its imports from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia America needed to protect Saudi Arabia at all costs but justifying doing
21:44 · so in Washington was growing increasingly difficult because Saudi Arabia was growing even more
21:49 · totalitarian as more and more westerners came to the country for work in developing the numerous oil fields the
21:55 · country's ultra-orthodox wahhabi establishment grew increasingly agitated at their growing Presence by 1979 it had
22:02 · just gotten to be too much for some and a group of hundreds of armed religious militants stormed the Grand Mosque in
22:08 · Mecca and seized control over it denouncing the Saudi king as a blasphemer for increasingly westernizing
22:15 · the country the Grand Mosque one of the holiest sites in all of Islam thus became the site of a military siege that
22:22 · lasted for weeks as Saudi Security Forces battled with the militants inside to regain control it marked the very
22:29 · first major direct challenge the house Assad's legitimacy to rule over the kingdom since its establishment back in
22:35 · 1932 and the Saudi monarchy chose to respond to the challenge by further embracing the Sunni wahhabi religious
22:43 · leaders and increasing the severity of religious laws in the country all of the previous social reforms that were taking
22:49 · place in the country were reversed movie theaters were universally banned women were completely removed from all of the
22:55 · Media newspapers altogether women's dress codes were much more strictly enforced in public homosexual activity
23:00 · was much more punished by the death penalty and the Saudi State's ancient religious police increased their patrols
23:06 · on the streets to rigorously enforce course the newly strengthened religious laws for the next 40 odd years Saudi
23:13 · Arabia would be among the most Theocratic and totalitarian regimes anywhere on the planet as the ruling
23:19 · Saudi royal family used strict Islamic religious laws to strengthen their own legitimacy in the eyes of the ultra
23:25 · conservatives of the country but the trend towards religious fundamentalism at home would eventually go on to
23:31 · produce even more problems for the kingdom in the future and even jeopardize its relationship with its own
23:37 · greatest protector and security guarantor the United States it was no coincidence that Osama Bin Laden and
23:43 · Al-Qaeda were initially both produced within the ultra-religious environment of Saudi Arabia in 1990 when saddam's
23:50 · Iraq appear likely to invade Saudi Arabia Bin Laden offered the Saudi king his own mujahideen fighters who were
23:56 · battle-hardened during the Afghan war against the Soviets to resist but the king refused and instead decided to
24:02 · allow the Americans to send hundreds of thousands of their troops to defend the kingdom Against The Invasion instead the
24:09 · presence of hundreds of thousands of Americans within the kingdom granted by the king who is supposed to be the
24:14 · protector of the two Islamic holy cities infuriated Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda and
24:20 · the outrage was never forgiven in 1995 Bin Laden declared that the king of Saudi Arabia was a heretic and a war
24:27 · between the kingdom and Al-Qaeda has raged on ever since with Al-Qaeda continually seeking ways to overthrow
24:33 · the monarchy and replace it with what it sees as its own vision of restored fundamentalist Sunni Theocratic rule the
24:40 · fact that Osama Bin Laden himself was born in Saudi Arabia and that many of Al qaeda's Fighters as well turned out to
24:46 · be Saudi citizens including 15 out of the 19 hijackers responsible for carrying out the 9 11 attacks has
24:53 · remained a sore spot for relations between the kingdom and the United States ever since but in addition to the
24:59 · growing Sunni islamist threat within the kingdom represented by the likes of al-Qaeda who felt that the Saudi royal
25:04 · family wasn't quite religious enough external threats to the Saudis rule in the Kingdom were greatly growing in
25:11 · numbers as well the emergence of the Revolutionary Shia islamist regime in neighboring Iran in 1979 presented the
25:18 · Saudi Kingdom with its most major external Arch Enemy that it has been locked in an on-again off-again cold war
25:24 · with ever since the Revolutionary regime in Iran had overthrown their own absolute monarch after all and replaced
25:31 · him with a totalitarian Islamic theocracy ruled by the country's Shiite clergy and their supreme leader the
25:37 · Ayatollah Khamenei and they were intent on exporting their Revolution to every other monarchist regime in the Islamic
25:44 · world and overthrowing all of their kings as well including Saudi Arabia's monarchy and the other Gulf Arab states
25:51 · but for a Time both revolutionary Iran and absolute monarchists Saudi Arabia
25:56 · found some common ground in their Mutual enemy in Iraq Saddam Hussein Saddam had led Iraq into a brutal invasion of Iran
26:03 · in 1980 and then in 1990 Saddam invaded an annexed Kuwait and Was preparing the Iran Army to invade Saudi Arabia next
26:10 · the United States and a massive Coalition involving Saudi Arabian troops intervened and kicked the Iraqi Army out
26:17 · of Kuwait and liberated the country in 1991. but Saddam still remained in power and remained as a Potential Threat to
26:23 · both the Saudis and the Iranians for the next decade relations between Tehran and Riyadh were therefore fairly cordial but
26:31 · that all suddenly ended in 2003 when the United States invaded Iraq in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks
26:37 · and overthrew Saddam and replaced him with a Democratic Republic a move the Saudi Arabia fiercely disagreed with
26:44 · Washington over and part of why they disagreed with it so strongly was because they knew there was Saddam now
26:50 · out of the way the Iranians would make moves into exporting their Revolution into Iraq next which is exactly what
26:57 · they began doing Iraq with the majority of its population being Shia Muslim Arabs and immediately adjacent to Iran
27:03 · was one of the most obvious first targets for the Iranians to export their Revolution into
27:08 · quickly after Saddam was removed by the Americans Iranian troops began entering into the country and building militia
27:14 · organizations out of the country's large Shia Muslim population and indoctrinating them with Iran's
27:19 · revolutionary anti-monarchist Zeal naturally to try and prevent Iraq from becoming essentially an
27:24 · iranian-controlled puppet the Saudis began funding and supplying Iraqi Sunni Muslim militias to counteract them and
27:31 · the first major proxy war between Tehran and Riyadh and begun then in 2011 the
27:36 · United States mostly withdrew all of their troops from Iraq and that very same year the Arab Spring revolutions
27:42 · began sweeping all across the Arab world as restless and angry Arab populations
27:47 · unsatisfied with their long-time regimes began taking to the streets for change popular revolutions eventually managed
27:54 · to topple the long-standing regimes in Tunisia Libya Egypt and Yemen while enormous Civil Wars exploded in Libya
28:00 · Yemen and Syria fearful about the wave of Revolution penetrating into their own long-standing kingdom and their own
28:07 · potentially Restless population Nation the Saudis began massively increasing their purchases of American-made weapons
28:13 · tanks Jets and ships to keep themselves in power in a series of deals worth tens of billions of dollars but the
28:20 · confrontation between revolutionary Iran and monarchist Saudi Arabia quickly came
28:25 · to a boiling point over the small island of Bahrain just off the Saudi Coast approximately 60 percent of the Island's
28:33 · total population are Shia Muslims but the ruling monarchy there are Sunni Muslims revolutionary Shia Ron on the
28:39 · other side of the gulf further claims Bahrain as a lost Iranian Province based on their own historical territorial
28:46 · claims to the island and has repeatedly pressed the issue and insisted that the Shia majority on the island are being
28:51 · repressed by the minority Sunni monarchy back in 1986 Saudi Arabia and Bahrain
28:57 · finished the construction of the 25 kilometer King fod Causeway that connects the island to the Saudi
29:02 · Mainland it was ostensibly built to further facilitate trade and travel between the two countries but one cannot
29:09 · help to notice that it can also be used as a bridge for Saudi tanks and soldiers to come storming into the island across
29:15 · were the Island's monarchy ever in Jeopardy of falling during a revolution where Iran to successfully foment a
29:22 · revolution in the island that would do that and install a revolutionary Shia government similar to their own in its
29:27 · place the very existence of the Saudi State itself would be directly put into question the island is only located
29:33 · about 60 kilometers away from Saudi Arabia's largest single oil field gavar only about 50 kilometers away from the
29:39 · headquarters of Saudi aramco the state-owned oil company at only about 80 kilometers away from Ross to neura which
29:46 · is the saudi's largest oil export terminal and indeed the largest one in the world moreover Bahrain is placed
29:52 · directly off the coast of the Shia Muslim majority areas of Eastern Saudi Arabia where nearly the entirety of
29:58 · Saudi Arabia's oil reserves and infrastructure are also located meaning that worthy Iranians to successfully
30:04 · export their Revolution into Shia majority Bahrain and topple the Sunni Anarchy there the next Target would be
30:10 · the next door Shia majority areas of Eastern Saudi Arabia which could put the entire Saudi Oil Business into Jeopardy
30:17 · which could put the entire Saudi monarchy and stayed into Jeopardy and that could never be tolerated so when
30:22 · uprisings began to Bahrain aimed at toppling the monarchy in 2011. Saudi troops indeed came storming across the
30:29 · bridge to help put them down Saudi Arabia came to back the rebels seeking to overthrow Bashar al-assad's regime in
30:35 · Syria because if it worked and he was removed it would be Iran who would lose a core component of their overall Grand
30:42 · strategy the Assad regime in Syria has been a core Ally of the Iranians for decades over their Mutual opposition to
30:48 · Israel and together with an iranian-dominated Iraq they form Iran's so-called land bridge across the Middle
30:54 · East towards the Mediterranean Sea enabling Iranian militias and proxies to safely and reliably transport weapons to
31:01 · Iranian aligned organizations like Hezbollah and Lebanon and across the Mediterranean Sea to Hamas in the Gaza
31:07 · Strip who all share Iran's desire to destroy the Israeli state from existence
31:12 · and also from Saudi Arabia's perspective makes it appear that Iran is attempting to encircle them and overthrow their
31:19 · Kingdom thus to shatter Iran's land bridge and break out of their potential encirclement the Saudis backed up Rebel
31:25 · forces in Syria while Iran backed up the regime the proxy war quickly extended into Libya as well as the Saudis back
31:31 · the tobrook-based House of Representatives government against the iranian-supported tripoli-based government of national Accord but the
