The Making of the Modern Middle East

0:02 Throughout all of our lifetimes,

0:03 the Middle East is a region that has been nearly synonymous with warfare,

0:06 instability, and conflict.

0:08 You have heard nearly every single year of your life

0:10 about some kind of conflict going on in this place,

0:13 regardless of when you were born,

0:14 because conflicts have been raging here without a pause

0:17 for nearly the entirety of the past century.

0:19 Just since the turn of the 21st century alone,

0:22 there have been major wars fought across the territories of Iraq,

0:24 Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine,

0:26 and Yemen that have variously attracted the military involvements of Iran,

0:29 Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey,

0:32 and powers from even beyond the Middle East,

0:34 like the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Russia.

0:37 These 21st century conflicts in the Middle East

0:39 alone have claimed the lives of millions of people,

0:42 and forced millions more into exile and refugee status,

0:45 while costing trillions of dollars,

0:47 making the Middle East arguably the most geopolitically

0:49 turbulent region anywhere in the 21st century world.

0:53 But why is this part of the world the way that it is?

0:56 Why do you always hear about wars and conflicts taking place here?

0:59 And why will you probably continue hearing about wars

1:02 and conflicts taking place here for the rest of your life?

1:05 The answers [snorts] to those questions are complex,

1:07 because the modern Middle East is the most

1:09 geopolitically complicated chessboard in the world to really understand.

1:13 With dozens of different actors and competing interests all variously working

1:16 against each other at sometimes and then working together at others.

1:20 But in order to understand the root

1:21 cause of the modern Middle East's many problems,

1:24 you only have to rewind the clock a little more than a hundred years

1:26 ago to learn how the Middle East borders we know today came into being,

1:30 and why they have guaranteed more than a centuries worth

1:34 of forever wars and misery for the entire world ever since.

1:37 For many centuries, the Turkish

1:39 Ottoman Empire dominated practically the entirety

1:41 of the Middle East and enforced its own rule of law across the land.

1:45 Dozens of ethnicities, languages,

1:47 and religions all composed the extremely diverse peoples of the empire

1:50 that at one point spanned from Hungary to Yemen.

1:53 The Ottoman Empire had regions within it, but it had no tolerance for nations,

1:57 and nationalism within the empire of any kind was always ruthlessly

2:01 repressed and crushed in the name of greater imperial stability and peace.

2:05 But the Ottoman Empire eventually entered into a long period of gradual decline,

2:09 and by the 19th century,

2:10 the rising British Empire was growing increasingly interested in the Middle

2:14 East that the Ottomans had so thoroughly dominated for so long.

2:17 The Middle East, you see, geographically stood in the way between the British

2:21 Home Islands and the Crown's most important colony, India.

2:24 In order to better safeguard British ships

2:25 traveling between India and the Home Islands,

2:27 the British began gradually acquiring protectorates across the Middle East,

2:31 beginning with the modern United Arab Emirates in 1820,

2:33 and then gradually expanding from there to include Southern Yemen,

2:36 Bahrain, and eventually Egypt itself in 1888.

2:39 Nearly 20 years after the Suez Canal had first been completed,

2:42 which granted the British the quickest possible journey time between the Home

2:45 Islands and India by way across the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.

2:49 The Suez Canal, owned by British

2:50 and French shareholders despite running through Egypt,

2:53 was therefore one of Britain's most geopolitically valuable assets,

2:56 and they intended to ensure their continuous access to it

2:59 by forcing Egypt into the status of a protectorate.

3:02 The British further established protectorates over

3:04 Oman and Kuwait, and then in 1914, alarmed by the increasing British meddling

3:09 in the Middle East and their internal affairs,

3:11 the Ottoman Empire took the decision to join

3:13 the First World War on the side of Imperial Germany.

3:16 It was shortly after that, when the British and the French decided

3:18 that the Ottoman Empire would have to be completely destroyed by them.

3:22 But it was initially unclear what exactly would take

3:24 the place of the centuries-old rule of the Ottomans.

3:28 In 1916, British and French diplomats named Mark [music] Sykes

3:31 and François Georges Picot negotiated

3:33 a secret treaty regarding how their respective

3:35 governments would divide and partition the lands of the Ottoman Empire

3:38 between themselves after the war's

3:40 conclusion and the ancient empire's destruction.

3:43 The agreement became simply known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement,

3:46 and basically went as follows.

3:48 This zone would fall under direct colonial British rule.

3:51 This zone would in time become

3:52 an independent Arab state under British influence.

3:55 This zone would fall under direct colonial French rule.

3:58 This zone would in time become another independent Arab state,

4:00 but under French influence.

4:02 This zone would be given to the Russian Empire,

4:04 while the region of Palestine and Jerusalem,

4:06 with its immense religious significance, would be placed under some kind

4:10 of as of yet unspecified international administration.

4:13 These initial political lines that the British and French

4:15 diplomats drew across the Middle East for the future

4:18 of the region in 1916 paid little attention to the complex

4:22 real borders of the Middle East's various religious beliefs,

4:24 languages, and ethnicities.

4:26 But the lines were also not just arbitrarily drawn, either.

4:30 While not based on ethnicity, language, or religion,

4:32 or really even geography in many cases,

4:35 the lines were instead based upon the older

4:37 Ottoman internal divisions that they had created,

4:40 which also had little to no regard

4:42 for ethnic or religious boundaries in their vast ethnically,

4:45 linguistically, and religiously diverse empire,

4:48 where nationalism and separatism was never tolerated.

4:51 The British zone initially encompassed the Ottomans' provinces of Baghdad

4:54 and Basra and parts of Deir ez-Zor and Damascus,

4:57 while the French zone initially encompassed the Ottomans' provinces of Mosul,

5:00 Deir ez-Zor, Aleppo, Adana, Beirut, and Lebanon,

5:03 while the international Palestine area was

5:05 based on the province of Jerusalem itself,

5:07 that reported directly to the Ottoman capital.

5:09 This was the map that Sykes and Picot

5:11 drafted their own new lines atop of in 1916, rather than any detailed ethnic,

5:17 linguistic, or religious map of the region,

5:19 resulting in massive consequences that have

5:22 reverberated down the decades ever since.

5:24 The initial terms of the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement were then

5:28 even further complicated by several

5:29 other British wartime promises, and assumptions.

5:33 In order to encourage an Arab revolt against their Turkish overlords,

5:36 many British officials guaranteed that they would favor the creation of a large,

5:40 unified Arab state [music] across the Arab lands following the end of the war.

5:45 At nearly the same time though,

5:46 in 1917, Britain also proclaimed the Balfour Declaration,

5:50 which promised that the British government would favor the creation

5:53 of a national home for the Jewish people in the land of Palestine.

5:56 And then finally, there was the question of oil.

5:59 Oil had been first discovered in the Middle

6:01 East in a remote part of Iran in 1908, that the British subsequently dominated

6:05 through their state-owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company,

6:08 which would later evolve into the British Petroleum,

6:10 or BP company that we know of today.

6:13 But Iran's oil at the time wasn't considered enough.

6:16 World War I was proving to everyone involved how critical oil was

6:19 becoming as a strategic resource to fuel the new machines of war,

6:23 from battleships to airplanes, and the United States was at that time

6:26 by far the world's largest producer and supplier of oil.

6:30 America therefore provided the British Empire with most of their oil needs.

6:34 But America's president of the time was also Woodrow Wilson,

6:37 a man who was staunchly opposed to the concept of empires in the post-war world,

6:42 including Britain's.

6:43 So, believing America to be a potentially unreliable

6:46 provider of oil to their empire in the future,

6:48 the British government was at the time highly incentivized to acquire influence

6:52 and control over as much of the Middle East nearby to Iran as possible,

6:57 where they believed that potential future massive oil

7:00 deposits would be later discovered and owned by them,

7:03 providing Britain with the critical oil it would need

7:05 to fight through whatever conflict would come to them next.

7:09 After World War I concluded,

7:10 the victorious allies met at Versailles in 1919 to set the terms of the peace,

7:15 and the borders of the Middle East were shifted once again.

7:18 The Ottoman province of Mosul was transferred from the French

7:20 zone of influence over to the British zone of influence,

7:23 and as the Ottoman Empire was actively collapsing,

7:25 the allies pressed the infamous terms of the Treaty

7:27 of Sèvres upon the dying empire in 1920.

7:31 The terms of which made even the Treaty

7:32 of Versailles that was pressed upon Germany seem fairly generous.

7:36 The terms of the previous Sykes-Picot Agreement

7:38 between Britain and France would remain intact.

7:41 With the Russian Empire now gone, a huge independent state of Armenia was

7:45 to be carved out of northeastern Anatolia.

7:47 Another independent state for the Kurdish people was

7:49 to be further carved out of southeastern Anatolia.

7:52 Italy was to seize control over several of the empire's Aegean islands.

7:55 Greece was to annex much of eastern Thrace and a chunk

7:58 around the city of İzmir on the Anatolian mainland,

8:00 while the area around the strategically important Turkish straits was

8:03 to fall under an international

8:05 regime outside of Turkey's remaining jurisdiction.

8:08 The Turkish state that was to be left over was

8:10 doomed to become nothing more than an insignificant rump state.

8:13 And thus, outraged by the treaty's terms,

8:16 the emerging Turkish government almost immediately rebelled and continued

8:20 fighting against the allies for the next two years.

8:23 After the Turkish forces made significant military gains on the battlefield,

8:26 they forced to return back to the negotiating table again,

8:30 and concluded with the terms of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne,

8:33 which replaced the terms of the previous Treaty

8:35 of Sèvres and were far more favorable to Turkey.

8:38 Finally, the borders of the modern Middle East as we

8:41 roughly know them as today were set in ink.

8:43 But the terms of Lausanne in 1923

8:46 still left many questions and problems unresolved.

8:49 There would be no independent state created for the Kurdish people after all,

8:52 for example, a problem that has vexed the region for the century ever since.

8:56 Today, the Kurds are one of the largest stateless people in the world,

8:59 numbering some 40 million strong with their own separate ethnic,

9:03 cultural, and linguistic identity,

9:05 but divided between the borders of what became Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran,

9:09 where in all four countries they are minority groups

9:12 and have often been subject to persecution and discrimination.

9:15 Kurdish nationalism and separatism,

9:17 and the desire to create an independent Kurdish state out of these areas,

9:20 has been a constant flashpoint of conflict in this region ever since.

9:24 The British also smooshed together

9:26 the former Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad,

9:29 and Basra into their mandate for Mesopotamia,

9:32 which would later evolve into the state of Iraq.

9:34 But the problem with that was that all three

9:36 of those Ottoman provinces contained very

9:39 different people with very different interests, identities, and beliefs.

9:43 The people of Mosul were mostly ethnically Kurdish.

9:46 The people of the Baghdad province were primarily Sunni Muslim Arabs,

9:49 while the people of the Basra province were mostly Shia Muslim Arabs.

9:53 Even further, what became Kuwait had also been

9:56 a formal part of the Basra province under

9:58 the Ottoman administration until the British showed up

10:01 and transformed it into a protectorate of theirs.

10:04 After World War I, the British legally separated

10:07 Kuwait from the Basra province and from Iraq,

10:10 and they kept Kuwait as their own protectorate until the 1960s,

10:14 which in the end would give the Iraqi state a decent historical claim

10:18 to Kuwait that would eventually be acted

10:19 upon by Saddam Hussein's invasion in 1990.

10:23 Iraq became independent from the British mandate in 1932 and emerged

10:26 as a deeply internally fragmented state with a historical claim on Kuwait.

10:32 And it was also almost completely landlocked with only a tiny sliver

10:36 of a coastline on the Persian Gulf wedged in between Kuwait and Iran.

10:40 And it further controlled neither of the headwaters for the two

10:43 great rivers that it would rely so heavily upon for its civilization,

10:47 the Tigris and Euphrates,

10:49 both of which begin further to the north within Turkey.

10:52 The French mandates weren't created much better either.

10:54 The Lebanon province of the Ottoman Empire

10:56 was deliberately separated as an independent state

10:58 by the French based on that province's

11:00 slight religious majority of Christians at the time.

11:03 But it had very significant minorities of Sunni

11:05 and Shia Arabs and Druze Arabs as well.

11:08 Meanwhile, the polyglot Ottoman provinces of Aleppo, Beirut, Damascus,

11:12 and Deir ez-Zor were all smooshed together to form what became Syria,

11:16 putting large numbers of Sunni Kurds, Sunni Arabs, Alawite Shia Arabs,

11:20 and Christian Assyrians and Arabs all into the same country.

11:24 And then in the 1930s,

11:26 the Turkish government began pressuring the French to cede over

11:29 the Syrian province of Alexandretta owing

11:32 to that province's large Turkish community,

11:34 fearing that if they did not yield to the Turkish

11:36 demands that Turkey may join in an alliance with Nazi Germany.

11:40 The French relented and pushed out Alexandretta from the Syrian

11:43 mandate as the independent state of Hatay in 1938.

11:47 Then the following year in 1939,

11:49 the independent Hatay state held a highly controversial

11:52 referendum on annexation into Turkey that was passed,

11:56 resulting in it entering Turkey as the Hatay province.

11:59 And ever since then,

12:00 the government of what would later become Syria has continually

12:03 claimed the Hatay province as rightfully

12:05 Syrian territory under Turkish occupation.

12:08 And even further, the headwaters for the Euphrates River

12:11 that runs all across Syria begins up in Turkey as well,

12:15 meaning that Turkish-built dams on the Euphrates and the Tigris

12:19 present direct challenges to both Syria's and Iraq's supplies of water,

12:23 leading to further sources of potential conflict between Iraq

12:26 and Syria on one side and Turkey on the other.

12:29 Lebanon became independent from the French mandate in 1943 and Syria in 1946.

12:35 And Syria immediately emerged with territorial disputes with Turkey

12:38 over Hatay and territorial claims to the whole

12:41 of Lebanon based on the French decision

12:43 to artificially separate it based on religious demographics,

12:47 while being itself a deeply internally fragmented state along

12:50 sectarian and ethnic lines just like Iraq and also Lebanon.

12:55 Then all of these political divisions created

12:57 by the Allies' mapmaking between 1916 and 1923 were even

13:01 further exacerbated by the future discoveries of oil

13:04 and gas across all of these brand new countries.

13:07 Oil was only first discovered in Iraq in 1927,

13:11 years after the borders had already been drawn and settled,

13:14 marking the first major discovery of oil in the Arab world.

13:17 Future initial discoveries of oil were made in Kuwait

13:19 and Saudi Arabia a decade later in 1938.

13:22 And then much later in Syria and the United

13:25 Arab Emirates in 1956 and 1958 respectively.

13:28 But the locations of where the oil

13:31 and gas reserves were to be discovered across all

13:33 of these new countries in nearly every single case

13:36 would ensure generations of nearly continuous conflict over them.

13:40 Within Iraq, oil was discovered across

13:42 the former Ottoman provinces of Basra and Mosul,

13:44 home to the Shia Arab and Sunni Kurdish communities,

13:47 but hardly any oil at all would be discovered in the central

13:50 Baghdad province that was primarily home to the Sunni Arabs.

13:54 Even further, an overwhelming 90% of all of Iran's oil

13:58 reserves would simply be discovered within the Iranian province of Khuzestan,

14:02 which encompasses an exposed flat plain on the western side of the Zagros

14:06 Mountains that otherwise largely forms the rest of Iran's westernmost borders.

14:10 [music] And even further,

14:11 Khuzestan was primarily inhabited by Shia Arabs rather than the Shia

14:16 Persians who made up the majority of the rest of the country.

14:19 Kuwait, though small in size, also had enormous oil reserves nearly equal

14:24 to the entirety of Iraq's oil reserves.

14:26 And of course, Iraq contained the historical claim to Kuwait,

14:30 a card that could be theoretically deployed at any

14:32 time to double the Iraqi state's oil resources.

