Financial safety

Russia Is Losing the Oil War—and the Middle East

For the past few years, the foreign-policy community has collectively come to believe that a new era in international politics is emerging. The defining features of this post-post-Cold War order are great-power competition and the realignment of America’s relationships around the world. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Middle East, where U.S. allies are developing diplomatic, commercial, and military relationships with the very powers with which Washington is supposed to be competing—China and Russia—and precisely at a time when so many U.S. experts, analysts, officials, and politicians are expressing a desire to retrench from the Middle East. That has led many of the same folks to conclude that the new regional order will be forged in either Beijing or Moscow.

There are plenty of reasons to doubt that—some of which have become clearer in recent weeks. Most acute is the ongoing oil price war between Moscow and Riyadh, which has demonstrated how Russia has overplayed its hand in the region.