31:38 · absolute Terror in the Royal Halls of Riyadh over being encircled by the Revolutionary Iranians came to a fever
31:44 · pitch in 2014 when the Shia adjacent houthi movement suddenly managed to conquer the yemeni capital and was
31:50 · advancing on the city of Aden next the most significant Port anywhere between the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea were the
31:58 · houthis to completely capture the entirety of Yemen it would have placed a highly militant and probably revolutionary Shiite Muslim power
32:05 · closely aligned with the Iranians across not only more than 30 500 kilometers of
32:10 · their southern border near to their own Shia Muslim subjects in the south of the country but also directly on the
32:16 · Strategic Maritime choke point of the Bob element Deb Strait as well were that to happen Saudi Arabia truly would be
32:23 · effectively encircled and checkmated surrounded by a hostile Iran who wants nothing more than to topple its monarchy
32:29 · and Iran's allies placed into power in Iraq Syria and Lebanon and potentially in Bahrain and in Yemen as well Iran
32:36 · could hypothetically mine or blockade the Strait of Hormuz regulating all the maritime traffic between the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean while the
32:43 · houthis could simultaneously use aronians applied missiles and weapons to blockade the Bob Allman depth straight
32:48 · as well such a scenario would be an utter doomsday one for the Saudis because they would lose the easiest
32:54 · ability to export all of their oil to their largest customers in East Asia the only way remaining for them to continue
33:00 · exporting oil at all under that scenario would be via the Suez Canal through Egypt but even that too nearly came
33:07 · under risk After the revolution in Egypt toppled a longtime dictator of that country in 2011. the Muslim
33:13 · brotherhood's candidate came to power in a democratic election next the Muslim Brotherhood is a Sunni islamist
33:19 · organization that like Iran is also staunchly opposed to the concept of monarchies and the Islamic world
33:25 · including the Saudi monarchy so obviously the Saudis despise them we're a Brotherhood government in Egypt who
33:31 · hypothetically deny the Saudis access to the Suez Canal in conjunction with the houthis and Iranians shutting down their
33:38 · access through the babalm and Deb in Hormuz Straits and nobody like the Americans did anything to stop it Saudi
33:44 · Arabia which was completely collapsed very rapidly because they would lose any ability to actually export any of their
33:49 · oil out of the country and 87 percent of their government's budget would just evaporate meaning their ability to bribe
33:56 · all of their divided and repressed citizenry would end and their ability to buy massive amounts of weapons would end
34:02 · and their monarchy would just collapse into dust and thus the Saudi sponsored
34:07 · and Military coup in engine shipped in 2013 the luckily for them panned out and overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood from
34:12 · power and replaced it with a much more friendly military government but coups and plots would not work to dislodge the
34:18 · houthis from power in Yemen instead the Saudis initiated a massive military intervention of their own into the
34:24 · country with enormous bombing and missile attacks and a devastating Naval blockade to choke the houthis into
34:30 · submission and remove what they perceived as Iran's revolutionary influence from the country Yemen thus
34:35 · became the focal point for the Iranian Saudi rivalry from 2015 onwards and the
34:40 · Saudis agreed to buy up tens of billions of dollars more worth of additional American Weaponry to wage that war with
34:46 · weapons that would help contribute to what the United Nations has described as one of the 21st Century's greatest humanitarian catastrophes the Saudi
34:54 · Arabian defense budget exponentially exploded to fight the war in Yemen and to fight all of these other proxy
35:00 · conflicts in Iraq and Syria and in Libya because the Saudi royal family saw external enemies circling all around
35:06 · them all being led had and coordinated by the Revolutionary Iranians and they decided to respond in the only way they
35:14 · knew how to do throw tens of billions of dollars at the problem they earned from selling their oil and hope it all went
35:20 · away Saudi defense spending grew so high in the mid to late 2010s that it became roughly On a par with Russia and was
35:27 · only outmatched by the superpowers of China and the United States in 2015
35:32 · Saudi Arabia was spending 2 748 dollars per person in the country on its
35:38 · military well the United States was only spending 1975 dollars per person on theirs but
35:45 · throwing money at trying to overpower their enemies wasn't really working the Iranians only spent a few tens of
35:50 · millions of their dollars arming the houthis in comparison to the tens of billions that the Saudis were spending
35:56 · attempting to crush them and the war gradually transformed into a quagmire with the houthis no closer to being
36:02 · removed than When The War Began and after nearly 400 000 deaths in the country caused by the conflict Bashar
36:09 · al-assad has remained in power in Syria for over a decade despite the saudi's best efforts to remove him while Iraq
36:15 · increasingly falls under Iran's influence as well and then in September of 2019 a series of drone and cruise
36:21 · missile attacks bombarded Saudi Arabia's oil refineries at AB cake and careers in the Eastern Province destroying the
36:28 · Kingdom's largest oil processing and Refinery facilities 5.7 million barrels
36:34 · per day worth of Saudi oil production were knocked offline in the Kingdom by the attack representing what was nothing
36:40 · less than the biggest disruption ever seen in the entire oil industry up to that point the houthis down in Yemen
36:47 · quickly claim responsibility for the attack as a reprisal for the Saudi Air campaign but they were more than 1200
36:53 · kilometers away from the attack's location American intelligence later determined that the attacks probably
36:59 · actually originated to the north and were probably fired by the Iranians themselves either from within Iran
37:05 · itself or from within their Shiite militia controlled areas in Iraq it could have been interpreted as an act of
37:11 · War by the kingdom but the United States made it clear that they didn't see things that way and when not militarily
37:17 · backed the kingdom if that's the route they chose to go down America wasn't prepared to go to war with Iran over the
37:22 · issue and with their military already struggling in Yemen the Saudis were left with no other choice but to back down
37:28 · and de-escalate the oil processing facilities were quickly repaired and business went on as usual but the Saudis
37:35 · never forgot that America had just refused to defend them the days back
37:40 · when America was willing to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops to protect the kingdom and its oil back in 1991 during the Gulf War appeared in
37:47 · Riyadh to be over the development of shale oil in the United States in the early 2010s had resulted in a massive
37:53 · increase in America's own oil production and by 2018 the year just before the ab cake attack America had finally
38:00 · surpassed Saudi Arabia and regained its title as the world's largest producer America was relying less and less on
38:07 · Saudi oil for themselves elves and by 2019 only about seven percent of America's oil imports were still even
38:13 · coming from the kingdom coming to how nearly a third of their oil imports were from Saudi Arabia back in 1991 during
38:20 · the Gulf War as Washington began relying Less on the Saudis themselves for their oil America's distaste for Saudi
38:27 · Arabia's totalitarian regime and human rights practices became more pronounced as well an absolute monarchy in the 21st
38:34 · century with extremely authoritarian religious laws waging a brutal war in Yemen with hundreds of thousands of
38:40 · deaths on his hand all fueled by American weapons no less and responsible for carrying out assassinations on
38:45 · journalists would not be a usual Ally of the United States were it not also for
38:51 · all of its oil and all of that oil was becoming less important to Washington moreover The World At Large is beginning
38:57 · to move more and more away from oil as an energy source as Nations around the world try and fight back against global
39:02 · climate change the countries of the European Union many of whom are currently in historically some of Saudi Arabia's largest oil customers are
39:09 · planning on completely phasing out their own fossil fuel usage by 2050 and if they're successful none of them will be
39:16 · customers of the Saudis any longer within only 27 years from now Japan also plans to eliminate oil and gases energy
39:22 · sources at some point in the future this same Century though without the same strict 2050 timetable as the Europeans
39:28 · one of the biggest reasons why the Americans still soared or support Saudi Arabia today even though they import hardly any of their oil themselves is
39:36 · because the Saudis Still Supply enormous amounts of oil to many of America's closest allies like the NATO States in
39:42 · Europe and the Japanese but when this too ends America will have almost no reason left to continue protecting the
39:49 · kingdom and the deal established between FDR and ibnson nearly 80 years ago will finally come to an end and without a
39:55 · major protector and with less and less customers to continue selling their oil to Saudi Arabia will have less money to
40:01 · buy weapons to defend themselves with and less money to subsidize their Restless population with and there are
40:06 · many many enemies both within the kingdom and outside of it will be emboldened like they have never been
40:12 · before to finally take their chance at overthrowing the monarchy thus in order
40:17 · to avoid this dangerous spiral toward destruction over the coming decades Saudi Arabia needs to radically
40:22 · transform its entire society and economy if it is going to survive and this is why the current Crown Prince and soon to
40:29 · be king of the country Muhammad bin Salman or MBS announced with much fanfare the vision 2030 plan back in
40:37 · 2016 which aims to do exactly that sweeping reforms across the country have
40:42 · already taken place as a part of vision 2030 and more still to come women were finally granted the ability to drive in
40:49 · the country in 2018. while their dress codes in public were slightly relaxed with the aim of encouraging and enabling
40:55 · more women to enter into the Saudi Workforce a push towards encouraging both religious and non-religious tourism
41:00 · to the kingdom has been sent into overdrive with massive new building developments being put into motion around the holy city of Mecca in order
41:07 · to further encourage religious tourism and Grand Mega projects like a 500 billion dollar futuristic city of Neo
41:14 · the Jeddah Tower in the city of Jeddah plan to be the new tallest building in the world and the Red Sea Islands Mega
41:20 · project in the Red Sea all set to attract a new set of non-religious tourists to the kingdom Saudi Arabia