14:35 In Saudi Arabia, home to the largest share of the Persian Gulf's oil,

14:39 the oil would be almost entirely discovered in just

14:41 a small area of the eastern side of the country

14:44 near to the waters of the Gulf itself within

14:46 lands that were home to Saudi Arabia's Shia Muslim minority,

14:50 while hardly any at all would be discovered in the Sunni majority areas.

14:54 And then in Syria, the oil was found

14:55 almost entirely in the east and the northeast

14:58 of the country in the lands of the Sunni Kurds and the Sunni Arabs,

15:02 while hardly any at all was discovered

15:04 in the Alawite Shia Arab lands of the west.

15:07 All in all, the oil found across the Middle

15:09 East scattered across the complicated mosaic of competing ethnic, religious,

15:14 and political identities would prove to make up nearly

15:16 half of the entire world's known supply of oil,

15:20 meaning that outside powers like the British,

15:21 the Soviets, and eventually the Americans

15:24 were all going to be permanently interested

15:27 in influencing the region's events atop all of the dozens of local ethnic,

15:32 religious, and political interests and actors

15:34 seeking to influence events as well.

15:36 And then the British did something else in the Middle East as well.

15:40 They created a Jewish state out of their other mandate

15:43 on the other side of the Middle East in Palestine.

15:46 In the wake of the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany in Europe,

15:49 hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees had been fleeing

15:53 for their lives to the British mandate for Palestine,

15:56 encouraged by the British government's own promises for a Jewish

15:59 homeland made in the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

16:02 And in the process, changing the mandate's demographics,

16:05 which had previously been almost entirely populated by Arabs.

16:09 As Britain prepared to release the mandate for Palestine

16:11 as an independent state following the end of World War II,

16:14 the newly created United Nations released a plan for the partition

16:17 of mandatory Palestine in 1947 between a newly created

16:21 Jewish state and a Palestinian Arab state and an international

16:25 administration placed in control over the holy city of Jerusalem.

16:28 The plan was accepted by most of the Jewish groups,

16:31 but nearly universally rejected by most of the Arab groups on the basis

16:35 that the proposal was too unfair and tilted too much towards the Jewish side.

16:40 Despite the Palestinian Arab population at the time in mandatory Palestine

16:44 being more than twice as many as the Jewish population was,

16:47 the 1947 UN partition plan called for giving

16:51 the Jewish state 62% of the mandate's land,

16:55 while only 38% of the land would be allocated to the Arab state.

16:59 Fighting between the Arabs and the Jews in mandatory

17:01 Palestine escalated and as the British withdrew in 1948,

17:05 the state of Israel declared its independence,

17:08 thus starting the continuous Arab-Israeli conflict that has remained ever since.

17:13 Not one Arab country in the world

17:15 would recognize Israel's existence as legitimate at first,

17:18 and a coalition of mostly recently created or independent Arab states went

17:22 to war with Israel in 1948 in support of the Palestinian Arab cause.

17:27 Israel ended up emerging victorious in that war and ended up

17:30 in control over all the lands that the UN had assigned

17:32 to the Jewish state in the 1947 partition plan in addition to 60%

17:37 of the UN-proposed Arab state's land and the western half of Jerusalem,

17:41 while Jordan occupied and then annexed

17:43 the Palestinian-assigned West Bank and international East Jerusalem,

17:47 while Egypt occupied the Palestinian-assigned Gaza

17:49 Strip and transformed it into a protectorate.

17:51 No independent Palestinian Arab state would end up emerging and an estimated

17:56 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were exiled

17:59 or became refugees displaced from their homes,

18:02 with many of them fleeing into neighboring Lebanon in an event

18:05 that they referred to as the Nakba or the catastrophe,

18:08 which would gradually alter that country's

18:10 demographics to being more Muslim-dominated,

18:13 leading to future internal demographic conflict in that country like

18:16 the long Lebanese Civil War that would last between 1975 and 1990.

18:21 At the same time, hundreds of thousands of additional Jews would migrate

18:25 towards Israel from the shattered communities

18:28 left behind by the Nazis in Europe,

18:30 further tilting Israel's demographics more in favor of Jews.

18:34 The defeat of the Arabs against Israel in 1948 gave

18:37 way to the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt,

18:40 a secular Arab nationalist who dreamed of unifying

18:43 all of the Arab lands in the Middle East

18:45 beneath a single Arab superpower state that would utilize

18:48 most of the Middle East's oil as their superweapon,

18:51 a superweapon that he hoped would lead to the defeat

18:54 of Israel and its primary backer, the United States.

18:58 Nasser came to power in Egypt in 1954,

19:01 and he would only be the first of many post-World War II Middle Eastern leaders

19:05 who would set about to change the map

19:07 of the region set into place by Sykes-Picot.

19:10 He railed against not only Israel and the United States,

19:13 but against the Arab monarchies like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as well,

19:17 whom he saw as corrupted and who were actively developing

19:20 closer relations to the United States over their vast oil resources.

19:24 In 1956, Nasser took the fateful decision of nationalizing

19:28 the Suez Canal and destroying the ownership structure

19:31 over it that had been dominated by the foreign

19:33 British and French shareholders for nearly a century.

19:36 The British, French, and Israelis all retaliated with war and an invasion

19:40 of Egypt to try and regain colonial control over the canal.

19:43 But this time, both the United States and the Soviet

19:45 Union alike rebuked the colonial invaders and Egypt emerged victorious,

19:50 catapulting Nasser and his flavor of secular Arab nationalism

19:53 to the status of much of the Arab world's new champion.

19:57 In 1958, a coup by military officers

19:59 in Syria pledging personal loyalty to Nasser took over the country and joined it

20:03 with Egypt in the short-lived United Arab Republic,

20:06 which only fell apart just 3 years later in 1961 when another group

20:10 of Syrian officers launched another coup

20:13 and restored Syria again as an independent nation.

20:16 Civil war in North Yemen exploded the following

20:18 year in 1962 when the monarchist government

20:21 there and Nasserist-style Arab nationalist Republican rebels leading

20:25 to the modern Middle East's first proxy conflict.

20:28 The monarchist Middle Eastern states like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan,

20:31 and Imperial Iran all bulked at the prospect of a revolution

20:35 in Yemen toppling the monarchy there and then spreading to their own monarchies.

20:40 And so they all intervened militarily on behalf of the Yemeni monarchist regime.

20:44 While Nasser, wanting to spread the cause of Arab nationalism and unity,

20:48 massively supported the nationalist rebels by sending tens

20:51 of thousands of Egyptian troops and copious volumes of weapons.

20:55 The war ended up turning into Egypt's version of the Vietnam war,

20:59 consuming enormous amounts of manpower

21:01 and resources and developing into a stalemate,

21:04 greatly weakening the Egyptian armed forces in the process.

21:07 By 1967, Nasser was again threatening war with Israel over on another front.

21:12 But, encouraged by Egyptian defeats in Yemen,

21:15 the Israelis decided to strike first.

21:18 Surprise Israeli airstrikes against Egyptian forces caught them completely

21:21 off guard leading to rapid Israeli military gains against Egypt,

21:25 Jordan, and Syria in what would become known as the Six-Day War.

21:28 Israel ended the war by occupying the Golan Heights from Syria,

21:32 the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan,

21:34 and the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt,

21:37 placing Israeli forces on the entire Eastern bank of the Suez Canal itself,

21:41 which caused Egypt to shut the canal down

21:43 to all maritime traffic for the next 8 years.

21:46 Jewish Israeli settlers would then begin to move

21:49 in and colonize all of the recently occupied territories,

21:52 leading to further conflicts between the Israeli

21:54 state and the Arab and Islamic worlds.

21:57 And then, crushed and humiliated by the defeat,

22:00 Nasser was forced to withdraw from the war in Yemen and died

22:03 shortly afterwards from a heart attack at just 52 years old in 1970.

22:07 It was also around that time that the British

22:09 Empire decided that they can no longer financially maintain

22:12 their commitments to security in the Middle East and the Persian

22:14 [music] Gulf and critically all of the oil there.

22:18 In 1971, the British protectorates of Bahrain, Qatar,

22:21 and the modern United Arab Emirates

22:23 in the Gulf were all finally granted their independence.

22:26 And without the British there any longer,

22:28 the United States began taking an increased interest in the region instead,

22:32 wishing to maintain the status quo and regional stability

22:35 in the Gulf in order to safeguard the world supply of oil.

22:38 In contrast to the frequent wars that were being

22:40 fought over on the other side of the Middle East,

22:42 the United States began encouraging their ally at the time,

22:45 Imperial Iran, to step forward as the new guarantor of the region's security

22:50 and to block the expansion of the Soviets from entering into the Gulf.

22:54 Massive amounts of American weapon sales were made

22:56 to arm Imperial Iran for this exact purpose,

23:00 a policy that would quickly backfire very badly.

23:03 But on the other side of the Middle East,

23:05 Nasser's Arab nationalist successor in Egypt,

23:07 Anwar Sadat, and the recently risen to power Arab nationalist in Syria,

23:11 Hafez al-Assad, decided to join forces again and attack Israel

23:16 in order to reclaim the occupied Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula.

23:19 Israel once again emerged victorious in that war,

23:21 but fearful that they would not always

23:23 be so capable of winning surrounded by enemies,

23:26 the 1973 Yom Kippur War paved the way for peace between Egypt and Israel 6 years

23:32 later in 1979 following the Camp David Accords

23:36 negotiated by the Carter administration in the United States,

23:39 in which Israel agreed to dismantle all

23:41 of their settlements in the Sinai Peninsula

23:43 and return it back to Egypt in exchange

23:46 for Egypt recognizing the legitimacy of Israel's statehood,

23:49 which made Egypt the first country in the entire Arab world

23:53 to ever do so after more than 30 years of Israel's existence.

23:58 Peace between Israel and Egypt had at last been achieved,

24:01 but the peace was denounced by every other Arab state in the world,

24:05 including most of all by Syria,

24:07 which by that time was under the nearly totalitarian regime of Hafez

24:11 al-Assad and his brand of extremely

24:14 militant secular Arab nationalism or Ba'athism.

24:17 Egypt was expelled from the Arab League for decade over the peace agreement.

24:21 Sadat himself was assassinated by Egyptian Islamist

24:24 militants who believed that he was a traitor,

24:27 and Syria began championing itself as the new

24:30 primary backer of the Palestinian Arab cause.

24:33 As more and more of Palestinian refugees fled into neighboring Lebanon,

24:36 that country's extremely diverse demographics began tilting

24:40 ever more in favor of the Muslims to the point where the Christians eventually

24:43 became less than half of the overall population.

24:46 The Lebanese Christians had generally dominated the government

24:49 and they generally sided with Israel and the Western world,

24:52 while the Lebanese Sunni and Shia Muslims generally

24:54 sided with the Arab and Muslim world instead,

24:57 eventually culminating in the explosion of a complex and multi-sided civil

25:01 war beginning in 1975 that would last for 15 years until 1990.

25:06 Ba'athist Syria would invade Lebanon in 1976 and then

25:10 spent years attempting to integrate and annex the country

25:12 directly into Syria based on the separation

25:15 that the French had done with their map-making after Sykes-Picot.

25:18 Israel would also invade Lebanon in their attempts to fight against

25:21 Palestinian forces there and secure the safety of their northern border,

25:24 leading to direct Israeli and Syrian fighting in the country as well.

25:27 The Israeli occupation in Lebanon would only end in 2000,

25:30 while the Syrian occupation only ended in 2005.

25:34 In retaliation for their worsening relationship with Syria,

25:36 Israel unilaterally declared to annex the occupied territories of East

25:40 Jerusalem in 1980 and the Syrian Golan Heights in 1981,

25:44 setting it on the path of a permanent territorial

25:46 dispute with Syria that lasts into the present day

25:49 as each side ever since has claimed that the Golan

25:51 Heights is a core part of their integral territories.

25:55 And at nearly the same time as these events were ongoing,

25:57 a revolution exploded in Iran in 1979 that toppled

26:01 the autocratic US-aligned monarchy of the Shah and replaced

26:04 him with a new revolutionary theocratic regime dominated

26:07 by the Iranian Shiite Muslim clergy and their leader,

26:10 the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

26:12 The new revolutionary Iran completely changed the way the Middle East worked

26:17 because they emerged as the first truly Islamist government in the region.

26:21 The new Iranian regime's Shia Islamist

26:23 ideology believes and continues to believe in the concept of a grand Islamic

26:28 civilization consisting of all the Islamic peoples

26:31 and territories all across the world and that all of these Islamic territories

26:35 should be united under the rule of the Islamic clergy and their supreme leader.

26:39 The new revolutionary Iran was also open about their desire to export and spread

26:44 their Islamic revolution first to the Shia Muslim

26:46 majority lands across the Middle East in Iraq,

26:48 Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen,

26:51 and then from there to the rest of the Islamic world.

26:54 All of the monarchies in the Islamic world like the Arab monarchies of Saudi

26:57 Arabia and the Gulf states were to be toppled during this revolutionary process.

27:01 While Israel, in the Iranian mind

27:03 a Western occupier of rightfully Islamic lands,

27:06 would have to be completely destroyed.

27:08 These foreign policy goals would ultimately make Iran

27:11 a bitter and irreconcilable enemy of both the Israelis

27:14 and also the Saudis and every other Arab monarchy

27:17 across the region in [music] addition to the United States,

27:20 all of whom wish to contain the Islamic revolution

27:22 within Iran and prevent it from spreading any further.

27:25 It also initially made Iran a terrifying enemy within Iraq,

27:29 where power had just recently been seized by the Ba'athist secular

27:33 Arab nationalist Saddam Hussein just as the revolution in Iran was erupting.

27:38 Saddam and his ruling clique of Ba'athists in Iraq came from the Sunni

27:41 Arab minority of the country from the former Ottoman province of Baghdad,

27:45 and he deeply feared revolutionary Iran's exportation

27:49 of the Shia revolution into the Basra area of Iraq,

27:52 where the majority of the population were also Shia

27:55 and where the majority of Iraq's oil reserves were also located.

27:58 Thus, determined to kill the Iranian revolution

28:01 in its cradle before it could spread,

28:03 Saddam invoked the call of Arab nationalism when he decided to send the Iraqi

28:08 army invading into Iran in 1980 with a stated goal of conquering the Arab

28:12 majority province of Khuzestan on the flat plain west of the Zagros Mountains

28:17 and adding its massive oil resources

28:20 to his own already large existing Iraqi oil arsenal,

28:24 and setting himself down the path as the next great aspirant to the mantle

28:28 of the Arab hero who would rail against

28:30 the map of the Middle East created by Sykes-Picot.

28:34 But instead, the Iran-Iraq War would

28:35 turn into an 8-year-long apocalypse that would

28:38 claim the lives of half a million people and injure around a million more.

28:43 Desperate to keep Iraq afloat as a buffer

28:45 state between themselves and the fiercely

28:47 anti-monarchist and expansionist revolutionary Iran who

28:50 had just toppled their own monarchy,

28:52 the Kuwaitis and the Saudis each lent tens of billions of dollars

28:56 to Saddam in order to keep him in the fight for longer,

28:59 the origin of the long-standing Saudi-Iranian Cold War.

29:03 But for Saudi Arabia, the fear went much deeper.

29:07 You see, across the 17th and 18th centuries, Bahrain,

29:10 an island in the Persian Gulf right off of the Saudi mainland,

29:13 had been ruled by various dynasties coming from Persia and Iran.

29:16 The British had transformed Bahrain into a protectorate of theirs only in 1861,

29:21 and after it was granted independence a century later in 1971,

29:25 the Imperial State of Iran claimed

29:26 the island as rightfully belonging to them instead.

