Fifty years ago, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia dared confront the then-most powerful man on earth, US President Richard Nixon. The king wielded an unexpected but fearsome weapon: oil embargoes.
King Faisal, angry at Nixon’s massive rescue of Israel during the Yom Kippur War, overnight cut all deliveries of oil to the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, and several other European countries, plunging the West into an unprecedented panic.
The vengeful king also ordered a massive increase in the price of oil, which jumped from about $3 a barrel in early October 1973 to about $12 a barrel in April 1974. Within months, the US, Japan, and Europe were suffering from runaway inflation and a series of deep recessions.
By 1979, prompted by the revolution in Iran, the oil price had tripled again, to about $36 a barrel. US inflation followed, and the fed funds rate moved over 20% in 1980, crushing the Jimmy Carter administration and ushering in the Ronald Reagan era.
Revenues of oil producers, particularly those in the Middle East, skyrocketed, creating unprecedented financial power for Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, and the UAE. The most influential man in the world briefly became Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, then oil minister of Saudi Arabia, who had inspired the creation of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) and negotiated the takeover, by the Kingdom, of Aramco, the old Arabian American Oil Company.
For decades after the 1973 “oil shock,” the price of oil and the production quotas decided by OPEC and OAPEC conditioned the foreign policies of the West vs. the Arab world, thus vs Israel. It was openly admitted that applying pressure on Israel to compromise with its Arab foes was the required path to appease Arab oil producers.
Two views dominated the oil-producing cartel: that oil should be viewed in the economic context of supply and demand, and that oil should be viewed and used essentially as a political pressure tool. Sheikh Yamani was on the side of moderation, warning his colleagues that raising oil too high, too fast would prompt a market reaction. Oil, however, was being used by Middle East powers as a weapon, but as such it turned out to have unpredictable impacts. During the Iraq-Iran war, Saudi Arabia kept lowering the price of oil to deprive Iran of money, a strategy which indeed hurt Iran but equally weakened all the oil producers and profoundly divided OPEC.
Sheikh Yamani was essentially correct. The high price of oil made exploration and invention worthwhile. The West found numerous new oil fields (North Sea, West Africa, Russia, and more recently North American shale oil), developed massive new energies (nuclear, LPG, and more recently renewables), and started conserving energy. The US today is self-sufficient, and Israel has become a gas exporter. Oil may still sustain the finances of large oil producers, but it does not rule Middle East politics any longer.
An alternative to oil
If not the oil, what then gave Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, one of King Faisal’s grandsons, the power to ignore and confront US President Joe Biden in 2023?
Cyber power.
Cyber power is this writer’s shortcut for the revolutions of the last 20 years: the Internet, mobile phones, smartphones, social media, artificial intelligence (AI), and the global propaganda techniques derived from this new toolbox. The battlefield has moved from Western chanceries to billions of little screens, and world public opinion gets manipulated by the Arab world, quite cheaply, through deafening propaganda and targeted character assassination.
This is not to say that the Middle East is now devoid of oil plots and old-world battling. At no time since the Yom Kippur War has terrorism abated, nor has guerrilla warfare, intelligence work, lawfare, or cyber attacks on civilian infrastructures.
The world public opinion, however, pays little attention to the feuds between Iran and Sunni powers, to the civil war in Syria, to the division of Libya, to Turkey’s ambitions in Iraq, to the Kurdish drama. The Arab world has successfully managed to protect these gruesome Muslim-to-Muslim conflicts from international interference, while constantly keeping Israel in the international penalty box.
The convicted murderer and politician, Marwan Barghouti, once announced in a Financial Times editorial the launch of the “Boycott, Divest, Sanction” movement against Israel. He specified that the movement would first target the BBC and the Financial Times, because they dominated English language media, and had the farthest reach into opinion leaders across the world. Since then, anti-Israel crusades have left the realm of the print and been amplified billions of times by social media and the internet in general. Hammering works.
Israel discovered a fantastic antidote against this electronic poison: the concept of the Start-up Nation. The Start-up Nation is the 21st-century equivalent of the kibbutz dream: a brilliant shortcut for success, scientific progress, peace, and universal contribution. Young Westerners identify with its message of hope and sharing, and so do youths in emerging countries.
The Start-up Nation opened the way for the Abraham Accords, for the opening of diplomatic relations in Africa, and for the investment flows from India, China, Japan, and Korea. The Start-up Nation reversed decades of negative tropes on Israel.
Yet, news from Israel today seems to revolve exclusively around a potential constitutional crisis perpetrated by the incendiary policies of a handful of far-right ministers. Will the damage to Israel’s standing among nations be so deep and so lengthy as to wipe out the goodwill created by the start-up nation concept?
Israel used to win skeptics’ hearts by bringing opinion leaders to Israel, showing them its geopolitical realities, and letting them judge by themselves. Four billion people today are less than 30 years old; they are tomorrow’s leaders. What can they know of Israel’s history, of the Jewish people’s struggles? What will shape their view of whether Israel may survive? The Internet.
Isn’t it time for Israel to go back to inventing, creating, and getting Nobel prizes? The power is in the Web. Harness it.
The writer is a publishing contributor at The MirYam Institute. He began his career in service of the French Treasury and is a recipient of the French Legion of Honor for his services to philanthropy and international finance.