41:26 · even managed to secure its own Grand Prix on the Formula One calendar in 2021 and even announced a brand new airline
41:32 · in 2023 called Riyadh air which will include the purchase of 72 brand new Boeing 787 Dreamliners at a price of 37
41:40 · billion dollars all combined Saudi Arabia hopes to establish tourism from all around the world to the kingdom in
41:46 · order to add diversification in the economy away from oil while investing hundreds of billions to trillions of
41:52 · dollars at the same time into a brand new Sovereign wealth fund to invest in companies all around the world to add
41:58 · even more diversification and to diversify away from their own usage of oil as a fuel source the government
42:04 · plans to invest aggressively into solar energy which in the deserts of Arabia does have a lot of very high potential
42:10 · but Vision 2030 contains within it two critical problems for the kingdom first while this process is ongoing and tons
42:17 · of tourists from the Western world begin coming to the country while religious laws in the country are relaxed or destroyed altogether to continue
42:24 · encouraging them to come and visit it is certain to generate a high degree of instability among Saudi Arabia's
42:30 · traditional Sunni wahhabi fundamentalists Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda previously went to war with the
42:36 · Saudi monarchy over their allowance of U.S troops into the country to protect the Kingdom so what do you think will
42:41 · happen if and when millions of Western tourists are being allowed to enter the country thus Saudi Arabia needs as
42:48 · little external conflicts as possible while it is focusing on dealing with this internal conflict for years Saudi
42:55 · Arabia thus wants to get out of its failed war in Yemen and in March of 2023 they even signed a historic agreement
43:02 · with Iran restoring relations with them and establishing a truce Riyadh couldn't possibly be foolish enough to believe
43:08 · that the truce will last forever as the Revolutionary regime in Iran will always remain militantly committed to
43:14 · overthrowing their monarchy the Saudis know that the truce with Iran is a temporary one but Iran also wanted to
43:20 · take it so they could spend the next few years focusing their efforts on Israel and the United States while the Saudis
43:25 · wanted it to spend crucial time focusing inwards and implementing these vital reforms From riyadh's perspective the
43:32 · hope is that they will finish reforming their society and emerge stronger before Iran decides to resume hostilities with
43:39 · them again but in order to further guarantee that Iran and his proxies will stay off of their back the Saudis also
43:45 · need to entice the United States to stick around as their protector for as long as possible they know that America
43:51 · is naturally losing interest in doing that but the Saudis still have levers that they can pull they have even
43:57 · suggested that they might be willing to recognize Israel and normalize relations with the Jewish state in exchange for an
44:04 · ironclad U.S security guarantee of the kingdom and the elevation of Saudi Arabia to the status of a major non-nato
44:10 · Ally as well as gaining access to a civilian nuclear energy program which could in a pinch enable them to develop
44:18 · a nuclear weapon on their own if the Iranians suddenly develop one first Washington seems unprepared to accept
44:24 · those demands for now over fears of being bound by treaty to go to war with Iran if the kingdom comes under attack
44:30 · again and over fears of nuclear proliferation spreading across the Middle East but the Saudis could
44:35 · potentially always Sweden the deal ahead of the November 2024 election by also agreeing to turn more of their spare
44:41 · capacity Wells back online and flooding the oil Market with their fresh Supply decreasing Global oil prices and
44:47 · inflationary pressures In America which is part of the reason why they've been cutting production for months they want
44:54 · that firm security guarantee Bound in treaty from the United States and recognizing Israel will lead to even
45:00 · more tensions with the Sunni wahhabi fundamentalists within the country and with revolutionary Iran outside of the
45:07 · country who is on uncompromising on their aim of destroying Israel and overthrowing the Saudi monarchy and the
45:13 · second problem related to Vision 2030 is that while it is generating all of this religious instability within the kingdom
45:18 · it is also going to cost an absolute Fortune current estimates believe that
45:23 · the Saudis are going to end up spending more than 3 trillion dollars on this plan to reform and diversify the kingdom
45:30 · and in order to fund that enormous amount of money Saudi Arabia is gradually selling small amounts of
45:35 · shares in the state-owned Saudi aramco oil company to foreign investors while the Saudi simultaneously need higher
45:42 · Global oil prices for several more years to come in order to add even more money into the state's coffers before it's all
45:48 · too late which is the other reason why they've been coordinating with the Russians to decrease production together
45:54 · in order to keep oil prices elevated for longer it's not that Saudi Arabia and Russia are really aligned in any real
46:00 · sense it's just that their interests in having higher worldwide oil prices are currently aligned so then Moscow has
46:07 · more money to fight their war in Ukraine and Riyadh has more money to fund their crucially important reforms but doing so
46:14 · is also upsetting the United States to a pretty large degree who obviously prefers lower Global oil prices both to
46:20 · deprive the Russians of more money and to lower gasoline prices and inflation back at home the Saudis are currently
46:26 · playing a very very delicate balancing game as they must simultaneously weigh their own self-interest and need to
46:32 · reform or die which will cost a lot of money and require high oil prices the
46:37 · relationship with the United States as their biggest security guarantor and provider of arms who prefers lower oil
46:43 · prices their relationship with Russia is the second largest oil exporter in the world who can most help them manipulate
46:49 · oil prices to be higher but who is stuck in a proxy war with the United States and Ukraine and their relationship with
46:56 · China who is the Saudi single largest oil customer but who is also locked in a sort of cold war with the United States
47:02 · in the Pacific over Taiwan it is a balancing act between all of these various interests that the Saudi Royal
47:07 · family led by MBS must carefully tread between for decades and if they ever stumble along the way during any part of
47:14 · it they will all immediately die and lose everything and at the same time this careful Balancing Act must all be
47:21 · maintained as Iran carefully eyes them with their gains in Iraq Syria Lebanon and Yemen and as the 15 000 other
47:28 · members of mbs's own royal family jockey and position themselves at court and Riyadh for their own positions of power
47:35 · and as the religious fundamentalists within Saudi Arabia increasingly feel that the house of sod at large is at
47:42 · last fully betraying them after the 300 year old alliance between them and the
47:47 · wahhabists is ended internal strife within the kingdom is a certainty and the Saudi regime is already responding
47:53 · to it by cracking down on emerging islamist opposition within the kingdom whenever it can and outside the kingdom
47:59 · whenever it can it's all a part of the very complex relationship between the Saudi Kingdom and radical sunismist
48:05 · organizations with roots in the Kingdom like how and even Isis for decades Al Qaeda sought to overthrow the Saudi
48:12 · monarchy and its strategy to do so has been to sow as much chaos in the Kingdom as possible by attacking foreigners and
48:18 · discouraging any tourism to the country and attacking skilled workers in the oil and gas industry and discouraging them
48:24 · from coming thus eventually leading to the Kingdom's Collapse by the erosion of both its oil and its tourism Industries
48:30 · the Saudi state has thus fought back against al Qaeda ever since the 1990s but a new and perhaps even more menacing
48:37 · internal and external threat suddenly appeared on the scene in 2014 when Isis exploded across the territory of Iraq
48:43 · and Syria in a lightning series of conquests Isis too just like Al Qaeda before it vowed that it would one day
48:51 · overthrow the Saudi Arabian monarchy after it completed its conquest of Iraq and Syria first and the Saudi monarchy
48:57 · wasn't put any more at ease after it turned out that thousands of Isis Fighters had in fact come from within
49:04 · the kingdom and were Saudi citizens thus in order to destroy the threat Saudi
49:09 · Arabia sent Military Officers to Syria to help train and equip resistance Fighters fighting against Isis and join
49:14 · the american-led military coalition to destroy Isis altogether by the end of 2014 a coalition that would eventually
49:21 · Encompass dozens of countries from all around the world in the largest military Alliance seen in history since the
49:27 · alliance to destroy Nazi Germany 70 years beforehand but unfortunately due to the inherently
49:33 · violent controversial and recent nature of discussing how an organization is Infamous as Isis was destroyed by a
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50:04 · by a global Coalition of Nations and organizations between 2014 and 2020 and this is also just one of more than two
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“0:00 · this video was made possible by nebula use the link down in the description below to support real life floor directly by signing up where you can
0:05 · watch 26 additional and exclusive full-length videos in my ongoing nebula modern conflict series covering recent
0:11 · major Wars and crises including this video’s next part covering how Isis was defeated in Iraq and Syria perhaps more
0:17 · than any other country today in the 21st century Saudi Arabia has the most uncertain future ahead of itself the
0:23 · country truly has almost countless problems ahead of it that it must overcome in order to survive and they’ve
0:29 · only been able to overcome all of these problems so far because of their dominance over a critical resource that
0:35 · everyone in the world has wanted for the past 100 years but from which the world is currently starting to move away from
0:41 · oil the Saudi Arabian state is one that is nearly utterly defined by its control
0:46 · over this black liquidy Resource as recently as 2018 the petroleum business
0:51 · in the country accounted for a whopping 87 percent of the government’s annual budget ninety percent of the country’s
0:58 · export earnings and a massive 42 percent of the country’s entire GDP this is
1:04 · because Saudi Arabia is known today to control approximately a quarter of all the proven oil reserves in the world the
1:10 · second largest reserves of all the world’s countries second only to Venezuela but unlike Venezuela’s
1:16 · technically larger oil reserves which are highly crude difficult and expensive to access Saudi Arabia is only slightly