29:30 After the 1979 Islamic Revolution,

29:32 the new theocratic revolutionary Iran continued the claim that Bahrain was

29:36 a lost Iranian province and that it should be returned to them,

29:40 further amplified by the fact that the vast

29:42 majority of Bahraini citizens were and are Shia Muslims,

29:46 but ruled by a Sunni Muslim monarchy friendly

29:49 to the fellow Sunni monarchies in Saudi Arabia,

29:52 Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.

29:54 Bahrain is these days directly connected

29:56 to Saudi Arabia by an 18-mile-long bridge.

29:59 The island is only located about 60 km

30:02 away from Saudi Arabia's largest single oil field,

30:05 Ghawar, only about 50 km away from the headquarters of Saudi Aramco,

30:09 the state oil company, and only about 80 km away from Ras Tanura,

30:13 which is the Saudi's largest oil export terminal.

30:16 Bahrain is placed directly off the coast

30:19 of the Shia Muslim majority area of Eastern Saudi Arabia,

30:22 where nearly the entirety of Saudi

30:24 Arabia's oil reserves and infrastructure are located,

30:27 meaning that were the Iranians to successfully export the revolution

30:30 into Shia majority Bahrain and topple the Sunni monarchy there,

30:34 the next target would be the next-door

30:36 Shia majority areas of Eastern Saudi Arabia,

30:40 which could place the entire Saudi monarchy and state into jeopardy.

30:44 Thus, to prevent that from ever happening,

30:45 the Saudis decided to bankroll Saddam to keep

30:49 the Iranian revolution contained within just Iran,

30:52 and they have worked tirelessly ever since

30:54 to do whatever they can to bottle Iran up.

30:57 After the Iran-Iraq War concluded in a stalemate

31:00 without any changes made to the borders in 1988,

31:03 Saddam requested that Kuwait forgive the $65 billion worth

31:07 of loans that they had given him to fight against Iran, and after they refused,

31:12 Saddam went on to utilize Iraq's theoretical historical claim to Kuwait

31:16 and invaded that country next just 2 years later in 1990,

31:20 annexing it and adding all of its own oil reserves into Iraq proper.

31:24 The Iraqi conquest of Kuwait suddenly doubled the amount

31:27 of oil reserves that Saddam controlled and placed

31:30 him personally in control of nearly a fifth

31:33 of all the known oil reserves in the world.

31:36 Then, the Iraqi army began lining up

31:38 on the Kuwaiti border with Saudi Arabia next,

31:41 a stone's throw away from the massive oil fields in Saudi Arabia.

31:45 It appeared quite obvious that Saddam was planning on using the Iraqi

31:49 army to invade Saudi Arabia next and conquer their oil fields as well,

31:54 which would have further boosted his control over

31:56 the world supply of oil to nearly 45% of it,

32:00 which would have made Saddam Hussein the master of global

32:03 oil and given him the fuel he needed to continue

32:06 on with his ultimate ambition of unifying the Arab world beneath

32:10 his authority and finally overturning the map drawn up by Sykes and Picot.

32:15 Not willing to allow any of that to happen, however,

32:17 the United States gathered together a massive military coalition of 32 nations

32:22 and militarily intervened against him during the Gulf War of 1990 to 91,

32:27 which rapidly ejected the Iraqi military

32:29 from Kuwait and liberated the nation once again.

32:32 The map of Sykes and Picot was once again restored.

32:36 Afterwards, the United States began fully stepping into the role

32:39 as the new primary security guarantor of the Persian Gulf and its

32:43 oil supplies in order to make sure that the source

32:46 of half of the world's oil would remain stable and accessible.

32:49 The United States Fifth Fleet was reactivated and headquartered in Bahrain,

32:53 providing the US with a big incentive alongside of the Saudis

32:56 to keep the island out of the hands of revolutionary Iranian influence,

33:01 while the United States Air Force set up

33:02 a massive new air base at Al Udeid in Qatar.

33:06 Shortly after that, Jordan became the second Arab state in the world

33:09 to make peace with Israel when they recognized the Jewish state in 1994.

33:14 But the increasing setbacks for secular Arab nationalism

33:17 in the Middle East and the growing presence

33:19 and legitimacy of the United States and Israel

33:21 in the region gave rise to a new brand of Sunni Islamism in the Arab world

33:26 that rivaled both the more Shia Islamism in Iran

33:29 and the secular Arab nationalist movements like Ba'athism

33:32 in Iraq and Syria and the previous Nasserism in Egypt.

33:35 This set the stage for new organizations like Al-Qaeda to emerge,

33:39 who wanted to ignite a worldwide Islamist revolution to unite

33:43 the entire Muslim world beneath a new Islamic state that would fully

33:47 encompass all of the Muslim lands and finally do away

33:51 with the borders and terms of Sykes and Picot once and for all.

33:55 This newest challenge to the map of the Middle East set by Sykes

33:59 and Picot would eventually evolve even further into the form of ISIS,

34:03 an even more radical Sunni Islamist organization with roots

34:07 in Al-Qaeda that for a time in 2014 [music]

34:09 and 2015 exploded onto the world stage with a series

34:13 of conquests across the border between Iraq and Syria,

34:16 a border that had been set by Sykes

34:18 and Picot a century before their time in 1916,

34:22 and a border which they were adamant they

34:24 were going to finally be the ones to destroy,

34:27 just like many others before them and probably like many more in the future.

34:31 Before we get into the next video of this compilation,

34:34 I wanted to suggest some other relevant videos I

34:36 produced that weren't able to make it into here,

34:38 like my documentaries I produced covering the wars

34:39 waged by Saddam Hussein against Iran and Kuwait,

34:42 the American invasion of Iraq in 2003,

34:45 the 20-year-long American occupation of Afghanistan and the eventual

34:48 return of power of the Taliban again, the first and second civil wars in Libya,

34:52 the long civil war in Syria as well as the Russian intervention there,

34:55 the earlier civil war in Lebanon,

34:57 the long conflict between Turkey and the Kurds,

35:00 and the rapid rise and fall of ISIS across Iraq and Syria,

35:04 along with many, many others.

35:06 And you can go and watch all of these other videos

35:08 that I've produced about the making of the modern Middle East on Nebula,

35:11 the sponsor of this compilation that helps fund all

35:13 of my videos and helps to make all of this possible.

35:16 And in addition to all of my exclusive

35:18 content like this that's only available on Nebula,

35:20 we have more than 200 other creators on the platform right now,

35:24 many of whom are also producing exclusive

35:26 and early content like Tom Scott, Lindsay Ellis,

35:29 Real Engineering, Wendover Productions, and Jetlag, and so,

35:32 so many others you probably already are familiar with.

35:35 We also have absolutely no ads and no AI on Nebula either,

35:39 which is why I treat Nebula as my own personal entertainment refuge away

35:43 from the ads and AI that are increasingly

35:45 choking the rest of the internet these days.

35:48 And best of all, when you follow the link

35:50 that's down below in the description at nebula.tv/reallifelore,

35:53 you can go to Nebula and experience all of this right now with a great

35:57 deal we're currently running that'll get you

35:59 a whole 50% off of an annual Nebula subscription,

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36:11 Giving us a shot on Nebula is the absolute best thing

36:13 that you can do to help support my channel and my journalism.

36:17 And with that, let's get back to the making of the modern Middle East.

36:21 The United States and Iran have one

36:23 of the world's most complicated and controversial relationships.

36:27 The [music] United States is the world's most preeminent

36:29 superpower with a population of more than 320 million,

36:33 while Iran is a major power in her own

36:35 right with a population of more than 80 million.

36:38 These countries represent 4% and [music] 1% of the living human population,

36:44 and for the past 41 years,

36:46 they've had [music] absolutely zero diplomatic relations and have come close

36:51 to the brink of total war on more than one occasion.

36:55 At the beginning of 2020,

36:56 war between [music] the two sides seemed almost inevitable.

36:59 The United States assassinated an Iranian major general in a drone strike,

37:04 and Iran retaliated by initiating artillery

37:07 strikes against American military bases across Iraq.

37:11 Had a war broken out from there, it had the potential to become the biggest

37:15 conflict in human history since the Second World War.

37:19 This time, that fate was thankfully avoided,

37:22 but in order to understand how it got so close

37:25 and why it could still happen during another crisis in the future,

37:28 you've got to understand [music] the entire history

37:32 of the conflict between America and Iran so far.

37:35 And that story begins back before the start [music] of World War II.

37:39 At the beginning of the 20th century,

37:41 oil was first discovered within the deserts of Iran by the British.

37:44 [music] As more and more of these discoveries were made,

37:47 it was revealed that Iran, in fact,

37:49 contained the fourth largest proven reserves of oil anywhere on the planet

37:54 and that the country was an undiscovered and unrealized energy superpower.

37:59 The only problem for the British, of course,

38:01 was that these discoveries were located within Iran,

38:04 and Iran wasn't within Britain's vast colonial empire

38:07 that already spanned a quarter of the globe.

38:10 Not too worried about that pesky little detail,

38:12 Britain negotiated a deal with Iran to share in the massive profits

38:16 that were bound to come from the extraction of all this oil.

38:19 They created the jointly owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company,

38:23 but it wasn't exactly set up very fairly.

38:25 [music] Iran, the country where all of this oil was actually located,

38:29 was only entitled to 16% of the company's profits,

38:33 whereas the other 84% of profits were going directly to the British.

38:37 By the start of the Second World [music] War,

38:39 the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company grew to control all of Iran's oil

38:43 and had grown to become the largest company in the entire British Empire.

38:47 But this massively valuable asset was coming under threats.

38:51 Discontent at the company's unfair [music] terms was growing within Iran itself,

38:55 while at the same time in 1941,

38:57 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and opened up

39:01 the largest military front line ever seen in human history.

39:05 Iran stood geographically at the Soviet Union's southern flank,

39:08 and [music] their intentions were considered suspect

39:11 by both the British and the Soviets.

39:13 Despite having declared neutrality at the onset of the war, Iran's ruling Shah,

39:17 or emperor, was widely considered by the allies

39:20 to be too friendly towards the Nazis.

39:23 If Iran were to have cooperated with the Axis,

39:25 it could have opened up another southern front for the Soviets to deal

39:28 [music] with that would have diverted vital

39:30 troops away from the critical Eastern Front.

39:32 It could have jeopardized the Soviet Union's own

39:35 oil fields in the Caucasus right on Iran's doorstep,

39:38 and it would have potentially placed Britain's largest

39:40 oil company in the hands of the Nazis.

39:42 So, in order to prevent any of that from happening and in order to ensure

39:46 that Iran could be used as a transportation

39:48 corridor to get vital supplies into the Soviet Union,

39:51 neutral Iran was invaded by both the Soviets and the British.

39:56 Vastly outnumbered and far behind in technology,

39:59 Iran never stood a chance and surrendered within just a week.

40:02 The old troublesome Shah was overthrown and replaced

40:05 by the invaders with his much younger 21-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi,

40:10 whom the Allies felt would be far

40:12 less capable of acting against their interests.

40:15 Iran was effectively occupied for the entire Second World War by the Allies,

40:19 which eventually saw the deployment of more

40:21 than 30,000 Americans and [music] the transportation

40:24 of nearly 1/3 of all the supplies that America sent to the Soviet Union.

40:29 After the war ended, the Allies left and ended their occupation,

40:33 but the unfair terms that the British had established

40:35 in regards to Iran's oil came back into question.

40:38 By the early 1950s, Britain was still

40:41 taking home the majority of Iran's oil profits,

40:43 while the conditions for Iranian oil

40:45 workers and their families remained terrible.

40:47 [music] At the same time,

40:49 the British were also withholding all of the company's financial records

40:52 from the Iranians and had refused all of their requests that being audited.

40:56 The support for nationalizing the company within

40:59 Iran was getting overwhelmingly massive and by 1951,

41:02 Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh,

41:06 with unanimous approval from the Iranian Parliament, finally did so.

41:10 Britain responded to this by immediately embargoing all

41:14 Iranian oil and then 2 years later in 1953,

41:18 Britain's MI6 and America's CIA organized a military

41:21 coup within the country to overthrow Mosaddegh's government.

41:25 As many as 300 Iranians were killed during the coup.

41:29 Mosaddegh himself was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life,

41:33 while the Shah was elevated to being

41:34 essentially an authoritarian dictator within the country.

41:38 Having had his position installed and guaranteed by Western powers twice now,

41:42 the Shah became widely viewed in Iran as little more than a Western puppet.

41:48 And as the Cold War developed out of the ashes of the Second World War,

41:51 Iran's strategic location at the Soviet Union's southern flank,

41:55 her vast strategic reserves of oil,

41:58 and her authoritarian leader who owed his position and loyalty to the West made

42:02 Iran a natural and valuable ally of the United States for the very first time.

42:09 The Shah pursued a staunchly pro-American

42:11 and pro-Israel foreign policy and for decades,

42:15 Iran became one of America's most important [music] Cold War era allies.

42:19 But over the decades, the Shah's policies and cozy relations with the West

42:23 alienated much of his home base support.

42:26 [music] He ran a vast network of secret police within

42:29 the country who arrested thousands of political opponents and many more,

42:33 like Ayatollah Khomeini, were exiled.

42:35 Widespread torture of political dissidents in prison was reported.

42:39 He outlawed the Iranian Communist Party.

42:41 He continued friendly relations with both America and Israel,

42:44 despite nearly none of the rest of the Islamic world even recognizing Israel,

42:49 while he carried out a domestic policy of modernization,

42:52 secularism, and the enfranchisement of women.

42:54 All of these policies combined alienated Iran's leftists,

42:58 the working class, and the hardcore Shiite Muslim conservatives and clergy.

43:03 And by the late 1970s, Iran's long-standing political unrest

43:07 had transformed into full-scale revolution.

43:10 A movie theater was set on fire in Abadan that killed at least 420 people,

43:15 with the Shah's regime blaming Marxist [music] and Islamist insurgents,

43:18 while many of the protesters felt like it

43:20 was more likely the Shah's own secret police.

43:23 The following month, protesters gathered in the capital Tehran's main square

43:27 and the Shah's army opened fire on them indiscriminately,

43:30 killing and wounding hundreds more.

43:32 More than 5 million Iranians took to the streets demanding

43:36 the Shah's abdication and after defections from his army became rampant,

43:40 Mohammad Pahlavi realized that his position was impossible to maintain

43:45 and he fled the country in exile in early 1979.

43:49 The new radical Shiite Islamist government that replaced the Shah's

43:52 regime immediately abolished the monarchy and invited Ayatollah Khomeini back

43:57 to the country after 15 years of exile to become Iran's

44:02 new supreme leader and the modern Islamic Republic of Iran was born.

44:07 And this new Iranian regime was radically

44:10 different from the one that it preceded.

44:12 It was a totalitarian Shiite theocracy that was staunchly

44:16 opposed to the United States and Israel and mass

44:19 executions and purges of political opponents and members

44:22 of the former regime were almost immediately carried out.

44:26 To the United States and the rest of the world,

44:28 Iran's Islamic Revolution came as an enormous shock.

44:33 Almost overnight, Iran had flipped from being one of America's

44:36 most important Middle Eastern allies to her greatest Middle Eastern enemy.

44:41 After the Shah was overthrown,

44:43 the United States welcomed him into their country for a cancer

44:46 treatment operation and the new Iran demanded that he

44:49 be extradited back to stand trial for the crimes

44:52 that he had committed throughout his reign against the Iranian people.

44:56 Knowing that his return would mean a certain execution,

44:58 the United States rejected all of Iran's demands,

45:01 but that did little to dissuade Iran's revolutionary paranoia.

45:05 Since the Shah was actively inside America

45:08 and since Western powers had already initiated

45:11 two previous coups in the past him over the will of the Iranian people,

45:16 the paranoia was widespread that America and the CIA could be plotting

45:20 yet another third coup [music] attempt from within their embassy inside Tehran.

45:25 And so, in November of 1979,

45:28 thousands of Iranian revolutionaries and students stormed the American

45:31 embassy and took 52 American diplomats and civilians as hostages.

