{"id":13508,"date":"2015-10-18T16:56:02","date_gmt":"2015-10-18T21:56:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13508"},"modified":"2015-10-18T16:56:02","modified_gmt":"2015-10-18T21:56:02","slug":"saudis-poke-the-russian-bear-start-oil-war-in-eastern-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13508","title":{"rendered":"Saudis Poke The Russian Bear, Start Oil War In Eastern Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/news\/2015-10-18\/saudis-poke-russian-bear-start-oil-war-eastern-europe\" target=\"_blank\">Saudis Poke The Russian Bear, Start Oil War In Eastern Europe<\/a><\/h3>\n<blockquote><p><em>Any weakening of Russian support for Mr. Assad could be one of the first signs that the recent tumult in the oil market is having an impact on global statecraft. Saudi officials have said publicly that the price of oil reflects only global supply and demand, and they have insisted that Saudi Arabia will not let geopolitics drive its economic agenda.\u00a0<strong>But they believe that there could be ancillary diplomatic benefits to the country\u2019s current strategy of allowing oil prices to stay low \u2014 including a chance to negotiate an exit for Mr. Assad.<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That\u2019s a quote from a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/02\/04\/world\/middleeast\/saudi-arabia-is-said-to-use-oil-to-lure-russia-away-from-syrias-assad.html?_r=0\">New York Times article<\/a>\u00a0that ran in February of this year.<\/p>\n<p>At the time,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/news\/2015-02-03\/another-conspiracy-theory-becomes-fact-entire-oil-collapse-all-about-crushing-russia\">we pointed<\/a>\u00a0to the piece as evidence that yet another conspiracy \u201ctheory\u201d has become conspiracy \u201cfact\u201d as it effectively served to validate (to the extent The New York Times is validation) the thesis that at the end of the day, this is all about energy.<\/p>\n<p>If the Saudis could use oil prices to force Moscow into ceding support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria, then the West and its regional allies could get on with facilitating his ouster by way of arming and training rebels. Once Assad was gone, a puppet government could be installed (after some farce of an election that would invariably pit two Western-backed candidates against each other)\u00a0<strong>then Riyadh, Doha, and Ankara could work with the new government in Damascus to craft energy deals that would not only be extremely lucrative for all involved, but would also help to break Gazprom\u2019s iron grip on energy supplies to Europe.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Those are the \u201cancillary diplomatic benefits\u201d mentioned in The Times piece.<\/p>\n<p>Only it didn\u2019t work out that way.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Saudis Poke The Russian Bear, Start Oil War In Eastern Europe Any weakening of Russian support for Mr. Assad could be one of the first signs that the recent tumult in the oil market is having an impact on global statecraft. Saudi officials have said publicly that the price of oil reflects only global supply [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,5],"tags":[1957,1928,7418,130,4333,184,1601,4390,359,441,1985,505,522,534,1479,1921,600,1046,683,701,857,4318],"class_list":["post-13508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","category-geopolitics","tag-belgium","tag-budget-deficit","tag-capital-markets","tag-china","tag-crude","tag-crude-oil","tag-eastern-europe","tag-exxon","tag-germany","tag-iran","tag-kazakhstan","tag-market-share","tag-middle-east","tag-monetary-policy","tag-netherlands","tag-new-york-times","tag-opec","tag-poland","tag-reuters","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-zerohedge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13508"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13509,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13508\/revisions\/13509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}