1:23 · smaller reserves are located under pressure just beneath the earth’s surface and they are extremely easy and
1:29 · cheap to access and they’re much easier to refine this is why for decades Saudi Arabia was the largest producer of oil
1:36 · in the world and is currently the world’s second largest producer just barely behind the United States
1:41 · alongside Russia these three countries are collectively referred to as the big three of global oil production a day
1:47 · because no single other country comes anywhere close to matching them and they combined produce approximately 40
1:53 · percent of all the oil in the world but America’s population is 332 million and
1:59 · so most of America’s oil production is consumed within the country and not exported abroad which is why America is
2:05 · only the world’s 14th largest oil exporter Saudi Arabia has just about a tenth of the American population but
2:11 · produces nearly as much oil as it meaning that they simply have far more that they can never possibly consume on
2:18 · their own and so they have far more left over to export to other countries Saudi Arabia is thus by far the largest
2:24 · exporter of oil in the world and oil continues to provide roughly a third of all the energy that Humanity
2:30 · collectively consumes worldwide countries like India China Japan South Africa and numerous European States all
2:37 · import enormous volumes of their own oil supplies from Saudi Arabia and are thus
2:42 · all heavily reliant on keeping those flows of oil continuing for now it is
2:47 · this simple calculus that is given Saudi Arabia enormous geopolitical power and clout over the past Century because
2:54 · they’ve just gotten more oil to give others than anybody else and more than any other country Saudi Arabia is the
3:01 · one most capable of influencing the global price of oil either negatively or positively this is because besides being
3:08 · by far the largest exporter of oil Saudi Arabia also has by far the largest spare
3:14 · capacity of oil production and this is what truly gives the Saudi State its
3:19 · unbelievable levels of global power spare capacity in the oil business refers to the number of oil wells that a
3:25 · country possesses that are not currently being used but which can be brought online again in a very short notice to
3:31 · rapidly increase production Saudi Arabia wields the largest bear capacity of oil production in the world and they usually
3:38 · keep around one and a half to two million barrels per day of oil production reserved in this spare
3:43 · capacity by rapidly turning this fare capacity back online Saudi Arabia can rapidly increase its globally
3:49 · significant oil production and dump those extra supplies onto the World Market thus decreasing Global prices of
3:55 · oil and by doing the reverse by shutting more Wells offline and increasing its
4:01 · available spare capacity Saudi Arabia can rapidly decrease its globally significant oil production and restrict
4:06 · Global oil supplies thus increasing worldwide oil scarcity and increasing Global oil prices this is why Saudi
4:14 · Arabia is often referred to as the Central Bank of world oil and it’s how the Saudi State can exert significant
4:20 · leverage over every single country in the world including the world’s most powerful country the United States while
4:27 · America only Imports a fraction of its oil supply from Saudi Arabia these days overall oil prices in the United States
4:33 · can still be severely impacted by the whims of the absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia after the Russians invaded
4:39 · Ukraine in February of 2022 the Western World immediately passed a series of sanctions against Russia that shut that
4:45 · country’s oil supply out of their markets which obviously reduced the supply of oil in their markets and led
4:51 · to a rise in oil prices and when oil prices rise it tends to increase inflation in every other sector of the
4:57 · economy because nearly every business in the world relies on oil at some point in time in its production process which
5:03 · 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
5:10 · invaded Ukraine and the global price of oil shot up and inflation rates went up along with it the Biden Administration
5:15 · in the United States requested that Saudi Arabia turned more of their spare capacity on and ramp up production to
5:21 · place more oil onto the global market in order to decrease oil prices that would help tame Global inflation but the
5:27 · Saudis instead did the complete opposite they ended up cutting more of their production over and over these past
5:34 · several months adding more Wells to their offline spare capacity and decreasing the supply of global oil in
5:40 · coordination with Russia which is increasing oil prices around the world which is enabling the Russians to earn
5:46 · more money on their own oil sales that is being plowed into waging their war in Ukraine and it is increasing
5:52 · inflationary pressures and gasoline prices in the United States as of May 2023 the American strategic petroleum
5:58 · Reserve or spr the usually massive emergency stockpile of petroleum that the United States keeps stashed away in
6:04 · tanks in Louisiana and Texas to release Syrian oil supply crisis has been gradually deplete needed every single
6:10 · day since the invasion of Ukraine began to the lowest level seen in 40 years right now since 1983. doing so has
6:18 · helped tame gasoline prices in the country for now but with the reserve now heavily depleted Washington possesses
6:24 · very little other options available to keep gasoline prices from spiraling upwards leading up to the November 2024
6:30 · presidential election other than calling Saudi Arabia and requesting them to turn more of their spare capacity back online
6:37 · which the Saudis will surely only do if they are given certain favors this is
6:43 · precisely how Saudi Arabia is able to wield its oil might and exert geopolitical influence across the entire
6:49 · world in the process but Saudi Arabia’s great challenge in the 21st century is that this greatest of its powers has a
6:57 · finite lifespan remaining and at a certain point in the future a day will come when this power will completely
7:03 · evaporate altogether because over the next several decades as countries around the world steadily continue moving their
7:08 · economies away away from oil as an energy source Saudi Arabia’s great advantage of being the global oil
7:13 · businesses Central Bank will matter less and less and if the country does nothing
7:19 · to change itself between now and whenever that uncertain future date arrives it will only be left with sand
7:25 · one of the worst human rights records on the planet an archaic religious absolute monarchy than most of the outside world
7:31 · finds repugnant and a lack of protection from the United States while being
7:36 · surrounded by countless enemies from both within and without if Saudi Arabia does nothing to change Saudi Arabia will
7:44 · no longer exist At All by the end of the century but change is also going to be very very hard and uncertain and if you
7:52 · want to understand where Saudi Arabia is going in the future you’ve got to understand where Saudi Arabia came from
7:58 · in the first place and why the country would have almost certainly never managed to exist at all in its current
8:03 · form were it not for the very fortunate discovery of oil very early on into its
8:09 · history for thousands of years the Arabian Peninsula was divided between various different tribes Sheiks Kings
8:15 · and Empires there was very little to note about the lands in the center of the Arabian peninsula where the house of Assad first originated in history a
8:22 · little more than 300 years ago in a region known as the najt the overwhelming majority of Saudi Arabia’s
8:27 · 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
8:34 · be found within it rainfall across most of the country’s land is extremely scarce and so fresh water for drinking
8:40 · and agriculture have historically been extremely difficult to come by Across the south of the modern country is a
8:46 · vast desert known as the Rob Alkali better known in English as the empty quarter it is the largest continuous
8:52 · expanse of sand that can be found anywhere in the world it is nearly completely devoid of life and it is
8:57 · larger in area than the entirety of France the region of najed deep within the interior of the Arabian Peninsula
9:03 · was an extremely sparsely populated and isolated Backwater separated from the rest of the World by vast empty deserts
9:10 · and high mountains with nothing of value to offer anyone in the outside world it was a place hardly anyone paid any
9:16 · attention to and its extreme isolation from the rest of the world was partially why an extremely strict interpretation
9:23 · of Sunni Islam gradually developed there now sometimes known as wahhabism it was
9:28 · an unlikely place from which one of the most powerful nations of the modern world would arise from but so it did
9:34 · regardless across the 18th and 19th centuries two small and largely unknown family Clans within the Naj region
9:41 · cemented an alliance between themselves the house of sod who had run the politics and day-to-day governance of
9:46 · the lands they controlled and the clan of wahab who had run the land’s religious Affairs based upon their own
9:51 · extremely strict interpretation of Sunni Islam the previously mentioned branch of the faith that is sometimes referred to
9:56 · as wahhavism after joining forces facade and wahab Alliance went on to carve out the first Saudi state that survived
10:03 · between 1744 and 1814 before it was ultimately destroyed by the Ottomans a
10:08 · group of survivors managed to take back the solid’s ancestral Capital at Riyadh in 1818 and from there they carved out
10:13 · the second Saudi state to survive for most of the rest of the 19th century until 1891 when catastrophic infighting
10:20 · among the royal family in conflict with a rival family Clan known as the rashidis led to the state’s ultimate
10:25 · collapse the surviving Saud family members were forced to flee from riyada’s Exiles into nearby Kuwait for
10:31 · they were powerless without any lands and without any wealth but with a very good historical claim to the supposedly
10:36 · worthless lands of nodged in the interior of Arabia there and then the Saud family probably would have vanished
10:42 · into her irrelevance never to be seen or heard from again were it not for the Ambitions of a young man of the family
10:48 · who would ultimately become known as IBN Saad the man who would create the modern day Kingdom of Saudi Arabia determined
10:55 · to restore his family’s position of power a 27 year old IBN Saud In 1902 led a party of a couple dozen loyal men from
11:02 · Kuwait to recapture his family’s ancestral seat in Riyadh from the Rival rashidi Clan it was the beginning of a
11:08 · decades on campaign of Conquest waged across Arabia for the young man but at first very few people from the outside
11:14 · world paid any attention to it the lands that now constitute Saudi Arabia back then in the early 20th century may have
11:20 · only been home to as few as 2 million people who are almost entirely very poor desert roaming Nomads and so the