45:36 America eventually sent the Shah away to Egypt,

45:39 while the Carter administration worked

45:40 for months to secure the hostages' release.

45:43 But when diplomacy went nowhere,

45:44 Carter authorized a raid by the United States Army

45:47 Rangers in April of 1980 to attempt a rescue operation.

45:51 But the raid turned into a disaster.

45:53 Co-named Operation Eagle Claw,

45:56 a helicopter crashed into a transport plane before any contact

45:59 with the Iranians was even made and eight American soldiers lost their lives.

46:03 Carter ordered the mission to be abandoned

46:05 and the hostages remained under Iranian control.

46:08 It was at this point that the United States decided to sever all

46:11 diplomatic relations with Iran's new regime

46:14 and they have been frozen ever since.

46:16 But a few months later, something else incredible and unexpected happened.

46:21 In September of 1980,

46:22 Saddam Hussein's Iraq launched an all-out invasion of conquest into Iran.

46:28 For years preceding this, Saddam had wanted Iraq to overtake

46:32 and supplant Iran as the dominant power in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

46:36 But they were never capable of doing anything about it because Iran had

46:40 a colossally larger military and they had the support of America and Israel,

46:45 all of which made her vastly more powerful.

46:47 But after Iran was thrown into chaos by her revolution

46:50 and regime change with massive purges and executions of government

46:54 officials and after she was abandoned by both America

46:56 and Israel and was left without any major foreign allies,

47:00 Saddam calculated that now was better than ever to take advantage and attack.

47:05 Iraq expected a rapid victory,

47:07 but the war that followed turned into an 8-year-long stalemate

47:11 that most resembled the Western Front of World War I.

47:14 After the massive Iraqi invasion,

47:17 Iran was forced to re-evaluate the American hostage situation and they agreed

47:21 to release all 52 back into US custody after holding them for 444 days.

47:29 America levied heavy economic sanctions upon Iran

47:31 as a consequence and then began heavily supplying

47:34 Saddam and Iraq in their war effort

47:36 that they hoped would destabilize Iran even further.

47:39 The Iran-Iraq War would ultimately prove to be one of the largest

47:43 and the bloodiest of the 20th century's second half with as many

47:46 as 400,000 Iranians losing their lives across the front line owing

47:52 in part to the widespread deployment

47:55 of chemical weapons and landmines from Iraq,

47:57 who was being heavily supplied and supported

47:59 with conventional weapons by the United States.

48:02 Throughout the war, the US contends that Hezbollah,

48:05 a Shia Islamist militia organization operating out

48:08 of Lebanon who is a client of Iran,

48:10 carried out multiple anti-American terror attacks across the region.

48:15 In 1983, they carried out a bombing of the US embassy in Beirut,

48:19 which killed 17 Americans and later that same year,

48:22 they carried out another massive truck bombing attack

48:25 against the barracks of a military compound in Lebanon,

48:28 which killed a further 241 American and 58 French soldiers.

48:35 These events and others contributed to the United States placing Iran

48:39 on their state sponsors of terrorism list the following year in 1984.

48:43 By April of 1988, the Iran-Iraq War was still raging and Iran had mined

48:49 a large section of the Persian Gulf in order to counter the Iraqi Navy.

48:53 An American frigate who happened to be passing through struck

48:55 one of these mines and became severely damaged and almost sank,

48:59 but with no loss of life.

49:01 Regardless, America decided to initiate a retaliatory attack

49:05 against Iranian targets and initiated Operation Praying Mantis.

49:09 It was the largest US naval combat operation seen

49:12 since the Second World War and it saw two American

49:15 surface groups launching coordinated strikes that blew up two

49:18 Iranian offshore oil platforms and sank six of their warships.

49:23 The attack destroyed or severely damaged half

49:26 of Iran's entire fleet and killed 56 Iranians,

49:30 while resulting in only two American deaths.

49:33 Just 3 months later in July of 1988,

49:36 an American cruiser strayed into Iranian territorial waters

49:40 and received warning shots fired from Iranian speedboats.

49:43 At the same time, Iran Air Flight 655

49:46 that was taking its normal flight route above from Tehran

49:49 to Dubai and was at this point flying

49:51 over Iran's territorial waters above the Strait of Hormuz.

49:55 The American cruiser misidentified this commercial aircraft as an Iranian

49:59 fighter jet and assuming that they could have been under attack,

50:02 they launched a missile that targeted

50:04 and then completely destroyed the whole plane.

50:07 There were 290 people on board that flight and 254 of them were Iranians.

50:14 None of them survived the missile strike [music] and it

50:18 was the deadliest aviation shoot down incident in history until

50:21 the horrible shoot down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over

50:25 Ukraine by pro-Russian rebels more than a quarter century later.

50:30 These deadly events between both sides

50:33 sharply escalated tensions between America and Iran

50:36 and each felt that the other had done grievous harm towards them.

50:40 In 1995, the Clinton administration enacted a total embargo

50:45 on all dealings with Iran by any American-based company,

50:48 which effectively killed all trade between both countries.

50:52 In 1996, the Iranian client Hezbollah [music] carried out yet

50:55 another terror bombing strike against a US target in Saudi Arabia.

50:59 This time killing 19 American Air

51:02 Force personnel and wounding nearly 500 others.

51:06 And then, 5 years after that, came the September 11th attacks.

51:10 Just [music] 4 months after 9/11,

51:12 US President Bush made his Axis of Evil speech in which he lumped Iran,

51:17 Saddam's Iraq, and North Korea all together

51:20 as an axis of evil conspiring against America.

51:23 Just a little more than a year after that speech,

51:25 the United States used the pretext of Saddam possessing weapons of mass

51:29 destruction to invade Iraq and completely toppled his regime in around a month.

51:35 No weapons of mass destruction were ever uncovered and the message

51:38 sent to both Iran and North Korea was clear [music] as day.

51:41 It was either develop nuclear weapons or you would be next.

51:45 North Korea managed to successfully test an atomic bomb

51:48 just 3 years after the American-led invasion of Iraq.

51:52 While Iran hastily carried out their own nuclear weapons research as well.

51:56 However, the United States made it clear

51:58 that a nuclear-armed Iran would never be tolerated

52:01 and a combination of sanctions and diplomacy were used

52:04 for years to try and convince Iran to stop.

52:06 By 2015, [music] the Obama administration had

52:09 successfully negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,

52:13 better known colloquially as the Iran nuclear deal.

52:15 The treaty's terms are complex, but the TLDR is that the US agreed to end

52:20 a sweeping series of sanctions they had previously placed upon Iran.

52:24 While Iran agreed to give up their pursuit of nuclear

52:27 research and allowed foreign inspections to routinely investigate them.

52:31 Iran's and America's relationship was beginning

52:33 to show some signs [music] of rapprochement.

52:35 But then, things took another curveball.

52:38 In 2016, Donald Trump was elected the new president

52:41 of the United States on a platform that included

52:43 a vow to fully withdraw the US from the Iran

52:46 nuclear deal and to reinstate tougher economic sanctions.

52:50 In 2018, [music] Trump carried through with these campaign

52:52 promises and Iran counter-threatened that they would continue

52:56 on with their nuclear program and even close the Strait

52:58 of Hormuz to international shipping if things escalated any further,

53:02 which would have completely crashed the global oil economy.

53:05 Relations between the two were back to being tense

53:08 and then things got even worse the next year.

53:10 In May and June of 2019, several merchant ships traveling through the Persian

53:14 Gulf were damaged in two separate violent incidents.

53:17 The West blamed Iran and then Iran denied all involvement.

53:21 In June, Iran shot down an American drone that was

53:24 flying over the Strait of Hormuz and tensions increased even further.

53:27 And then in July, an Iranian oil tanker was seized

53:31 by the UK as it was passing through the Strait of Gibraltar

53:34 on the grounds that it was shipping oil to the Bashar

53:36 al-Assad regime in Syria in direct violation of EU sanctions.

53:40 Iran countered this by capturing a British oil tanker and taking

53:43 its crew hostage as it was later passing through the Persian Gulf.

53:47 Both sides eventually released the other's ships and crew,

53:50 but it was clear that tensions were reaching a boiling point.

53:53 And then, they dramatically escalated near the end of the year.

53:58 On the 27th of December 2019,

54:00 a rocket artillery attack from some assailant on America's K1 military base

54:05 in Iraq left one US civilian contractor dead and four other soldiers wounded.

54:10 America blamed the attack on Hezbollah

54:12 and other Shiite Islamist militias supported by Iran,

54:15 though both Hezbollah and Iran denied all responsibility.

54:18 At this point, there were about 5,000 US troops who were

54:22 stationed in Iraq who were helping in the ongoing fight against ISIL.

54:25 And 2 days later on the 29th,

54:27 they decided to initiate a retaliatory strike against Hezbollah's

54:31 weapons depots and command centers across both Iraq and Syria.

54:34 These American airstrikes killed 25 Hezbollah-affiliated

54:39 militiamen and wounded nearly 60 others.

54:42 Escalating things even further a couple days after that on December the 31st,

54:46 Iran-backed militiamen stormed and attacked

54:49 the United States Embassy in Baghdad.

54:51 The embassy was heavily vandalized, but nobody on either side was killed

54:55 and the US blamed Iran once again for the provocation.

54:58 And then came the 3rd of January 2020 when

55:01 the already high tensions skyrocketed to levels never seen before.

55:06 Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian major general widely believed to be

55:11 the second most powerful figure within the Iranian regime,

55:14 had just arrived in Baghdad on a flight.

55:17 He was scheduled to meet with Iraq's prime minister later on in the day,

55:20 but as he departed the Baghdad airport in a convoy of vehicles,

55:23 a US drone that had been hovering nearby overhead

55:27 fired a series of missiles that completely destroyed them.

55:31 This missile strike had been personally

55:33 authorized and ordered by President Donald

55:35 Trump himself and resulted in the deaths of Soleimani and nine others.

55:40 This event profoundly changed the crisis between Iran and the United States.

55:45 It was the first time that America had

55:47 assassinated a major military leader of a major

55:50 foreign country since the plot to kill Isoroku

55:53 Yamamoto of the Japanese Imperial Navy back in 1943,

55:57 who had been the mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attacks.

56:00 Two days later, Iran announced that it would no longer abide by any of the terms

56:05 of the 2015 nuclear deal and demanded that Iraq

56:08 remove all of the American presence from their country.

56:11 And then, on the 8th of January, 5 days after Soleimani's death,

56:15 Iran launched its own retaliatory strike against America.

56:19 Co-named Operation Martyr Soleimani,

56:22 Iran initiated multiple ballistic missile strikes against two US military

56:26 bases within Iraq and the entire world held its breath.

56:30 This was the closest that America and Iran had ever come

56:35 to full-scale war and the crisis could have easily escalated into that.

56:40 America had already rapidly deployed thousands of soldiers

56:43 to the Persian Gulf from the US East Coast in the days between

56:46 Soleimani's death and this Iranian artillery attack,

56:49 but thankfully, nobody was killed by it.

56:52 The bases experienced significant damage to buildings and infrastructure,

56:55 but everybody present remained alive.

56:58 And this was sort of a godsend because it gave both

57:01 Iran and America the opportunity to de-escalate [music] without losing any face.

57:06 Iran got to look strong and powerful by firing

57:09 rockets at American targets [music] and without any casualties,

57:12 America was given the option not to retaliate, which is what they chose to do.

57:16 [music] Unfortunately though, tragedy still managed to find a way to strike.

57:21 While Iran likely designed the attack

57:23 intentionally to not cause any American casualties,

57:26 Iran didn't necessarily know that the US

57:29 wasn't going to retaliate [music] and their anti-air

57:32 batteries across the country were on high alert for any kind of response.

57:37 One of these missile batteries detected what

57:39 they believed to be an American cruise missile on their radar and they opened

57:43 fire on it with two surface-to-air missiles.

57:46 It turned out that the target wasn't a cruise missile at all,

57:50 but was just a regularly scheduled commercial airliner that had

57:54 just taken off from Tehran International Airport [music] mere minutes before.

57:59 The plane in question was Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752

58:04 traveling from Tehran to Kiev with 176 people on board.

58:08 [music] The Iranian missiles completely destroyed

58:12 the plane and killed everybody on board,

58:14 including 82 Iranian and 63 Canadian citizens.

58:19 Initially, the Iranian government denied all

58:22 responsibility and attempted to cover the disaster

58:24 up by blaming the crash on technical faults with the plane itself.

58:28 [music] But after raising suspicion when they wouldn't

58:30 allow any investigators access to the crash site,

58:33 the government finally admitted to mistakenly shooting the plane

58:37 down a few days later on January 11th.

58:40 That attempted cover-up sparked massive protests

58:43 across Iran and against the regime.

58:46 And the brink of war against the United States had just narrowly been avoided.

58:51 Hundreds of innocent people died as a result

58:54 of the conflict between Iran and the United States in 2020.

58:57 [music] But of course, it could have always been far worse.

59:01 Had the conflict escalated by any number of countless different ways,

59:06 all-out war could have broken out that would

59:08 have resulted in the deaths of many, many more.

59:12 I only hope that peace between my country

59:15 and Iran can be maintained in the future.

59:18 [music] But at the same time, I'm aware of how precarious this peace is

59:22 [music] and the history behind all of this.

59:25 And I'm fearful that one day in the future,

59:28 we might not get as relatively lucky as we did at the beginning of 2020.

59:38 This is a stretch of water that's only a tad more than 30 mi wide.

59:42 It's so small that you couldn't even fit Luxembourg inside of it,

59:45 and yet these 30 mi make up the most

59:48 important location to understand in the entire [snorts] known universe.

59:54 By controlling these 30 mi, you can effectively rule the entire world,

59:59 and by closing them down, you can effectively destroy the world.

1:00:03 And this is why.

1:00:05 The ocean spans most of our planet's surface, about 70% of it to be precise.

1:00:10 In order to transport goods from one of Earth's many continents to another,

1:00:13 this vast ocean that takes up 70% of the planet has to be traveled across.

1:00:19 And in the 21st century, there are many ways to do so.

1:00:22 Simply using an airplane to fly across in mere

1:00:24 hours might be how you choose to do it, but airplanes are expensive,

1:00:29 especially the more and more heavy an object it is that you're moving.

1:00:32 So, when it comes to cargo,

1:00:34 80% of the 21st century's global trade is still being carried out the way

1:00:39 that it generally always has been for thousands of years now, by ship.

1:00:44 At any given normal time, there are around 50,000 merchant vessels carrying

1:00:49 as much as 6 million containers full of cargo and goods all across the world's

1:00:54 oceans and between all the world's continents.

1:00:57 These networks and streams of ships that you

1:01:00 see moving in lines across the world's surface

1:01:02 here are the literal arteries that power

1:01:05 the beating heart of the 21st century global economy.

1:01:08 And unfortunately, the world's oceans aren't very easy to navigate through.

1:01:13 The geographic placement of the world's continents, islands,

1:01:16 and land masses have created numerous natural choke points

1:01:19 that these trade arteries have no other choice but to move through.

1:01:23 And when these choke points become blocked by whatever means,

1:01:26 they can cause a veritable stroke upon the world economy.

1:01:30 This is exactly what happened earlier this year when

1:01:33 one of the most important of these, the Suez Canal,

1:01:36 was blocked for several days when a cargo

1:01:39 ship became unexpectedly stuck in the middle,

1:01:41 which blocked nearly 10 billion dollars

1:01:44 worth of global trade and caused widespread

1:01:46 shipping and logistical delays across the entire

1:01:49 world from North America to Australia.

1:01:51 But there are other strategic maritime choke

1:01:54 points to consider across the world as well.

1:01:56 The Panama Canal controls the flow of trade between

1:01:58 the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean across the American landmass.

1:02:01 The Cape of Good Hope controls the flow of trade around the African continent.