11:27 · squabbling between two rival Clans in these lands was hardly noticed by any of the great powers of the day but things
11:33 · began shifting during World War One the rashidi clan was Allied to the Ottoman Empire and after the war broke out the
11:39 · British began supplying weapons and cash to IBN Saad who was fighting against them that combined with ibenstad’s own
11:45 · Alliance to the ultra Sunni wahhabi clan that provided tens of thousands of fanatical and now well-armed troops
11:52 · proved decisive by the early 1920s the najed region of Arabia had been entirely
11:57 · conquered but the campaigns weren’t quite finished yet after World War one’s conclusion and the collapse of the
12:02 · Ottoman Empire in the Middle East the British appointed the Arab hashemite family as the new reigning monarchs in three newly created Kingdom jumps Iraq
12:10 · Jordan and the hijabs which crucially included the two holiest cities in Islam
12:15 · Mecca and Medina but relations between the British and the hashemite family quickly soured after the war’s
12:20 · conclusion after the British transformed Jordan and Iraq into Colonial mandates and began letting Jews settle in
12:26 · Palestine the hashemites ruling the kingdom of hijaz refused to ratify the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and so the
12:31 · British withdrew their support for the family and backed up their other Arab wartime Ally even Saad and his expanding
12:37 · Kingdom in the naged emboldened even Saad launched a new military campaign by invading the kingdom of ajaz in 1924
12:44 · which was fully conquered within only a single year by 1925 the modern territory
12:49 · of Saudi Arabia was fully under the control of IBN Saad after more than 20 years worth of nearly constant Warfare
12:55 · including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina a few years later on in 1932 IBN
13:01 · Saad proclaimed the creation of a brand new kingdom over all of these lands and he named it after himself and his family
13:07 · the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with himself naturally as the new Kingdom’s absolute
13:13 · monarch the third Saudi state had been born covering a large amount of the lands that the previous two Saudi States
13:19 · from the 19th and 18th centuries had also encompassed the very basis of idensod’s argument and later the Saudi
13:25 · State’s argument right up into the 2020s today that he was merely restoring his own family’s historical territorial
13:32 · claims but his new kingdom entered in a life in 1932 as a severely troubled one
13:37 · the kingdom had been created through decades worth of violent Warfare and conquest at many of the lands IBN saw
13:43 · now controlled were forcefully conquered and included many people who found his alliance with the extremely Orthodox
13:49 · wahhabists as off-putting Shia Muslim minority populations were found in the Eastern Province near the Red Sea and in
13:56 · the South near Yemen who often felt religiously persecuted by the Sunni fundamentalist wahhabi Allied regime and
14:03 · even less strict fellow Sunni Muslims in the now conquered Kingdom of hijaz felt on edge moreover over the exiled and
14:10 · Furious hashemite family continue to rule Kingdoms in neighboring Jordan in Iraq with very good claims to the hijaz
14:16 · region internal instability within the New Kingdom was Rife and to try and preserve the peace IBN Saad married a
14:23 · daughter of every one of the other tribes he had conquered 20 wives and all who would go on to produce more than a
14:28 · hundred children for him including 45 Sons six of whom would go on to later Rule the Kingdom after his death
14:35 · including the current 87 year old King today in 2023 who was born when ibn’s
14:40 · sod was 60 and after Decades of Warfare the new Kingdom’s finances were in a
14:46 · pretty terrible state with nothing but a tiny tax base of 2 million impoverished people the only actually important thing
14:52 · that IBN saad’s New Kingdom controlled to earn money from was its control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina
14:59 · which only brought in modest amounts of religious tourism to the state’s struggling coffers at this point in time
15:05 · it was far more likely that either Egypt or Iraq with their plentiful agricultural Farmland around the Nile
15:11 · and Tigris Euphrates rivers would emerge as the dominant source of the Arab world’s geopolitical power in the 20th
15:18 · century just as they had both been for literally all of human history beforehand but of course the discovery
15:24 · of oil suddenly changed everything you see oil had been discovered previously in commercial quantities in nearby Iran
15:31 · Iraq and Bahrain and even Saad had convinced himself that there was still oil to be discovered within his kingdom
15:37 · nearby as well but it was the British who had discovered oil in Iran Iraq and
15:42 · Bahrain and even saw didn’t exactly trust the imperialist and Colonial Tendencies of them so instead IBN Saad
15:50 · went to the Americans to get them searching for oil in his kingdom in 1933 the year after his kingdom was
15:56 · proclaimed Standard Oil Company of California or SoCal later known as Chevron was granted the exclusive
16:02 · contract to begin the search it was only five years later in 1938 when they made the first discovery of oil in Saudi
16:08 · Arabia at a well known as dhamum number seven right by the Persian Gulf initially SoCal created a wholly owned
16:15 · subsidiary assigned to the oil they discovered in Saudi Arabia that would eventually be named arabian-american Oil Company AKA aramco after Saudi Arabia
16:24 · managed to take full control over the subsidiary company itself later on it became simply known as Saudi aramco the
16:31 · modern state-owned Saudi oil giant from 1938 onwards more and more oil fuels
16:37 · were steadily discovered across Saudi Arabia’s sparsely populated Eastern Province and production steadily
16:42 · increased up to the point where the country was the 22nd largest producer of oil in the world significant enough to
16:48 · begin attracting the attention of the American government during World War II oil was becoming more important than
16:54 · ever before during that war and the American president of the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew that America and
17:00 · the post-war washington-led Alliance structure needed as much oil as they could possibly get to compete with the
17:06 · Soviet Bloc in the war’s aftermath IBN Saad was a man who still had many enemies with a british-backed hashemite
17:12 · still in power in Iraq and Jordan and many Saudis within the country who didn’t like his and the wahhabist’s
17:17 · absolute Rule and so it eventually became time for him and FDR to finally meet they did so upon a ship in the Suez
17:24 · Canal in February of 1945 mere weeks before FDR’s own death and their agreement became the basis for the Saudi
17:31 · American relationship that has largely endeared ever since the United States despite being a secular constitutional
17:38 · republic would back the ultra-islamic absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia
17:43 · because both had something the other desperately wanted America wanted access to the increasingly important Saudi oil
17:50 · fields both for itself and for its allies all around the world while the Saudis wanted America’s security because
17:57 · as a sparsely populated country with nothing of value whatsoever besides for oil they knew they could never hope to
18:04 · defend themselves or their oil on their own either against their own people or their EX Eternal Rivals but who would
18:10 · ever dare to attack them if they had the backing of the most powerful country in the world over time this basic
18:17 · Arrangement between America and Saudi Arabia security guarantees in exchange for oil has continually evolved but
18:23 · remained more or less the same ever since IBN Saw died in 1953 and his sons
18:29 · have ruled the kingdom as absolute monarchs ever since eventually more oil fields were discovered around the
18:34 · initial demo number seven well like sophonia in the Gulf the largest offshore oil field ever discovered in
18:40 · the world and the mighty gavar field the largest onshore oil field ever
18:45 · discovered and the largest single source of human energy that we as a species have ever so far discovered it turned
18:52 · out that the lands even sod had conquered for his kingdom were not so worthless or useless after all because
18:59 · they contained within them the most valuable oil fields that have ever been discovered on the planet money began
19:06 · flooding into the kingdom as the oil field continue to be developed but the true era of wealth only came after the
19:13 · 1973 oil crisis after Israel defeated the combined Arab armies of Egypt and
19:18 · Syria during the Yom Kippur War the OPEC oil cartel made up of major oil producing countries from all around the
19:24 · world decided to embargo many of Israel’s most major supporters including the United States Saudi Arabia briefly
19:31 · participated in that embargo and the global price of oil subsequently quadrupled and remained high for more
19:37 · than a decade afterwards the flood of money into Saudi Arabia suddenly became a deluge of money over the following
19:44 · decade and the kingdom became one of the wealthiest countries in the world and the house of sod became one of the
19:50 · wealthiest families in the world it was with this unbelievable money that Saudi Arabia made its great bargain with the
19:57 · people of the Kingdom the centuries-old alliance between the house Assad and the clan of wahab remained intact meaning
20:04 · that the Saudi state was governed by a set of extremely fundamentalist Sunni Muslim values that a lot of the state’s
20:10 · minority groups like The Shia and less fundamentalist sunnis didn’t exactly get along with very well which in a vacuum
20:17 · would have led to domestic instability but the enormous revenues that the state was earning from its Oil Business
20:23 · enabled the government to basically just bribe all of its citizens into complicity and so Saudi Arabia
20:29 · essentially became a massive welfare state for all of its citizens zero taxes
20:35 · were levied on anything or anyone because oil was paying for all of the government’s budget a flood of money
20:41 · went into subsidizing everything for Saudi Arabia citizens from Health Care education food water fuel electricity
20:47 · and whatever else you could possibly think of nearly all of the citizens needs were completely being covered by
20:53 · the government and in exchange it was expected that all of the citizens would accept some of the strictest and most
20:59 · totalitarian religious laws anywhere in the world and more importantly except
21:04 · the house of sod’s absolute legitimacy to rule a medieval Kingdom in a 20th
21:10 · century world as the 20th century continued progressing oil production in the United States diminished while
21:15 · production in Saudi Arabia only increased to the point where the kingdom even overtook America to become the
21:21 · world’s largest oil producer for decades America became increasingly committed to
21:26 · protecting the kingdom strategically important oil supply and by 1991 as production in the United States
21:31 · continued to flounder America found itself importing nearly a third of all
21:36 · of its imports from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia America needed to protect Saudi Arabia at all costs but justifying doing
21:44 · so in Washington was growing increasingly difficult because Saudi Arabia was growing even more
21:49 · totalitarian as more and more westerners came to the country for work in developing the numerous oil fields the
21:55 · country’s ultra-orthodox wahhabi establishment grew increasingly agitated at their growing Presence by 1979 it had
22:02 · just gotten to be too much for some and a group of hundreds of armed religious militants stormed the Grand Mosque in
22:08 · Mecca and seized control over it denouncing the Saudi king as a blasphemer for increasingly westernizing
22:15 · the country the Grand Mosque one of the holiest sites in all of Islam thus became the site of a military siege that
22:22 · lasted for weeks as Saudi Security Forces battled with the militants inside to regain control it marked the very
22:29 · first major direct challenge the house Assad’s legitimacy to rule over the kingdom since its establishment back in
22:35 · 1932 and the Saudi monarchy chose to respond to the challenge by further embracing the Sunni wahhabi religious
22:43 · leaders and increasing the severity of religious laws in the country all of the previous social reforms that were taking
22:49 · place in the country were reversed movie theaters were universally banned women were completely removed from all of the
22:55 · Media newspapers altogether women’s dress codes were much more strictly enforced in public homosexual activity
23:00 · was much more punished by the death penalty and the Saudi State’s ancient religious police increased their patrols
23:06 · on the streets to rigorously enforce course the newly strengthened religious laws for the next 40 odd years Saudi
23:13 · Arabia would be among the most Theocratic and totalitarian regimes anywhere on the planet as the ruling
23:19 · Saudi royal family used strict Islamic religious laws to strengthen their own legitimacy in the eyes of the ultra
23:25 · conservatives of the country but the trend towards religious fundamentalism at home would eventually go on to
23:31 · produce even more problems for the kingdom in the future and even jeopardize its relationship with its own
23:37 · greatest protector and security guarantor the United States it was no coincidence that Osama Bin Laden and
23:43 · Al-Qaeda were initially both produced within the ultra-religious environment of Saudi Arabia in 1990 when saddam’s
23:50 · Iraq appear likely to invade Saudi Arabia Bin Laden offered the Saudi king his own mujahideen fighters who were
23:56 · battle-hardened during the Afghan war against the Soviets to resist but the king refused and instead decided to
24:02 · allow the Americans to send hundreds of thousands of their troops to defend the kingdom Against The Invasion instead the
24:09 · presence of hundreds of thousands of Americans within the kingdom granted by the king who is supposed to be the
24:14 · protector of the two Islamic holy cities infuriated Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda and
24:20 · the outrage was never forgiven in 1995 Bin Laden declared that the king of Saudi Arabia was a heretic and a war
24:27 · between the kingdom and Al-Qaeda has raged on ever since with Al-Qaeda continually seeking ways to overthrow
24:33 · the monarchy and replace it with what it sees as its own vision of restored fundamentalist Sunni Theocratic rule the
24:40 · fact that Osama Bin Laden himself was born in Saudi Arabia and that many of Al qaeda’s Fighters as well turned out to
24:46 · be Saudi citizens including 15 out of the 19 hijackers responsible for carrying out the 9 11 attacks has
24:53 · remained a sore spot for relations between the kingdom and the United States ever since but in addition to the
24:59 · growing Sunni islamist threat within the kingdom represented by the likes of al-Qaeda who felt that the Saudi royal
25:04 · family wasn’t quite religious enough external threats to the Saudis rule in the Kingdom were greatly growing in
25:11 · numbers as well the emergence of the Revolutionary Shia islamist regime in neighboring Iran in 1979 presented the
25:18 · Saudi Kingdom with its most major external Arch Enemy that it has been locked in an on-again off-again cold war
25:24 · with ever since the Revolutionary regime in Iran had overthrown their own absolute monarch after all and replaced
25:31 · him with a totalitarian Islamic theocracy ruled by the country’s Shiite clergy and their supreme leader the
25:37 · Ayatollah Khamenei and they were intent on exporting their Revolution to every other monarchist regime in the Islamic
25:44 · world and overthrowing all of their kings as well including Saudi Arabia’s monarchy and the other Gulf Arab states
25:51 · but for a Time both revolutionary Iran and absolute monarchists Saudi Arabia
25:56 · found some common ground in their Mutual enemy in Iraq Saddam Hussein Saddam had led Iraq into a brutal invasion of Iran
26:03 · in 1980 and then in 1990 Saddam invaded an annexed Kuwait and Was preparing the Iran Army to invade Saudi Arabia next
26:10 · the United States and a massive Coalition involving Saudi Arabian troops intervened and kicked the Iraqi Army out
26:17 · of Kuwait and liberated the country in 1991. but Saddam still remained in power and remained as a Potential Threat to
26:23 · both the Saudis and the Iranians for the next decade relations between Tehran and Riyadh were therefore fairly cordial but
26:31 · that all suddenly ended in 2003 when the United States invaded Iraq in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks
26:37 · and overthrew Saddam and replaced him with a Democratic Republic a move the Saudi Arabia fiercely disagreed with
26:44 · Washington over and part of why they disagreed with it so strongly was because they knew there was Saddam now
26:50 · out of the way the Iranians would make moves into exporting their Revolution into Iraq next which is exactly what
26:57 · they began doing Iraq with the majority of its population being Shia Muslim Arabs and immediately adjacent to Iran
27:03 · was one of the most obvious first targets for the Iranians to export their Revolution into
27:08 · quickly after Saddam was removed by the Americans Iranian troops began entering into the country and building militia
27:14 · organizations out of the country’s large Shia Muslim population and indoctrinating them with Iran’s
27:19 · revolutionary anti-monarchist Zeal naturally to try and prevent Iraq from becoming essentially an
27:24 · iranian-controlled puppet the Saudis began funding and supplying Iraqi Sunni Muslim militias to counteract them and
27:31 · the first major proxy war between Tehran and Riyadh and begun then in 2011 the
27:36 · United States mostly withdrew all of their troops from Iraq and that very same year the Arab Spring revolutions
27:42 · began sweeping all across the Arab world as restless and angry Arab populations
27:47 · unsatisfied with their long-time regimes began taking to the streets for change popular revolutions eventually managed
27:54 · to topple the long-standing regimes in Tunisia Libya Egypt and Yemen while enormous Civil Wars exploded in Libya
28:00 · Yemen and Syria fearful about the wave of Revolution penetrating into their own long-standing kingdom and their own
28:07 · potentially Restless population Nation the Saudis began massively increasing their purchases of American-made weapons
28:13 · tanks Jets and ships to keep themselves in power in a series of deals worth tens of billions of dollars but the
28:20 · confrontation between revolutionary Iran and monarchist Saudi Arabia quickly came
28:25 · to a boiling point over the small island of Bahrain just off the Saudi Coast approximately 60 percent of the Island’s
28:33 · total population are Shia Muslims but the ruling monarchy there are Sunni Muslims revolutionary Shia Ron on the
28:39 · other side of the gulf further claims Bahrain as a lost Iranian Province based on their own historical territorial
28:46 · claims to the island and has repeatedly pressed the issue and insisted that the Shia majority on the island are being
28:51 · repressed by the minority Sunni monarchy back in 1986 Saudi Arabia and Bahrain
28:57 · finished the construction of the 25 kilometer King fod Causeway that connects the island to the Saudi
29:02 · Mainland it was ostensibly built to further facilitate trade and travel between the two countries but one cannot
29:09 · help to notice that it can also be used as a bridge for Saudi tanks and soldiers to come storming into the island across
29:15 · were the Island’s monarchy ever in Jeopardy of falling during a revolution where Iran to successfully foment a
29:22 · revolution in the island that would do that and install a revolutionary Shia government similar to their own in its
29:27 · place the very existence of the Saudi State itself would be directly put into question the island is only located
29:33 · about 60 kilometers away from Saudi Arabia’s largest single oil field gavar only about 50 kilometers away from the
29:39 · headquarters of Saudi aramco the state-owned oil company at only about 80 kilometers away from Ross to neura which
29:46 · is the saudi’s largest oil export terminal and indeed the largest one in the world moreover Bahrain is placed
29:52 · directly off the coast of the Shia Muslim majority areas of Eastern Saudi Arabia where nearly the entirety of
29:58 · Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves and infrastructure are also located meaning that worthy Iranians to successfully
30:04 · export their Revolution into Shia majority Bahrain and topple the Sunni Anarchy there the next Target would be
30:10 · the next door Shia majority areas of Eastern Saudi Arabia which could put the entire Saudi Oil Business into Jeopardy
30:17 · which could put the entire Saudi monarchy and stayed into Jeopardy and that could never be tolerated so when
30:22 · uprisings began to Bahrain aimed at toppling the monarchy in 2011. Saudi troops indeed came storming across the
30:29 · bridge to help put them down Saudi Arabia came to back the rebels seeking to overthrow Bashar al-assad’s regime in
30:35 · Syria because if it worked and he was removed it would be Iran who would lose a core component of their overall Grand
30:42 · strategy the Assad regime in Syria has been a core Ally of the Iranians for decades over their Mutual opposition to
30:48 · Israel and together with an iranian-dominated Iraq they form Iran’s so-called land bridge across the Middle
30:54 · East towards the Mediterranean Sea enabling Iranian militias and proxies to safely and reliably transport weapons to
31:01 · Iranian aligned organizations like Hezbollah and Lebanon and across the Mediterranean Sea to Hamas in the Gaza
31:07 · Strip who all share Iran’s desire to destroy the Israeli state from existence
31:12 · and also from Saudi Arabia’s perspective makes it appear that Iran is attempting to encircle them and overthrow their
31:19 · Kingdom thus to shatter Iran’s land bridge and break out of their potential encirclement the Saudis backed up Rebel
31:25 · forces in Syria while Iran backed up the regime the proxy war quickly extended into Libya as well as the Saudis back