1:02:05 The Strait of Gibraltar controls the flow

1:02:07 between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic,

1:02:09 the Danish Straits between the Baltic and the North Sea,

1:02:11 the Turkish Straits between the Mediterranean and Black Seas,

1:02:14 and the Strait of Malacca between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

1:02:17 However, none of these are as important nor

1:02:20 as dangerous as the Strait of Hormuz here for many, many critical reasons.

1:02:25 First among them, it's the only possible way for ships to move back and forth

1:02:29 between the Persian Gulf in the west and the Gulf of Oman in the east,

1:02:33 which then leads out to the greater global ocean.

1:02:35 The Persian Gulf is particularly important for this equation

1:02:38 because eight countries share some of its coastline:

1:02:41 Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain,

1:02:45 Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman.

1:02:47 And for four of those countries,

1:02:49 the only maritime access they have is within the Persian Gulf,

1:02:53 which means that the 30-mi wide Strait of Hormuz is the only

1:02:57 possible location they can pass through in order to access the world's oceans.

1:03:01 And if you know anything at all about the Middle East and the Gulf countries,

1:03:04 you know that they're pretty much all completely loaded in oil.

1:03:08 But oil is only part of what makes the Persian Gulf,

1:03:11 and the Strait of Hormuz especially, so critically important.

1:03:14 Oil [music] is still the lifeblood of the modern world's economy.

1:03:17 Around a third of our energy worldwide is produced by using it,

1:03:21 and every single day humanity consumes more than 9 million barrels of it.

1:03:26 Oil is still by far the most common source

1:03:29 of energy for human civilization in the 21st century.

1:03:33 And as a non-renewable, it can't simply be produced.

1:03:35 [music] Oil is a resource that can

1:03:37 only be extracted from where it already exists, and [music] as it happens,

1:03:41 it's not naturally found in too many parts of the world.

1:03:45 Around the Persian Gulf basin,

1:03:46 across these dozens of oil fields marked in green,

1:03:49 you can find roughly half of the entire planet's proven reserves of oil,

1:03:55 including the single largest oil field

1:03:57 in the world here in Saudi Arabia, at Ghawar,

1:04:00 which all on its own produces nearly

1:04:03 6% [music] of the entire world's oil supply.

1:04:07 There are dozens of fabulously rich oil fields here that stretch

1:04:11 across all eight of the countries that border [music] the Persian Gulf.

1:04:15 But that's not the only valuable resource that can be found here.

1:04:18 Marked in red, you can also find roughly

1:04:21 40% of the world's proven reserves of natural gas.

1:04:25 Natural gas is the world's third most common source of energy,

1:04:28 behind oil and coal,

1:04:30 and more than a fifth of the world's energy is produced by using it.

1:04:33 Qatar itself produces the highest amount of liquefied natural gas in the world,

1:04:37 [music] and according to British Petroleum,

1:04:39 Iran possesses the world's largest reserves of natural gas.

1:04:43 Between all of these combined reserves,

1:04:45 there is more oil and natural gas in the seas of the Persian

1:04:49 Gulf and the land immediately surrounding it

1:04:52 than anywhere else on the planet Earth.

1:04:55 Since a third of all the world's oil

1:04:57 production is currently taking place around the Gulf,

1:04:59 and a third of the world's energy is powered by oil,

1:05:02 and since a further fifth of natural gas production takes place around the Gulf,

1:05:06 and about a fifth of the world's energy is powered by gas,

1:05:09 it can therefore be said that about 15% of the entire

1:05:14 planet's [music] energy supply comes from around the Persian Gulf,

1:05:19 and largely behind the Strait of Hormuz.

1:05:22 This is why the 30 mi of water here is so insanely important,

1:05:28 because roughly 15% of all the energy that humanity is collectively consuming

1:05:34 right now [music] largely has no other choice but to pass through it.

1:05:40 No other choke point in the 21st century's global transportation network

1:05:44 can come anywhere even close [music] to that level of critical importance.

1:05:49 [snorts] And it doesn't help that navigating

1:05:51 through it is pretty geographically difficult.

1:05:54 There are eight major islands located inside of the strait,

1:05:57 which must be avoided by any ships,

1:05:59 seven of which are de facto controlled by Iran.

1:06:02 These three strategically placed ones are contested by the United Arab Emirates,

1:06:07 but the Iranian military has occupied them since the 1970s,

1:06:10 so they're effectively controlled by Iran.

1:06:12 These areas of water highlighted are too shallow for any tanker to traverse,

1:06:16 while these areas separately highlighted have very limited

1:06:19 visibility due to the obstructions from islands and land.

1:06:22 Dust storms, morning fog,

1:06:23 and haze can all make visibility within the strait even

1:06:26 more challenging and are particularly common events during the summer months.

1:06:30 The UN has established a special traffic separation scheme for tankers

1:06:35 and other ships to take while traveling through to avoid the most risk.

1:06:38 This scheme consists of only two 2-mi wide shipping lanes,

1:06:42 one for incoming and another for outgoing traffic,

1:06:45 while each is only separated by a 2-mi wide buffer zone.

1:06:49 The whole route travels through Iranian, Emirati,

1:06:52 and Omani territorial waters at various times,

1:06:54 and all of the world's largest ships must pass through them and limited

1:06:58 capability to avoid any unexpected obstructions that might or might not crop up.

1:07:03 The overwhelming majority of all the oil that flows

1:07:06 out of the Gulf travels towards East Asia,

1:07:08 76% of it, [music] and most of that travels to only five countries.

1:07:14 China is the world's largest importer

1:07:16 of petroleum and the world's second largest economy,

1:07:19 and is heavily dependent on the oil flow coming out from the Strait of Hormuz,

1:07:23 [music] because it imports about 45% of its

1:07:26 supply from the eight countries around the Persian Gulf.

1:07:29 Japan, the world's third largest economy,

1:07:31 is even more critically dependent and addicted.

1:07:34 Infamously barren of most natural resources

1:07:37 that are required for an industrial society,

1:07:39 Japan has always been forced to seek them

1:07:42 out abroad and away from their home islands,

1:07:44 at times through war, while at other times through trade.

1:07:47 Currently, they rely on trade.

1:07:49 While oil and liquefied natural gas power

1:07:52 more than 60% [music] of Japan's energy needs,

1:07:55 nearly 100% of all of it is imported,

1:07:58 and nearly 80% of that is transported by tankers

1:08:01 from the Persian Gulf and through the Strait of Hormuz.

1:08:05 Therefore, nearly half of Japan's energy,

1:08:08 the fuel that powers the world's third largest economy,

1:08:11 has to travel through the 30 mi of water at the Strait of Hormuz.

1:08:17 And South Korea, the world's 10th largest global economy,

1:08:20 has similar dependencies.

1:08:22 They import nearly 70% of their oil from the Persian Gulf states.

1:08:27 And since oil powers more than 40% of their energy needs,

1:08:30 nearly a third of South Korea's energy supplies also have no other choice

1:08:36 but to be delivered by tankers that are

1:08:38 coming through the 30-mi wide Strait of Hormuz.

1:08:42 Were the strait ever to be obstructed or shut down for very long,

1:08:45 the world's second, third,

1:08:46 and 10th largest economies would immediately come to a screeching halt.

1:08:52 The primary source of revenue for all eight countries

1:08:54 around the Persian Gulf would also immediately dry up,

1:08:58 and the ripple effect from there would

1:09:00 almost certainly crash the entire global economy.

1:09:03 And in that event, there aren't many options

1:09:05 for getting the oil and natural gas around the strait.

1:09:08 Saudi Arabia does have a crude oil and liquefied

1:09:11 natural gas pipeline that they can use to transport

1:09:14 limited amounts from the rich fields around the Persian

1:09:16 Gulf over to their ports on the Red Sea,

1:09:18 while the United Arab Emirates has a similar

1:09:21 pipeline that they can use to transport

1:09:23 further limited amounts to the other side of their country on the Gulf of Oman,

1:09:27 and away from the Strait of Hormuz, but these amounts are all limited,

1:09:31 while Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Iraq possess no such ability.

1:09:36 At a maximum, it's believed that these pipelines can only divert about 20%

1:09:40 of the oil coming out of the Persian Gulf around the Strait of Hormuz,

1:09:44 and building any more oil pipeline infrastructure is expensive.

1:09:48 All of this means that the 30-mi wide Strait of Hormuz is the most

1:09:52 important choke point [music] in the entire

1:09:54 world for the global economy to function smoothly.

1:09:57 And as a result, it's attracted considerable attention

1:10:00 of countless empires and foreign powers from the outside,

1:10:04 most notably the United States.

1:10:06 The US maintains dozens of bases across Oman,

1:10:09 the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain,

1:10:12 Kuwait, and Iraq, seven of the eight countries around the Gulf, save for Iran.

1:10:17 This includes an air force base in Qatar, and the United States' [music] fifth

1:10:20 fleet being further headquartered within Bahrain,

1:10:23 which is generally composed of more than 15,000 sailors, two aircraft carriers,

1:10:28 dozens of other vessels,

1:10:29 and between them and the air force base, countless aircraft.

1:10:33 As the current largest single source for all of humanity's energy,

1:10:37 all of this presence in the area from the United States

1:10:40 is generally in place to ensure that the oil continues flowing,

1:10:44 and to counter Iran's influence over on the other side of the Strait.

1:10:48 The United States and Iran have had no official

1:10:50 diplomatic relations for more than 40 years now, since 1980.

1:10:54 And relations between the two sides of the Strait have been continuously tense.

1:10:59 In the event of a war breaking out,

1:11:01 Iran has made numerous threats over the years to close

1:11:04 the Strait of Hormuz from their side over to Oman,

1:11:07 which, if successful, would shatter the world economy,

1:11:10 and that's enough of a threat to always make America,

1:11:13 or any other foreign power, think twice.

1:11:16 But Iran's capability to do that is realistically pretty limited.

1:11:20 While the Iranian military is powerful, America's is a lot more powerful,

1:11:25 and the presence of the fifth fleet so close by in Bahrain would

1:11:28 almost guarantee American naval and air

1:11:31 superiority almost immediately across the entire Strait.

1:11:34 Iran knows that their navy and air

1:11:36 force couldn't compete though, so as a result,

1:11:39 most of their focus over the past decade has been centered around building air

1:11:42 defenses and missile batteries across the coast

1:11:45 that could simply bombard any ships passing through.

1:11:48 Iran also possesses a massive arsenal of thousands of maritime

1:11:52 mines that they could theoretically quickly fill the 30-mi

1:11:56 wide Strait with that would ground all trading activity

1:11:58 through it to a halt for who knows how long.

1:12:02 Theoretically, Iran could probably shut the Strait down,

1:12:05 but doing so would almost certainly invoke a very sharp response

1:12:10 from a coalition of countries who would be staunchly opposed to it,

1:12:13 likely led by the United States and Saudi Arabia.

1:12:17 That conflict wouldn't be very pretty,

1:12:19 and it's come dangerously close to already happening.

1:12:22 Just two years ago in 2019,

1:12:25 the United States began a military build-up around the Persian Gulf,

1:12:28 while simultaneously withdrawing from the Iran nuclear

1:12:31 deal and imposing new sanctions upon the country.

1:12:33 The conflict escalated from there to the point where an Iranian major

1:12:37 general was assassinated in a US drone strike at the beginning of 2020,

1:12:41 and led from there to Iran bombarding US

1:12:44 military bases across Iraq with rockets and artillery.

1:12:47 It was the closest that America and Iran

1:12:50 have ever come so far to a full-out war, and the tension still hasn't gone away.

1:13:01 There's 62 countries around the world today who

1:13:02 have small populations less than 3 million people.

1:13:05 Because of their small size, they're all generally limited in their power

1:13:08 and influence to their immediate surroundings.

1:13:10 And even then, in the case of places like Armenia, Moldova,

1:13:13 or the Gambia, they're usually minor players even within their own neighborhood.

1:13:16 The fascinating exception to this rule

1:13:18 of thumb for the world's smallest countries, however, is Qatar, a small, dusty,

1:13:23 and largely empty peninsula no larger than the state of Delaware

1:13:26 that juts out from Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf.

1:13:29 While Qatar has an overall population of around 2.8 million people,

1:13:33 which is already smaller than Albania,

1:13:35 only 320,000 of them are actually citizens of the country,

1:13:38 while the remaining nearly two and a half million people are almost

1:13:41 entirely foreign and expatriate labor that have come to the country from abroad.

1:13:45 That means that with only around 320,000 citizens,

1:13:49 Qatar's citizen population is only about the same size as tiny Vanuatu,

1:13:53 a little island country in the Pacific Ocean.

1:13:55 And yet, [music] despite its tiny size in both land and people,

1:13:58 Qatar commands global prestige,

1:14:00 power, and influence on the same scale of countries

1:14:03 that are dozens of times larger than it.

1:14:05 For years now, Qatar has often been

1:14:07 described as the wealthiest country in the world

1:14:09 with the highest GDP per capita of all

1:14:11 the world's nations for multiple years in a row.

1:14:14 The Qatari economy was larger than Ukraine's even before the Russian invasion,

1:14:18 and with nearly 16 times fewer people,

1:14:21 even when including all the foreign labor.

1:14:23 The state of Qatar wields the ninth largest sovereign wealth

1:14:26 fund in the world with assets exceeding 450 billion dollars,

1:14:30 including a large 10 and 1/2% stake in the Volkswagen Group,

1:14:34 and the outright ownership of the Paris Saint-Germain Football Club,

1:14:37 the seventh most valuable football club in the entire world.

1:14:40 This is all in addition to a diversified real estate portfolio

1:14:43 that makes the state of Qatar the largest single property owner in London,

1:14:47 including a 95% stake in the tallest building in Western Europe,

1:14:50 the Shard, 100% ownership of the Harrods department store,

1:14:54 a majority stake in the Canary Wharf financial center,

1:14:57 and a 20% stake in London's Heathrow Airport,

1:15:00 the seventh busiest airport in the world by international passenger traffic.

1:15:03 This sovereign wealth fund's assets equate to more

1:15:06 than 1.4 million dollars per citizen of Qatar,

1:15:09 by far the largest of any sovereign wealth fund in the world.

1:15:13 The state-owned airline Qatar Airways is one of the largest

1:15:15 and the most influential in the entire global aviation industry.

1:15:19 Ranked by assets, Qatar Airways is the ninth largest airline in the world,

1:15:23 and is roughly equivalent in scale to Air France-KLM,

1:15:26 and they have even greater revenue numbers than Turkish Airlines.

1:15:29 The state-owned media company Al Jazeera is one

1:15:31 of the largest public media conglomerate in the world,

1:15:34 second only to the BBC in the number of news bureaus located across the world.

1:15:38 And perhaps most infamously of all,

1:15:40 they are by far the smallest country and the first

1:15:42 in the Arab world to ever host the FIFA World Cup,

1:15:46 which is currently ongoing as of the release of this video.

1:15:49 The Qatar of today is a fabulously wealthy country for its small size,

1:15:53 and with that wealth also comes enormous global influence and power.

1:15:57 And as a result, I would argue that Qatar is

1:16:00 by far [music] the most overpowered country in the 21st century world,

1:16:04 with a level of influence ranking it

1:16:06 as a middle power alongside states that are many,

1:16:09 many times larger than it, like Turkey, South Korea, the Netherlands, or Canada.

1:16:14 And they're only going to continue getting

1:16:15 even more overpowered as this decade advances.

1:16:18 But it wasn't always so certain to be this way,

1:16:20 because Qatar only really started getting rich

1:16:23 and overpowered pretty recently in the 1990s.

1:16:26 For thousands of years before then, hardly anybody would have ever been able

1:16:30 to guess how Qatar's fortunes would eventually turn out, because geographically,

1:16:34 Qatar possesses very few advantages to help it become powerful.

1:16:37 It's just a small, dusty,

1:16:39 flat peninsula covered in deserts with scarce arable land,

1:16:43 little rainfall, and without even a single

1:16:45 river to use for fresh water or irrigation.