31:31 · the tobrook-based House of Representatives government against the iranian-supported tripoli-based government of national Accord but the
31:38 · absolute Terror in the Royal Halls of Riyadh over being encircled by the Revolutionary Iranians came to a fever
31:44 · pitch in 2014 when the Shia adjacent houthi movement suddenly managed to conquer the yemeni capital and was
31:50 · advancing on the city of Aden next the most significant Port anywhere between the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea were the
31:58 · houthis to completely capture the entirety of Yemen it would have placed a highly militant and probably revolutionary Shiite Muslim power
32:05 · closely aligned with the Iranians across not only more than 30 500 kilometers of
32:10 · their southern border near to their own Shia Muslim subjects in the south of the country but also directly on the
32:16 · Strategic Maritime choke point of the Bob element Deb Strait as well were that to happen Saudi Arabia truly would be
32:23 · effectively encircled and checkmated surrounded by a hostile Iran who wants nothing more than to topple its monarchy
32:29 · and Iran’s allies placed into power in Iraq Syria and Lebanon and potentially in Bahrain and in Yemen as well Iran
32:36 · could hypothetically mine or blockade the Strait of Hormuz regulating all the maritime traffic between the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean while the
32:43 · houthis could simultaneously use aronians applied missiles and weapons to blockade the Bob Allman depth straight
32:48 · as well such a scenario would be an utter doomsday one for the Saudis because they would lose the easiest
32:54 · ability to export all of their oil to their largest customers in East Asia the only way remaining for them to continue
33:00 · exporting oil at all under that scenario would be via the Suez Canal through Egypt but even that too nearly came
33:07 · under risk After the revolution in Egypt toppled a longtime dictator of that country in 2011. the Muslim
33:13 · brotherhood’s candidate came to power in a democratic election next the Muslim Brotherhood is a Sunni islamist
33:19 · organization that like Iran is also staunchly opposed to the concept of monarchies and the Islamic world
33:25 · including the Saudi monarchy so obviously the Saudis despise them we’re a Brotherhood government in Egypt who
33:31 · hypothetically deny the Saudis access to the Suez Canal in conjunction with the houthis and Iranians shutting down their
33:38 · access through the babalm and Deb in Hormuz Straits and nobody like the Americans did anything to stop it Saudi
33:44 · Arabia which was completely collapsed very rapidly because they would lose any ability to actually export any of their
33:49 · oil out of the country and 87 percent of their government’s budget would just evaporate meaning their ability to bribe
33:56 · all of their divided and repressed citizenry would end and their ability to buy massive amounts of weapons would end
34:02 · and their monarchy would just collapse into dust and thus the Saudi sponsored
34:07 · and Military coup in engine shipped in 2013 the luckily for them panned out and overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood from
34:12 · power and replaced it with a much more friendly military government but coups and plots would not work to dislodge the
34:18 · houthis from power in Yemen instead the Saudis initiated a massive military intervention of their own into the
34:24 · country with enormous bombing and missile attacks and a devastating Naval blockade to choke the houthis into
34:30 · submission and remove what they perceived as Iran’s revolutionary influence from the country Yemen thus
34:35 · became the focal point for the Iranian Saudi rivalry from 2015 onwards and the
34:40 · Saudis agreed to buy up tens of billions of dollars more worth of additional American Weaponry to wage that war with
34:46 · weapons that would help contribute to what the United Nations has described as one of the 21st Century’s greatest humanitarian catastrophes the Saudi
34:54 · Arabian defense budget exponentially exploded to fight the war in Yemen and to fight all of these other proxy
35:00 · conflicts in Iraq and Syria and in Libya because the Saudi royal family saw external enemies circling all around
35:06 · them all being led had and coordinated by the Revolutionary Iranians and they decided to respond in the only way they
35:14 · knew how to do throw tens of billions of dollars at the problem they earned from selling their oil and hope it all went
35:20 · away Saudi defense spending grew so high in the mid to late 2010s that it became roughly On a par with Russia and was
35:27 · only outmatched by the superpowers of China and the United States in 2015
35:32 · Saudi Arabia was spending 2 748 dollars per person in the country on its
35:38 · military well the United States was only spending 1975 dollars per person on theirs but
35:45 · throwing money at trying to overpower their enemies wasn’t really working the Iranians only spent a few tens of
35:50 · millions of their dollars arming the houthis in comparison to the tens of billions that the Saudis were spending
35:56 · attempting to crush them and the war gradually transformed into a quagmire with the houthis no closer to being
36:02 · removed than When The War Began and after nearly 400 000 deaths in the country caused by the conflict Bashar
36:09 · al-assad has remained in power in Syria for over a decade despite the saudi’s best efforts to remove him while Iraq
36:15 · increasingly falls under Iran’s influence as well and then in September of 2019 a series of drone and cruise
36:21 · missile attacks bombarded Saudi Arabia’s oil refineries at AB cake and careers in the Eastern Province destroying the
36:28 · Kingdom’s largest oil processing and Refinery facilities 5.7 million barrels
36:34 · per day worth of Saudi oil production were knocked offline in the Kingdom by the attack representing what was nothing
36:40 · less than the biggest disruption ever seen in the entire oil industry up to that point the houthis down in Yemen
36:47 · quickly claim responsibility for the attack as a reprisal for the Saudi Air campaign but they were more than 1200
36:53 · kilometers away from the attack’s location American intelligence later determined that the attacks probably
36:59 · actually originated to the north and were probably fired by the Iranians themselves either from within Iran
37:05 · itself or from within their Shiite militia controlled areas in Iraq it could have been interpreted as an act of
37:11 · War by the kingdom but the United States made it clear that they didn’t see things that way and when not militarily
37:17 · backed the kingdom if that’s the route they chose to go down America wasn’t prepared to go to war with Iran over the
37:22 · issue and with their military already struggling in Yemen the Saudis were left with no other choice but to back down
37:28 · and de-escalate the oil processing facilities were quickly repaired and business went on as usual but the Saudis
37:35 · never forgot that America had just refused to defend them the days back
37:40 · when America was willing to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops to protect the kingdom and its oil back in 1991 during the Gulf War appeared in
37:47 · Riyadh to be over the development of shale oil in the United States in the early 2010s had resulted in a massive
37:53 · increase in America’s own oil production and by 2018 the year just before the ab cake attack America had finally
38:00 · surpassed Saudi Arabia and regained its title as the world’s largest producer America was relying less and less on
38:07 · Saudi oil for themselves elves and by 2019 only about seven percent of America’s oil imports were still even
38:13 · coming from the kingdom coming to how nearly a third of their oil imports were from Saudi Arabia back in 1991 during
38:20 · the Gulf War as Washington began relying Less on the Saudis themselves for their oil America’s distaste for Saudi
38:27 · Arabia’s totalitarian regime and human rights practices became more pronounced as well an absolute monarchy in the 21st
38:34 · century with extremely authoritarian religious laws waging a brutal war in Yemen with hundreds of thousands of
38:40 · deaths on his hand all fueled by American weapons no less and responsible for carrying out assassinations on
38:45 · journalists would not be a usual Ally of the United States were it not also for
38:51 · all of its oil and all of that oil was becoming less important to Washington moreover The World At Large is beginning
38:57 · to move more and more away from oil as an energy source as Nations around the world try and fight back against global
39:02 · climate change the countries of the European Union many of whom are currently in historically some of Saudi Arabia’s largest oil customers are
39:09 · planning on completely phasing out their own fossil fuel usage by 2050 and if they’re successful none of them will be
39:16 · customers of the Saudis any longer within only 27 years from now Japan also plans to eliminate oil and gases energy
39:22 · sources at some point in the future this same Century though without the same strict 2050 timetable as the Europeans
39:28 · one of the biggest reasons why the Americans still soared or support Saudi Arabia today even though they import hardly any of their oil themselves is
39:36 · because the Saudis Still Supply enormous amounts of oil to many of America’s closest allies like the NATO States in
39:42 · Europe and the Japanese but when this too ends America will have almost no reason left to continue protecting the
39:49 · kingdom and the deal established between FDR and ibnson nearly 80 years ago will finally come to an end and without a
39:55 · major protector and with less and less customers to continue selling their oil to Saudi Arabia will have less money to
40:01 · buy weapons to defend themselves with and less money to subsidize their Restless population with and there are
40:06 · many many enemies both within the kingdom and outside of it will be emboldened like they have never been
40:12 · before to finally take their chance at overthrowing the monarchy thus in order
40:17 · to avoid this dangerous spiral toward destruction over the coming decades Saudi Arabia needs to radically
40:22 · transform its entire society and economy if it is going to survive and this is why the current Crown Prince and soon to
40:29 · be king of the country Muhammad bin Salman or MBS announced with much fanfare the vision 2030 plan back in
40:37 · 2016 which aims to do exactly that sweeping reforms across the country have
40:42 · already taken place as a part of vision 2030 and more still to come women were finally granted the ability to drive in
40:49 · the country in 2018. while their dress codes in public were slightly relaxed with the aim of encouraging and enabling
40:55 · more women to enter into the Saudi Workforce a push towards encouraging both religious and non-religious tourism
41:00 · to the kingdom has been sent into overdrive with massive new building developments being put into motion around the holy city of Mecca in order
41:07 · to further encourage religious tourism and Grand Mega projects like a 500 billion dollar futuristic city of Neo
41:14 · the Jeddah Tower in the city of Jeddah plan to be the new tallest building in the world and the Red Sea Islands Mega
41:20 · project in the Red Sea all set to attract a new set of non-religious tourists to the kingdom Saudi Arabia
41:26 · even managed to secure its own Grand Prix on the Formula One calendar in 2021 and even announced a brand new airline
41:32 · in 2023 called Riyadh air which will include the purchase of 72 brand new Boeing 787 Dreamliners at a price of 37
41:40 · billion dollars all combined Saudi Arabia hopes to establish tourism from all around the world to the kingdom in
41:46 · order to add diversification in the economy away from oil while investing hundreds of billions to trillions of
41:52 · dollars at the same time into a brand new Sovereign wealth fund to invest in companies all around the world to add
41:58 · even more diversification and to diversify away from their own usage of oil as a fuel source the government
42:04 · plans to invest aggressively into solar energy which in the deserts of Arabia does have a lot of very high potential
42:10 · but Vision 2030 contains within it two critical problems for the kingdom first while this process is ongoing and tons
42:17 · of tourists from the Western world begin coming to the country while religious laws in the country are relaxed or destroyed altogether to continue
42:24 · encouraging them to come and visit it is certain to generate a high degree of instability among Saudi Arabia’s
42:30 · traditional Sunni wahhabi fundamentalists Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda previously went to war with the
42:36 · Saudi monarchy over their allowance of U.S troops into the country to protect the Kingdom so what do you think will
42:41 · happen if and when millions of Western tourists are being allowed to enter the country thus Saudi Arabia needs as
42:48 · little external conflicts as possible while it is focusing on dealing with this internal conflict for years Saudi
42:55 · Arabia thus wants to get out of its failed war in Yemen and in March of 2023 they even signed a historic agreement
43:02 · with Iran restoring relations with them and establishing a truce Riyadh couldn’t possibly be foolish enough to believe
43:08 · that the truce will last forever as the Revolutionary regime in Iran will always remain militantly committed to
43:14 · overthrowing their monarchy the Saudis know that the truce with Iran is a temporary one but Iran also wanted to
43:20 · take it so they could spend the next few years focusing their efforts on Israel and the United States while the Saudis
43:25 · wanted it to spend crucial time focusing inwards and implementing these vital reforms From riyadh’s perspective the
43:32 · hope is that they will finish reforming their society and emerge stronger before Iran decides to resume hostilities with
43:39 · them again but in order to further guarantee that Iran and his proxies will stay off of their back the Saudis also
43:45 · need to entice the United States to stick around as their protector for as long as possible they know that America
43:51 · is naturally losing interest in doing that but the Saudis still have levers that they can pull they have even
43:57 · suggested that they might be willing to recognize Israel and normalize relations with the Jewish state in exchange for an
44:04 · ironclad U.S security guarantee of the kingdom and the elevation of Saudi Arabia to the status of a major non-nato
44:10 · Ally as well as gaining access to a civilian nuclear energy program which could in a pinch enable them to develop
44:18 · a nuclear weapon on their own if the Iranians suddenly develop one first Washington seems unprepared to accept
44:24 · those demands for now over fears of being bound by treaty to go to war with Iran if the kingdom comes under attack
44:30 · again and over fears of nuclear proliferation spreading across the Middle East but the Saudis could
44:35 · potentially always Sweden the deal ahead of the November 2024 election by also agreeing to turn more of their spare
44:41 · capacity Wells back online and flooding the oil Market with their fresh Supply decreasing Global oil prices and
44:47 · inflationary pressures In America which is part of the reason why they’ve been cutting production for months they want
44:54 · that firm security guarantee Bound in treaty from the United States and recognizing Israel will lead to even
45:00 · more tensions with the Sunni wahhabi fundamentalists within the country and with revolutionary Iran outside of the
45:07 · country who is on uncompromising on their aim of destroying Israel and overthrowing the Saudi monarchy and the
45:13 · second problem related to Vision 2030 is that while it is generating all of this religious instability within the kingdom
45:18 · it is also going to cost an absolute Fortune current estimates believe that
45:23 · the Saudis are going to end up spending more than 3 trillion dollars on this plan to reform and diversify the kingdom
45:30 · and in order to fund that enormous amount of money Saudi Arabia is gradually selling small amounts of
45:35 · shares in the state-owned Saudi aramco oil company to foreign investors while the Saudi simultaneously need higher
45:42 · Global oil prices for several more years to come in order to add even more money into the state’s coffers before it’s all
45:48 · too late which is the other reason why they’ve been coordinating with the Russians to decrease production together
45:54 · in order to keep oil prices elevated for longer it’s not that Saudi Arabia and Russia are really aligned in any real
46:00 · sense it’s just that their interests in having higher worldwide oil prices are currently aligned so then Moscow has
46:07 · more money to fight their war in Ukraine and Riyadh has more money to fund their crucially important reforms but doing so
46:14 · is also upsetting the United States to a pretty large degree who obviously prefers lower Global oil prices both to
46:20 · deprive the Russians of more money and to lower gasoline prices and inflation back at home the Saudis are currently
46:26 · playing a very very delicate balancing game as they must simultaneously weigh their own self-interest and need to
46:32 · reform or die which will cost a lot of money and require high oil prices the
46:37 · relationship with the United States as their biggest security guarantor and provider of arms who prefers lower oil
46:43 · prices their relationship with Russia is the second largest oil exporter in the world who can most help them manipulate
46:49 · oil prices to be higher but who is stuck in a proxy war with the United States and Ukraine and their relationship with
46:56 · China who is the Saudi single largest oil customer but who is also locked in a sort of cold war with the United States
47:02 · in the Pacific over Taiwan it is a balancing act between all of these various interests that the Saudi Royal
47:07 · family led by MBS must carefully tread between for decades and if they ever stumble along the way during any part of
47:14 · it they will all immediately die and lose everything and at the same time this careful Balancing Act must all be
47:21 · maintained as Iran carefully eyes them with their gains in Iraq Syria Lebanon and Yemen and as the 15 000 other
47:28 · members of mbs’s own royal family jockey and position themselves at court and Riyadh for their own positions of power
47:35 · and as the religious fundamentalists within Saudi Arabia increasingly feel that the house of sod at large is at
47:42 · last fully betraying them after the 300 year old alliance between them and the
47:47 · wahhabists is ended internal strife within the kingdom is a certainty and the Saudi regime is already responding
47:53 · to it by cracking down on emerging islamist opposition within the kingdom whenever it can and outside the kingdom
47:59 · whenever it can it’s all a part of the very complex relationship between the Saudi Kingdom and radical sunismist
48:05 · organizations with roots in the Kingdom like how and even Isis for decades Al Qaeda sought to overthrow the Saudi
48:12 · monarchy and its strategy to do so has been to sow as much chaos in the Kingdom as possible by attacking foreigners and
48:18 · discouraging any tourism to the country and attacking skilled workers in the oil and gas industry and discouraging them
48:24 · from coming thus eventually leading to the Kingdom’s Collapse by the erosion of both its oil and its tourism Industries
48:30 · the Saudi state has thus fought back against al Qaeda ever since the 1990s but a new and perhaps even more menacing
48:37 · internal and external threat suddenly appeared on the scene in 2014 when Isis exploded across the territory of Iraq
48:43 · and Syria in a lightning series of conquests Isis too just like Al Qaeda before it vowed that it would one day
48:51 · overthrow the Saudi Arabian monarchy after it completed its conquest of Iraq and Syria first and the Saudi monarchy
48:57 · wasn’t put any more at ease after it turned out that thousands of Isis Fighters had in fact come from within
49:04 · the kingdom and were Saudi citizens thus in order to destroy the threat Saudi
49:09 · Arabia sent Military Officers to Syria to help train and equip resistance Fighters fighting against Isis and join
49:14 · the american-led military coalition to destroy Isis altogether by the end of 2014 a coalition that would eventually
49:21 · Encompass dozens of countries from all around the world in the largest military Alliance seen in history since the
49:27 · alliance to destroy Nazi Germany 70 years beforehand but unfortunately due to the inherently
49:33 · violent controversial and recent nature of discussing how an organization is Infamous as Isis was destroyed by a
49:40 · global Military Coalition over the course of years the next part of this video would almost certainly cause the
49:45 · rest of the video to become demonetized and age-restricted which ultimately would mean the YouTube’s algorithm would have never promoted any of this video to
49:52 · you and you probably never would have seen any of it but thankfully I was still able to produce the next part of this video anyway because of the power
49:58 · of nebula where you can go and watch the next 40 minute part covering exactly how Isis Was Defeated across Iraq in Syria
50:04 · by a global Coalition of Nations and organizations between 2014 and 2020 and this is also just one of more than two
50:10 · dozen exclusive full-length real-life lore videos that you can only find on nebula in My overall modern conflict
50:16 · series there that can all only be found over there because of all of their darker more controversial subject material there were other episodes you
50:22 · can go and watch right now covering how Saudi Arabia’s massive military intervention into Yemen has been going episodes detailing the entire courses of
50:29 · the modern civil wars in both Syria and Libya episodes keeping up to date with the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine
50:35 · deeper dives into the United States Iran conflict and the wars fought by Saddam Hussein and dozens of others with brand
50:41 · new episodes releasing over there every single month and with even more you also get access to all of the other amazing
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51:55 · help support what I’m doing here on real life lore and as always thank you so much for watching”

Damn, I was going to say the same.

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