1:16:48 The prospects for anyone living here were bleak for thousands of years,

1:16:52 and the only way anybody could really make a living was

1:16:54 limited either to fishing or to diving for pearls in the Gulf.

1:16:57 And consequently, hardly anybody actually did live here.

1:17:00 Qatar was an isolated, impoverished,

1:17:03 and underdeveloped backwater for basically all

1:17:05 of human history until things finally began

1:17:08 changing when oil happened to be discovered

1:17:10 in 1939 across the Dukhan field here,

1:17:13 found across the westernmost edge of the peninsula.

1:17:15 But of course, the same year it was discovered

1:17:18 was the same year that World War II began,

1:17:20 so it was never really developed until a decade later in 1949.

1:17:23 By the 1950s, Qatar was producing a modest amount of oil from this field,

1:17:27 but it paled in comparison to the gigantic oil fields

1:17:30 that had been found nearby across Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

1:17:33 The largest oil field ever discovered in the world is the Ghawar

1:17:36 field less than 150 km away from the Qatari border within Saudi Arabia,

1:17:41 and it alone contains nearly twice the amount of oil found across all of Qatar.

1:17:47 But after scouring across their tiny peninsula,

1:17:49 the Qataris never discovered any other significant oil reserves on land,

1:17:53 and that pushed Qatar and their partnered

1:17:55 Western oil companies to begin searching

1:17:57 for offshore oil reserves around the peninsula

1:17:59 within their territorial waters in the Gulf.

1:18:01 Several were found, but again,

1:18:03 none of them were anything like the huge earth-shattering

1:18:06 finds that the Saudis and Kuwaitis were making just nearby.

1:18:09 It would eventually turn out that Qatar had

1:18:10 the 14th largest reserves of oil in the world,

1:18:13 a significant asset and a boon for the people of the tiny peninsula.

1:18:17 But in the grand scheme of the Persian Gulf,

1:18:19 these oil reserves were still fairly small.

1:18:22 They were but a quarter of the reserves

1:18:24 found in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates,

1:18:26 and only a tenth of those found just next door in Saudi Arabia.

1:18:29 If it was only ever going to rely on oil,

1:18:32 Qatar would never grow to be as rich as its neighbors.

1:18:35 But naturally, Qatar wanted to strike it big like the rest of them,

1:18:38 and so they kept on searching for more.

1:18:39 And then in 1971, they would finally end

1:18:42 up making the geologic discovery of the century, and it wouldn't even be oil.

1:18:46 With the assistance of Shell,

1:18:48 what they ended up discovering was this, a big offshore

1:18:51 natural gas field in the middle of the Persian Gulf,

1:18:54 split roughly 60/40 between their own exclusive economic zone and Iran's.

1:18:58 Their side of the field became known as the North Field,

1:19:01 while Iran's became known as the South Pars Field, [music]

1:19:04 and its discovery would ultimately change both countries' destinies forever.

1:19:08 Because this field is by far the largest

1:19:11 natural gas field ever discovered in the world.

1:19:14 [music] It is so enormous that the Qatari side of the field

1:19:16 alone contains an estimated fifth of all

1:19:19 the entire world's natural gas reserves.

1:19:22 This single field overnight catapulted little Qatar into the number

1:19:26 three position in the world for natural gas reserves,

1:19:30 just behind Iran and Russia, and nearly double the natural gas

1:19:33 reserves found across the entire United States.

1:19:36 Its discovery would one day transform Qatar into the financial

1:19:39 and economic juggernaut that we know it as today,

1:19:42 and it is the primary source of Qatar's OPEC status on the world stage.

1:19:47 But, when it was first discovered,

1:19:48 the Qataris and Shell were actually disappointed that it

1:19:51 wasn't oil and thought it was almost useless.

1:19:53 You see, back at that time in the '70s,

1:19:55 the natural gas industry was completely different than it is today.

1:19:58 Natural gas is, of course, a gas, and that means it takes up a lot of volume.

1:20:03 Exporting natural gas to somewhere else while it's still

1:20:05 in its gaseous state takes up a lot of space,

1:20:07 and that means that exporting the gas by ship

1:20:09 is incredibly inefficient and doesn't make any financial sense.

1:20:12 This is why the liquefied natural gas, or LNG,

1:20:15 business was born shortly after the Second World War.

1:20:17 By converting natural gas into a liquid,

1:20:19 it takes up only 1/600 of the same volume

1:20:22 it does when it's in its gaseous [music] state,

1:20:24 and that means that LNG can be transported in huge quantities by tanker

1:20:29 ship from any source to any destination in the world, in theory.

1:20:34 The problem with LNG has always been that it's

1:20:36 the most expensive way to transport natural gas because

1:20:40 of all the complicated and advanced infrastructure that needs

1:20:43 to be put in place to get it all running.

1:20:45 You need complicated refrigeration plants at the source of the gas

1:20:47 that can cool it down to its liquid state at -161° C.

1:20:51 No easy task to do around the Persian Gulf,

1:20:54 which has some of the hottest average temperatures in the world.

1:20:56 You need to commission specialized refrigerated tanker

1:20:58 ships that can continue keeping the gas that cold for weeks to months on end

1:21:03 while they carry it across the world's oceans.

1:21:05 And you need another specialized plant at the final destination that can

1:21:08 safely transform the LNG back into gas to be used by consumers.

1:21:12 It costs billions of dollars to get all

1:21:13 of this set up before the first shipments even arrive, and worse, in the 1970s,

1:21:18 there was nowhere near enough of a market or a demand for LNG.

1:21:22 Europe received plentiful cheaper gas from pipelines

1:21:25 coming in from places like Russia, Norway, and the Netherlands,

1:21:28 meaning that expensive LNG was not going to be competitive there.

1:21:31 But, the increasingly advanced and developing island economies

1:21:34 of East Asia were a completely different matter altogether.

1:21:36 Japan, in particular, is an island nation that is bereft of fossil fuels,

1:21:40 meaning that as their economy developed and their demand for gas increased,

1:21:44 their geography was better suited towards importing gas as LNG from container

1:21:47 ships rather than through long pipelines built across or beneath the ocean.

1:21:52 The same became true of Taiwan and eventually South Korea as well,

1:21:55 which effectively functions as an island

1:21:57 as well for the purpose of importing energy

1:21:59 from abroad because of North Korea and the ocean to their other three sides.

1:22:03 All three of these rising East Asian economies'

1:22:05 demand for LNG began to grow over the years,

1:22:08 and at first, their demand was almost

1:22:09 entirely met by nearby producers in Southeast Asia,

1:22:12 Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei.

1:22:14 This was the world that Qatar and Shell found themselves in in 1971

1:22:18 when they suddenly discovered the biggest natural gas field in the world,

1:22:22 and they initially decided that they couldn't economically

1:22:24 compete for any of the market in Asia.

1:22:26 Building up an LNG industry from scratch was

1:22:28 thought to be too costly and too risky,

1:22:31 and building out long pipelines to markets in Europe

1:22:33 was just too ridiculous and expensive to even consider.

1:22:36 They had both hoped that their discovery was oil because,

1:22:38 unlike natural gas, oil is naturally a liquid,

1:22:41 and so it's far less costly to just load

1:22:43 it up on tankers and ship it around the world.

1:22:46 So, rather than developing Qatar's natural gas in the North Field,

1:22:49 Shell abandoned the project, and with global oil prices skyrocketing following

1:22:53 the Arab oil embargoes in the '70s,

1:22:55 Qatar continued to focus on its smaller oil reserves for the next 20 years.

1:23:00 And then, everything would begin to change again in the late 1980s.

1:23:04 In 1986, the price of oil unexpectedly crashed by more than

1:23:07 50% production and revenue from oil sales in Qatar crashed alongside it,

1:23:12 and the Qatari economy,

1:23:13 which almost entirely relied upon selling oil at the time,

1:23:16 was put into a crisis mode.

1:23:18 By the 1990s, with oil prices and revenue still low,

1:23:22 the Qataris began turning their attention back towards all of that natural

1:23:25 gas they found 20 years previously in the biggest field in the world.

1:23:29 And at the same time, global demand for natural gas was beginning to increase.

1:23:33 Natural gas emits 50% less CO2 than coal when it's burned for energy,

1:23:38 and about 30% less than oil while releasing less air pollution as well,

1:23:42 making it a desirable and slightly cleaner fuel to use

1:23:45 for electricity for nations weary of climate change and pollution,

1:23:49 or for nations seeking a transitory fuel source while they move

1:23:51 towards full carbon neutrality and green energies like wind or solar.

1:23:55 And at the same time,

1:23:56 the cost of building out LNG infrastructure had dramatically come down

1:24:00 after more than 20 years

1:24:01 of continuous technological developments and understanding.

1:24:05 In 1995, the ambitious son of the ruling Qatari emir

1:24:08 launched a bloodless coup d'état against his father and overthrew him.

1:24:12 And it would be under his leadership that little

1:24:15 Qatar would be transformed into a world power.

1:24:18 Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani strongly believed in the potential of the natural

1:24:23 gas reserves in the North Field and in the growing LNG business.

1:24:27 Equipped with billions of dollars worth of investment

1:24:29 secured from Western energy companies like ExxonMobil,

1:24:31 the Qataris and their partners set out to build no less than

1:24:34 the largest and the most competitive LNG business the world had ever seen.

1:24:39 Backed up by the single largest gas field ever discovered,

1:24:42 the Qataris managed to increase the scale

1:24:44 of their LNG operations to never-before-seen heights.

1:24:48 They constructed the largest artificial harbor

1:24:50 in the world for their Ras Laffan Industrial City,

1:24:53 which became their primary production and export center for Qatari LNG.

1:24:56 They commissioned larger and larger LNG container ships that could

1:25:00 carry increasingly larger volumes of LNG to customers abroad.

1:25:03 And by 1996, Qatar was exporting their first shipments of LNG

1:25:07 through the Strait of Hormuz and abroad to global markets.

1:25:11 It would end up revolutionizing both Qatar and the entire world in the process.

1:25:15 Within just 10 years of the beginning their operations by 2006,

1:25:19 Qatar had already overtaken all of its LNG competitors like Malaysia

1:25:24 and Indonesia to become the largest exporter of LNG in the world.

1:25:28 With the bulk of their shipments eating into the market

1:25:30 share in the East Asian economies of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

1:25:34 South Korea became their single largest customer,

1:25:37 and they still continue to purchase roughly 27%

1:25:40 of their entire natural gas supply from Qatar alone.

1:25:43 And the vast revenues that these countries were paying for Qatari

1:25:47 LNG flooded back into the coffers of the Qatari government,

1:25:51 which, of course, made them mind-bogglingly rich.

1:25:54 This is a chart of the gross domestic product

1:25:56 per capita in Qatar from 1987 to the present.

1:25:59 This year, 1996, is when Qatar first began exporting LNG to the world market,

1:26:03 and you can clearly see how immediately afterwards,

1:26:06 their wealth began to absolutely skyrocket to the point in 2006

1:26:10 where they became the largest LNG exporter in the world.

1:26:13 Tens of billions of dollars a year began flowing

1:26:16 directly to Qatar in exchange for their shipments of LNG.

1:26:20 But, all of this newfound wealth came with a problem.

1:26:22 Qatar was growing too over-dependent on a single source

1:26:26 of income and was transforming into the world's first LNG state.

1:26:30 By the 2010s, 70% of the entire government's revenue,

1:26:34 60% [music] of the entire country's GDP,

1:26:37 and 85% of their export earnings were all

1:26:39 simply coming from the LNG and petroleum business.

1:26:43 If the business were to ever crash or run out of supplies,

1:26:46 Qatar would be forced into going back to the impoverished,

1:26:49 empty peninsula that it had been for thousands of years beforehand.

1:26:53 And of course, the government has always been aware of this, [music]

1:26:55 and so in order to diversify their income streams and secure their future,

1:26:58 they began investing into other businesses, ideas, and avenues.

1:27:02 Qatar Airways was founded in 1993 and expanded with the LNG and oil

1:27:06 money to become one of the top 10 largest airlines in the world today.

1:27:10 The Qatar sovereign wealth fund was established in 2005 as a means

1:27:13 to invest their massive [music] revenues into projects, real estate,

1:27:17 and companies abroad to the point where today,

1:27:19 the fund's assets are nearly equivalent to the entire annual GDP of Egypt,

1:27:23 [music] a nation of more than 100 million people.

1:27:26 And then in 1996, the same year they began exporting LNG,

1:27:30 they also founded the state-owned Al Jazeera Media Group,

1:27:34 translating from Arabic into English as literally the peninsula,

1:27:38 the Qatar peninsula.

1:27:39 But, Qatar still had a low natural population base

1:27:42 in addition to being located in a dangerous geopolitical neighborhood.

1:27:46 Saddam Hussein's Iraq had previously launched wars of conquest into both

1:27:50 Iran and Kuwait in order to seize control over their oil industries,

1:27:54 and little Qatar was hypothetically a much more

1:27:57 vulnerable target than either of those had been.

1:27:59 There was also the fact that Qatar shared

1:28:01 the largest natural gas field in the world with Iran,

1:28:04 which meant that each of their governments

1:28:05 had to collaborate together and remain friendly

1:28:08 to an extent in order to safely and mutually extract all of the gas there,

1:28:13 a situation that made next door Saudi Arabia,

1:28:15 the greatest rival of Iran, intensely apprehensive.

1:28:19 Qatar's solution to defending themselves

1:28:21 in this precarious geopolitical neighborhood

1:28:23 was by simply aligning itself very closely to the United States.

1:28:27 At the same [music] time as they were getting their LNG business up and running,

1:28:31 Qatar invited both the American and British militaries [music]

1:28:33 to assist in constructing the Al Udeid airbase in the country,

1:28:37 which eventually went on to become the US

1:28:39 military's largest base in the entire Middle

1:28:41 East with more than 11,000 total personnel

1:28:45 and more than 100 operational aircraft as of today.

1:28:48 It became an invaluable asset for the United States through multiple conflicts,

1:28:52 used as a primary airbase to conduct operations from in Afghanistan,

1:28:55 Iraq, and later against ISIS in Syria.

1:28:58 And beyond that base, Qatar also supplied enormous quantities of energy supplies

1:29:03 to many of America's most important allies in Asia,

1:29:06 Japan, South Korea, [music] Taiwan, and India.

1:29:09 This is all in part why

1:29:10 the Biden administration would eventually label tiny Qatar

1:29:13 [music] as a major non-NATO ally of the United States at the beginning of 2022,

1:29:18 a status that is similarly bestowed upon great power nations

1:29:22 like Japan and Brazil with nearly a hundred times Qatar's population.

1:29:27 Meanwhile, Qatar's low population base of only a few hundred

1:29:30 thousand people also proved to make it difficult to actually

1:29:32 use all of that money from LNG and petroleum

1:29:35 to build things like skyscrapers and stadiums for the World Cup.

1:29:39 And so to solve that problem,

1:29:41 Qatar began encouraging enormous migration to the country for low-

1:29:45 skilled workers coming primarily from South Asian nations like Nepal,

1:29:48 India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.

1:29:50 This is why today, Qatar's demographic structure is one

1:29:53 of the strangest and the most [music] exploitative in the entire world.

1:29:57 Nearly nine in 10 people in the country today are foreign workers

1:30:00 without any citizenship who have recently moved to the country from abroad,

1:30:04 including more than 700,000 from India.

1:30:07 Since the overwhelming majority of the foreign workers

1:30:09 who have come to Qatar are also men,

1:30:11 Qatar's gender profile is by far the most lopsided in the world

1:30:16 with roughly three men in the country for every one woman.

1:30:19 And ever since these migrations began to Qatar,

1:30:22 there have been countless reports of terrible human rights

1:30:25 abuses that have been made against them with many

1:30:28 publications suggesting that the treatment of the millions

1:30:30 of foreign workers in Qatar essentially amounts to modern-day slavery.

1:30:35 South Asian men would be promised by Qatari officials

1:30:38 of high pay and good conditions and then lured

1:30:41 to the country where they would then often have

1:30:43 their passports confiscated and with no way to leave,

1:30:46 forced into much lower paying labor jobs with much

1:30:50 worse conditions than they had initially been promised.

1:30:52 Over the past decade, [music] Qatar has spent more than 200 billion

1:30:56 dollars of its LNG and petroleum wealth to build

1:30:59 out stadiums and infrastructure for the World Cup

1:31:01 and put millions of their foreign laborers to work.

1:31:04 And according to some reports, at least 6,500 of those workers died

1:31:11 building everything simply due to atrocious working conditions.

1:31:16 That is simply unacceptable and it is a dark stain

1:31:20 on Qatar's success story and the World Cup in general.

1:31:23 At the same time, Qatar's LNG wealth was

1:31:26 also coming under threat in the later 2010s.

1:31:29 After an investment of more than 250

1:31:30 billion dollars into their own LNG industry,

1:31:33 Australia suddenly surpassed the Qataris for the number one

1:31:36 largest exporter of LNG at the end of 2018.

1:31:39 And the United States wasn't very far behind them

1:31:42 with billions worth of investments into the industry of their own.

1:31:45 Australian and American LNG were suddenly competing

1:31:48 with Qatari LNG for market share across Asia.

1:31:51 And not content with playing second or even third fiddle,

1:31:54 the Qataris decided to double down.

1:31:56 In 2019, they announced a 30 billion dollar plan to expand their LNG production

1:32:01 from the North Field with billions of more

1:32:03 dollars coming from Western energy giants like Shell,

1:32:06 Exxon, and Chevron among others.

1:32:08 The plan was that Qatar's LNG exports

1:32:11 would be increased by nearly two-thirds by 2026,

1:32:14 which hypothetically would have enabled Qatar to regain the position

1:32:18 of the world's largest exporter and to then keep it indefinitely.

1:32:21 But many people were worried at the time

1:32:23 that such a massive investment into even more LNG

1:32:26 production would have never paid off with the stiff

1:32:29 competition growing from the Australians and the Americans.

1:32:32 Where would all the excess Qatari LNG go to?

1:32:35 The Asian market's demand was already largely being met.

1:32:38 North America was growing increasingly energy

1:32:40 independent and less reliant on imports.

1:32:43 And Europe hardly bought any LNG at all with most

1:32:46 of their gas demand being met by the Russians,

1:32:48 Norwegians, and Algerians through their pipelines.

1:32:50 And then, of course,

1:32:52 everything changed when the Russians invaded Ukraine and the Europeans

1:32:55 began to cut out all of their gas imports from Russia.

1:32:58 Suddenly, out of nowhere, a brand new enormous market for LNG that is roughly

1:33:03 the same size as Asia's market opened up to the suppliers.

1:33:07 And Qatar immediately became one of the best positioned to capitalize on it.

1:33:11 There is perhaps no other country in the world

1:33:13 that will benefit more from Russia's invasion of Ukraine than Qatar.

1:33:16 A flurry of high-ranking European Union

1:33:19 and German energy executives have now been

1:33:21 flying back and forth with Doha to discuss new LNG contracts and shipments.

1:33:26 And now, the Qatari economy is expected to grow by more than

1:33:29 4% this year alone and it could potentially only be the beginning.

1:33:33 With Russian gas now being completely locked out of the European market,

1:33:37 LNG replacements from elsewhere will be

1:33:39 highly in demand and competitively priced.

1:33:43 And Qatar is currently estimating that at least half of their ongoing LNG

1:33:47 expansion in the North Field will now be headed straight for Europe by 2026,

1:33:52 ensuring them billions of dollars a year in extra revenues

1:33:56 from today and increased leverage over European demand and influence.

1:34:00 Naturally, Qatar's new-found wealth has also come with new-found

1:34:04 ambitions and abilities to influence the world around them.

1:34:08 And this has often gotten them into trouble.

1:34:10 Since they share the largest natural gas field in the world with Iran,

1:34:13 Qatar has always maintained that fairly close

1:34:16 working relationship with them out of necessity, which, like I said before,

1:34:19 has never sat well with Saudi Arabia, Iran's fiercest geopolitical rival.

1:34:24 But Qatar's and Saudi Arabia's foreign policies

1:34:26 clash in many more ways than just this.

1:34:30 Following the Arab Spring revolutions that swept

1:34:32 across the Arab world in the early 2010s,

1:34:34 Qatar and Saudi Arabia nearly always found themselves supporting

1:34:38 the opposite sides in every conflict all throughout the region.

1:34:42 Qatar came to support the wave

1:34:43 of democratic and Islamist revolts long-standing Arab regimes,

1:34:47 such as by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood's democratic

1:34:50 rise to power in Egypt with billions of dollars,

1:34:53 generous media coverage within Al Jazeera

1:34:55 of the uprisings in Bahrain against the monarchy,

1:34:58 and eventual backing of the Tripoli-based Government

1:35:00 of National Accord during the Libyan Civil War.

1:35:03 All of which the Saudis fiercely opposed and fought against.

1:35:07 There became increasing concerns within Riyadh

1:35:09 that Qatar's overt support for revolutions

1:35:12 against long-standing autocratic regimes across

1:35:15 the Arab world meant that one day,

1:35:17 they would also be bankrolling a revolution against the nearly century-old

1:35:21 absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia with both money and generous media coverage.

1:35:27 By 2017, the Saudis had had enough

1:35:29 of their conflicting ambitions and all on the same day,

1:35:32 Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates,

1:35:34 Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Djibouti, Senegal, Mauritania,

1:35:37 the Comoros, the Maldives,

1:35:38 and the Saudi-supported Tobruk-based government in Libya,

1:35:41 as well as the Saudi-supported Hadi government in Yemen,

1:35:44 all announced the severing of their diplomatic relations with Qatar.

1:35:48 Saudi Arabia and the UAE went another step

1:35:50 further by also shutting down all of their ports

1:35:53 to Qatari-registered ships and shutting down all

1:35:56 of their airspace to the state-owned airline, Qatar Airways.

1:35:59 The Saudis also shut down their entire land border with Qatar,

1:36:02 effectively transforming the country into an island state.

1:36:05 And then, to make Qatar's isolation even more permanent,

1:36:08 the Saudis even proposed digging a canal across their entire land

1:36:12 border and filling it in with water from the Persian Gulf,

1:36:15 which would have literally transformed Qatar into an island.

1:36:19 They made several demands of Qatar in order to lift the blockade,

1:36:22 including that they shut down Al Jazeera,

1:36:24 reduce their diplomatic relations with Iran,

1:36:26 end their alleged support for foreign organizations considered to be terrorist

1:36:29 by the Saudis like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas in Gaza,

1:36:33 among others, agree to reparation payments and 10 years of monitoring,

1:36:38 and to align themselves fully with the geopolitical

1:36:41 interests of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.

1:36:44 Naturally, Qatar refused all of the demands and the economic

1:36:47 consequences of the Saudi-led blockade over them immediately became apparent.

1:36:51 Qatar Airways had relied extensively on both Saudi and Emirati

1:36:55 airspace for a significant amount of their routes and nearly overnight,

1:36:59 they had to suddenly change all of their flight paths

1:37:01 to longer and more costly routes to avoid both countries entirely.

1:37:05 The Saudi-led blockade over Qatar would go on for another three

1:37:08 and a half years until January of 2021 and it largely

1:37:13 only ended out of the Saudi regime's own desire to rebrand

1:37:16 their image with the incoming Biden administration over in the United States.

1:37:21 Many figures in Washington have been

1:37:22 frustrated with the blockade for years because

1:37:25 both Saudi Arabia and Qatar are nominally strategic allies of the United States.

1:37:31 And even more strange, the United States, Qatar,

1:37:34 and the Saudis had all actually been cooperating together alongside

1:37:38 of each other for years in another major conflict in the region,

1:37:41 the civil war in Yemen.

1:37:43 In late 2014 or early 2015, a Shia Muslim-adjacent group called the Houthis

1:37:48 managed to seize control over the capital in Yemen and declared themselves

1:37:52 as the sole legitimate government of the country,

1:37:54 sparking a civil [music] war between

1:37:56 themselves and the previously Sunni Muslim-led government.

1:37:59 The sudden possibility of Yemen flipping into a Shia-led

1:38:02 country immediately sent shockwaves throughout the Islamic world and especially

1:38:08 in Saudi Arabia over the fear that a Shia-led

1:38:11 Yemen could end up aligning itself with the Iranians,

1:38:15 the world's most preeminent Shia power.

1:38:17 Were this scenario to take place, Saudi Arabia would be placed into its

1:38:22 worst imaginable geopolitical position with its

1:38:25 primary enemy Iran being theoretically capable

1:38:27 of blockading the Strait of Hormuz,

1:38:29 the leads between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea,

1:38:32 and an Iranian-aligned Yemen theoretically

1:38:34 capable of simultaneously blockading the Bab

1:38:37 el-Mandeb Strait between the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.

1:38:41 Were that to happen, Saudi Arabia would economically collapse because

1:38:45 the country relies so extensively on selling

1:38:47 their oil exports to countries in Asia on the backs of tanker ships.

1:38:51 The most direct route to Asia for these tanker

1:38:53 ships to take from Saudi Arabia are, of course,

1:38:56 from either the Saudi East or West Coast through

1:38:58 either the Strait of Hormuz or the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

1:39:02 But if both of them are blockaded, then the only possible way that Saudi

1:39:06 oil could actually continue reaching their Asian

1:39:08 customers would be through the Suez Canal

1:39:11 and around the entirety of the African continent,

1:39:14 which would make Saudi oil far more expensive and less

1:39:17 competitive and potentially crash their economy in the process.

1:39:21 So, in order to prevent that from ever happening,

1:39:23 the Saudis gather together a massive military coalition

1:39:27 that included the Qataris and support from the Americans,

1:39:30 and they began invading and blockading Yemen in March

1:39:33 of 2015 in order to topple the Houthis from power.

1:39:40 Djibouti is a small country in the Horn of Africa that is most

1:39:42 well known in the Western world for its funny sounding name in English.

1:39:45 Indeed, Djibouti is a country that few

1:39:47 Westerners probably ever give a second thought about.

1:39:50 It's only about the size of New Hampshire and it

1:39:51 only has a small population of about 957,000 people,

1:39:55 the lowest population of any country on the entire mainland African continent.

1:39:59 And yet, despite its small size and funny sounding name,

1:40:02 Djibouti is one of the most serious and influential

1:40:04 geopolitical hotspots in the entire world because of this.

1:40:08 The sheer number of foreign military bases

1:40:11 that have been established on its territory.

1:40:13 I mean, just look at this map

1:40:14 of the area immediately around Djibouti's capital city,

1:40:16 which is also called Djibouti.

1:40:18 You've got an American military base here,

1:40:20 which is the only permanent military base the United

1:40:22 States has got anywhere on the African continent.

1:40:24 You've got a collection of French military bases up here,

1:40:27 a French operated airbase down here that the United

1:40:29 States also uses to fly drones out of.

1:40:31 You've got a Japanese military base over here,

1:40:33 which is literally the only overseas base that the Japanese operate anywhere.

1:40:37 You've got an Italian military base wedged in here by the Americans.

1:40:41 You've got another French naval base up here.

1:40:43 You've got German and Spanish soldiers who don't have bases

1:40:45 of their own but get stationed up in these hotels.

1:40:48 And then you've even got a Chinese People's Liberation Army

1:40:50 naval base over here on the other side of town,

1:40:52 opposite of the Americans and friends.

1:40:54 The first overseas military base that the People's

1:40:57 Republic of China ever built anywhere.

1:40:59 And other countries are still actively trying

1:41:01 to build their own bases here as well.

1:41:03 In 2021, Djibouti agreed to allow Saudi Arabia to begin

1:41:06 construction of a new military base in the country as well,

1:41:09 which will likely appear somewhere near the American base when completed.

1:41:12 And then for years now,

1:41:13 Djibouti has also been courted by the Indian and Russian governments

1:41:16 to construct some kind of base there for themselves as well.

1:41:19 All of this means that as of 2023,

1:41:21 little Djibouti in fact has by far the highest per capita concentration

1:41:25 of foreign military bases on its soil out of any country in the world.

1:41:29 [music] And that kind of begs the question, why and how did this little country

1:41:34 in the Horn of Africa essentially become the 21st

1:41:37 century's global military base for all of the world's

1:41:40 great powers to set up their operations in.

1:41:42 Well, a lot of Djibouti's significance

1:41:44 and value comes from its ideal geographic position.

1:41:47 You see, while Djibouti is indeed small,

1:41:49 it also sits precisely on the western side of the narrow Bab el-Mandeb Strait,

1:41:53 immediately opposite of Yemen.

1:41:55 At its narrowest point, this strait is but 28 km wide,

1:41:59 and it is those 28 km that all ships must pass through

1:42:03 in order to get between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

1:42:05 And in effect, because of the Suez Canal further to the north through Egypt,

1:42:09 it is these 28 km that all ships must pass through in order

1:42:12 to get between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, at least quickly.

1:42:16 This makes the Bab el-Mandeb Strait one of the most

1:42:18 geopolitically crucial maritime choke points in the world,

1:42:22 especially from the perspective of the global oil and gas industry

1:42:25 and the state security of dozens of countries from all around the world.

1:42:28 You see, while the Red Sea in the area around the Bab

1:42:30 el-Mandeb Strait never yielded very many

1:42:32 lucrative oil or natural gas discoveries,

1:42:34 the nearby Persian Gulf region on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula

1:42:38 literally contains the highest concentration of oil

1:42:41 and gas found anywhere on the planet.

1:42:43 Approximately half of all the world's known oil reserves

1:42:45 and around a third of all the world's current oil production,

1:42:48 in addition to around 40% of all the world's

1:42:50 known natural gas reserves are found only here,

1:42:53 scattered around the shores of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait,

1:42:55 Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman.

1:42:59 These reserves include the largest single oil field ever

1:43:02 discovered in the world here at Ghawar in Saudi Arabia,

1:43:04 and the largest single natural gas field ever

1:43:06 discovered in the world here at the North

1:43:08 and South Pars Field in the center of the Gulf shared between Qatar and Iran,

1:43:13 which all in itself represents around a fifth of all

1:43:16 the natural gas reserves ever found on the entire planet.

1:43:19 The Persian Gulf is therefore arguably the single most

1:43:22 important location on the entire planet in the 21st century,

1:43:26 as it is effectively the greatest single source

1:43:28 in the universe for the energy that humanity collectively consumes.

1:43:31 The eight countries around the Persian Gulf

1:43:33 harvest their oil and natural gas resources, load them up on a container ships,

1:43:37 and then ship them through the similarly narrow

1:43:39 Strait of Hormuz and into the Indian Ocean,

1:43:42 where they then travel onwards to markets all around the world.

1:43:45 For the ships carrying Persian Gulf oil and natural gas towards Asia,

1:43:48 the journey then takes them across the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal,

1:43:51 then through the narrow Strait of Malacca,

1:43:52 and then onwards to the energy-hungry economies of China,

1:43:55 Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan.

1:43:57 But for the ships carrying Persian Gulf oil and natural

1:43:59 gas onwards from the Strait of Hormuz to Europe,

1:44:01 the quickest and most efficient path is for them

1:44:03 to then head west across the Gulf of Aden,

1:44:05 through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait past Djibouti,

1:44:07 up the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal across Egypt

1:44:10 and into the Mediterranean before then continuing

1:44:12 onwards to ports across the European continent.

1:44:15 As of 2022, approximately 20% of the European Union's oil imports and 24%

1:44:20 of their liquefied natural gas imports were all

1:44:22 coming in from countries around the Persian Gulf,

1:44:25 delivered almost entirely by containers passing through

1:44:28 the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Suez Canal.

1:44:30 Were either of these choke points to become somehow obstructed or blockaded,

1:44:34 the European Union would in a flash lose a major import route for huge

1:44:38 volumes of their oil and gas supply that powers their societies and economies.

1:44:42 And the only possible alternative route for Persian

1:44:45 Gulf oil and gas to reach the European market would be by then sailing the very

1:44:49 long way around the entirety of the African continent,

1:44:52 a route that adds weeks to delivery times

1:44:54 and consequently adds higher cost to the prices of imports.

1:44:58 This risk was most laid bare back in March of 2021,

1:45:01 when a container ship ran aground within the Suez Canal and blocked

1:45:03 it all off to trade for a period of 6 days,

1:45:06 resulting in hundreds of ships queuing up

1:45:08 to pass through the canal to collectively

1:45:09 prevented an estimated 9.6 [music] billion

1:45:12 dollars worth of trade from taking place.

1:45:15 Were the Bab el-Mandeb Strait to become blocked for whatever reason instead,

1:45:18 the result would largely be the same.

1:45:21 And that is a massive fear to Saudi Arabia.

1:45:24 You see, if there were ever a textbook definition

1:45:27 of what a petrostate looks like, it is Saudi Arabia.

1:45:30 The country controls 15% of the entire world's proven reserves of oil,

1:45:34 largely around its territory bordering the Persian Gulf.

1:45:37 The Saudis are the largest oil exporter in the entire world,

1:45:40 and they also maintain the largest oil production capacity in the entire world.

1:45:44 The Saudi state is defined by its vast oil reserves and production

1:45:48 and ability to sell and export that oil to markets around the world.

1:45:52 40% of the entire Saudi GDP is simply the country's oil industry,

1:45:57 while on average over the past decade,

1:45:59 Saudi oil revenues have provided a whopping

1:46:01 75% of the government's entire annual budget

1:46:05 that funds everything from ambitious construction

1:46:08 and infrastructure projects to the Saudi Armed Forces.

1:46:11 Therefore, if Saudi Arabia's ability to export oil abroad and earn

1:46:14 revenue to fund their government was ever put into jeopardy,

1:46:17 it could end up literally meaning the collapse

1:46:19 of the central Saudi state and even the Saudi absolute monarchy.

1:46:23 Since nearly all of Saudi Arabia's oil fields are located

1:46:25 in the east of the country near to the Persian Gulf,

1:46:28 the easiest and most obvious method of getting their oil out to global markets

1:46:32 is by putting them on container ships

1:46:33 and sending them through the Strait of Hormuz.

1:46:35 But that strait is vulnerable because at its narrowest point,

1:46:39 it is less than 34 km wide, and the entire northern shoreline of the strait

1:46:44 is controlled by their greatest geopolitical rival,

1:46:47 the Islamic Republic of Iran.

1:46:50 Throughout the decades,

1:46:50 the Iranians have frequently threatened and boasted about their ability to shut

1:46:54 down the Strait of Hormuz if they ever felt like it,

1:46:57 either by placing countless naval mines across the strait

1:47:00 and/or by lining the north shore of the strait

1:47:02 with area denial weapons like surface-to-ship and surface-to-air

1:47:05 missiles and just attacking everything that comes through it.

1:47:08 Such an action would probably trigger a military

1:47:10 response from the United States, but it would also,

1:47:13 at least [music] temporarily, crash Saudi Arabia's ability to export oil through

1:47:17 the Strait of Hormuz and keep their government functioning.

1:47:20 So, in order to mitigate that risk a bit,

1:47:22 the Saudis constructed what's known as the East-West Pipeline,

1:47:25 which can transfer limited volumes of their crude oil from their fields

1:47:29 around the Persian Gulf to ports over on the Red Sea,

1:47:32 where the oil can then continue on to world markets through either

1:47:35 the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the south or the Suez Canal in the north.

1:47:38 But unfortunately for the Saudis,

1:47:40 even this ability has come under threat because of the civil war in Yemen.

1:47:45 Beginning in 2014, a generally Shia Muslim-adjacent

1:47:48 faction in Yemen known as the Houthis

1:47:50 rose up in revolt against the predominantly

1:47:52 Sunni Muslim and Saudi-backed government in the country,

1:47:55 and they quickly seized control over the capital city.

1:47:58 The Houthis have allegedly received weapons and financing from the Iranians,

1:48:02 and their zone of control primarily exists near

1:48:04 to the eastern shore of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

1:48:07 Were the Houthis to become successful and take control over

1:48:10 Yemen and remain aligned with Saudi Arabia's greatest geopolitical rival, Iran,

1:48:15 it is conceivable that the Houthis and Iranians

1:48:17 could coordinate a joint blockade action wherein the Iranians

1:48:20 block the Strait of Hormuz and the Houthis block

1:48:23 the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the exact same time.

1:48:27 And in doing so, deny the Saudis pretty much any way to continue

1:48:30 exporting their oil to their largest customers in East Asia, like China.

1:48:34 The only way the Saudis could continue transporting their oil

1:48:37 to markets in Asia under this scenario would be the very,

1:48:40 very long and limited way across the East-West

1:48:43 Pipeline to the west coast, up the Red Sea,

1:48:46 through the Suez Canal, across the Mediterranean,

1:48:48 and through the Strait of Gibraltar,

1:48:50 and then around the entirety of the African continent just to get

1:48:54 to the same place where Saudi oil exports normally begin at anyway.

1:48:58 This is why the Saudis have been attacking

1:49:00 and bombing the Houthis in Yemen for years now,

1:49:03 and it's why the Saudis have been so interested in building

1:49:06 their own overseas military base on the opposite end of the Bab

1:49:09 el Mandeb Strait in Djibouti so that they can quickly respond

1:49:13 to the situation and free the strait up if that time ever comes.

1:49:16 But of course, the Bab el Mandeb Strait isn't just

1:49:19 of critical importance to the Saudis and their state security.

1:49:22 Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Europe,

1:49:24 the European Union has been steadily divesting itself away

1:49:27 from their previously high imports of Russian oil and gas.

1:49:31 One of the primary countries that has stepped up to supply

1:49:33 the Europeans with greater quantities of natural gas is Qatar,

1:49:37 a small country but with big resources.

1:49:40 The second largest reserves of natural gas of any

1:49:43 country on the planet after the Russians themselves.

1:49:46 The Qataris are currently investing tens of billions of dollars into expanding

1:49:49 their LNG production out of their North Field in the Gulf,

1:49:53 a large amount of which is slated to be exported further to Europe

1:49:56 as the European demand for alternative supplies

1:49:58 of gas away from Russia continues to increase.

1:50:01 Qatar is thus becoming a major component

1:50:03 of the European Union's new energy profile as the EU

1:50:06 continues to increase their LNG imports and divest

1:50:09 themselves away from Russian natural gas pipelines.

1:50:12 But just like the oil making its way to Europe, the cheapest, quickest,

1:50:16 and easiest way for Qatari LNG to make its

1:50:18 way to Europe is also through the Strait of Hormuz,

1:50:21 the Bab el Mandeb Strait, and the Suez Canal.

1:50:24 Consequently, the Bab el Mandeb and the Suez

1:50:26 Canal alike are both gaining in global importance.

1:50:29 [music] Even as far back as 2018 before all these major geopolitical shifts,

1:50:34 an estimated 6.2 million barrels worth of crude oil a day

1:50:38 were passing through the Bab el Mandeb Strait toward Europe,

1:50:40 Asia, and North America,

1:50:42 representing around 9% of all the traded oil in the world.

1:50:46 And it's not just oil and gas that makes the Bab el Mandeb so important either.

1:50:50 From China's perspective, the strait is a critical component making up

1:50:53 their shortest maritime export route to Europe as well.

1:50:56 China's economy is basically based around importing enormous amounts

1:51:01 of raw energy materials from the Persian Gulf states,

1:51:04 using those enormous raw energy materials

1:51:06 to produce enormous volumes of manufactured goods,

1:51:09 and then exporting those enormous volumes of manufactured goods

1:51:13 to the world's largest consumer markets in North America and Europe.

1:51:16 These manufactured exports represent around 30% of the entire Chinese economy,

1:51:21 and the quickest and cheapest way for their exports

1:51:23 to make it to the European market ends up passing through

1:51:26 the Bab el Mandeb Strait and the Suez Canal rather

1:51:29 than sailing the long way around either Africa or the Pacific.

1:51:32 Ultimately, the Bab el Mandeb Strait is one of the most critical

1:51:34 maritime chokepoints that keeps the pace of globalized trade alive and well.

1:51:38 Europe needs the strait to be secure to continue

1:51:40 importing large amounts of their oil and gas

1:51:42 from the Persian Gulf and large volumes of manufactured

1:51:45 products from China as cheaply and as quickly as possible.

1:51:48 Persian Gulf states and primarily Saudi Arabia need

1:51:50 the strait to remain secure so that they

1:51:52 can continue selling oil and gas to Europe

1:51:54 and Asia and keep their foreign policy options flexible.

1:51:57 China needs the strait secure to continue exporting their manufactured

1:52:00 goods to Europe as quickly and cheaply as possible.

1:52:02 While the United States wants the strait to remain secure

1:52:05 to keep global trade from falling apart and to keep

1:52:08 the European oil and gas supply steady in the face

1:52:10 of Russian aggression and energy warfare in Europe.

1:52:13 That's why the security of the Bab Strait is so important to so many people.

1:52:18 But it's also unfortunately placed

1:52:20 in a very geopolitically turbulent neighborhood.

1:52:24 Yemen, which occupies the entire north shore of the strait,

1:52:27 has been consumed by one of the most devastating civil wars

1:52:30 of the 21st century for nearly a decade now that is still continuing.

1:52:34 A civil war that has claimed the lives of hundreds

1:52:37 of thousands of people and has become an intense

1:52:39 proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran as each

1:52:42 vies for supremacy over the other in the country.

1:52:45 On the southern shore of the strait is Eritrea,

1:52:48 a ruthless totalitarian one-party dictatorship that has been ruled

1:52:51 by the same man ever since 1993 and which

1:52:54 is generally considered to have one of the most

1:52:56 abysmal human rights records and freedoms on the planet,

1:52:59 genuinely on a par with North Korea.

1:53:02 Eritrea was also locked in a conflict over disputed lands

1:53:05 with neighboring Ethiopia for decades until it was resolved only in 2019.

1:53:10 But the very next year after that, the Tigray War exploded in Ethiopia just

1:53:15 across the border as the Tigray region

1:53:17 of Ethiopia rebelled against the central Ethiopian government.

1:53:21 A horrible conflict which would ultimately between 2020

1:53:24 and 2022 descend into the bloodiest and most

1:53:27 violent conflict of the entire 21st century

1:53:30 and claim the lives of around 600,000 people.

1:53:34 The Eritrean army invaded the Tigray region at the behest

1:53:37 of the central Ethiopian government

1:53:39 and committed numerous atrocities and massacres.

1:53:42 And still, as of the production of this video,

1:53:44 has never agreed to any formal peace settlement.

1:53:47 And then there's also Somalia,

1:53:49 a country whose very name is essentially synonymous

1:53:52 in the Western world with anarchy and chaos.

1:53:55 The country has been locked in a multi-sided

1:53:57 civil war for more than 40 years now.

1:53:59 There is really no concept

1:54:00 of a centralized authority anywhere across the country.

1:54:03 Over the decades and lack of central authority in Somalia,

1:54:07 insurgents and pirates alike have thrived as they

1:54:10 realized their country enjoys a coastline directly

1:54:12 adjacent to one of the most strategically valuable

1:54:15 and lucrative maritime trade routes in the world.

1:54:18 And so, Somali pirate attacks on container and cargo vessels transiting the Bab

1:54:22 el Mandeb Strait have been frequent occurrences over the past 20 years.

1:54:26 Yemen, Eritrea, and Somalia are all generally unstable and fragile

1:54:30 countries who've been frequently involved

1:54:32 in both internal and external conflicts.

1:54:34 And all of that combines to put

1:54:36 maritime shipping through the Bab Strait into jeopardy,

1:54:39 which threatens the economies and security

1:54:41 of countries from all around the world.

1:54:43 This then led to the sense in many countries

1:54:45 that a military presence of some kind nearby to the strait

1:54:48 was necessary in order to ensure the strait's security

1:54:51 and the continued uninterrupted global flow of cheap oil,

1:54:54 cheap gas, and cheap manufactured goods through it could continue.

1:54:58 And so, for the most part,

1:54:59 that left only little Djibouti as an island of relative stability

1:55:03 in a very chaotic neighborhood for outside

1:55:06 powers to construct their military bases in.

1:55:08 Bases which would enable their military to project

1:55:10 power into the Bab el Mandeb Strait and keep the flow of global trade continuing

1:55:14 through the dangerous neighborhood and the various risks.

1:55:18 But Djibouti itself is also a fairly autocratic country since it

1:55:21 has been ruled by the very same president ever since 1999,

1:55:24 Omar Guelleh, and elections are generally

1:55:27 viewed as being unfair and undemocratic.

1:55:30 But that doesn't really matter because crucially,

1:55:33 ignoring some fairly minor border skirmishes with Eritrea back in 1999 and 2008,

1:55:37 Djibouti is a country that has remained relatively free of conflicts

1:55:41 in a region of the world that is usually full of them.

1:55:44 And part of the reason why is because recognizing their status as a small

1:55:48 and largely defenseless country in control

1:55:50 of extremely strategically valuable real estate,

1:55:54 President Guelleh has welcomed the presence

1:55:56 of foreign military to come and establish

1:55:58 their bases within his country that will

1:56:00 protect it from the chaos that surrounds it.

1:56:02 And Djibouti's strategic location is important even beyond

1:56:05 the shipping concerns through the Bab el Mandeb Strait.

1:56:09 This is because Ethiopia immediately to the southwest

1:56:11 of Djibouti is home to Africa's second largest population of more than 120

1:56:15 million people but is also completely landlocked,

1:56:19 which severely limits their ability to send exports or receive

1:56:21 imports to and from the rest of the world.

1:56:24 So, because Ethiopia and Eritrea have been locked in some

1:56:26 kind of territorial conflict for decades had a very tense relationship,

1:56:31 and because Somalia is,

1:56:32 well, Somalia, that basically just leaves Djibouti as the only possible nearby

1:56:37 source with maritime access for Ethiopia

1:56:39 to receive imports or send exports through.

1:56:41 That is why little Djibouti, a nation of less than 1 million people,

1:56:45 handles more than 95% of all the imports from around

1:56:50 the world that make their way into giant Ethiopia,

1:56:53 a nation with more than 120 times their own population.

1:56:57 Djibouti's location and relative stability

1:57:00 within its dangerous neighborhood grants it

1:57:01 outrageously outsized power and influence over

1:57:05 Ethiopia and the globalized trade network,

1:57:07 which makes it a potentially lucrative target to many outside powers,

1:57:12 [music] which is why the country has been more

1:57:14 than happy to allow military great powers from all around

1:57:17 the world to set up their bases there and dissuade

1:57:20 any potential hostile outside power from ever trying anything funny.

1:57:23 And that is why all today you have American,

1:57:25 French, Italian, Japanese, German, Spanish, Saudi Arabian,

1:57:29 and Chinese military bases all crowded together so nearby to each other

1:57:34 in attempts from the Russians and Indians to build their own as well,

1:57:37 all of whom want to project power into the Bab

1:57:39 el Mandeb Strait and protect their own interests in the region.

1:57:42 The American base in Djibouti is the only

1:57:44 permanent US military base on the mainland African continent,

1:57:47 and it enables the US military and their drones

1:57:49 to conduct operations in nearby Yemen against

1:57:51 Al-Qaeda elements and in nearby Somalia against Al-Shabaab

1:57:55 and ISIS elements with support from the French,

1:57:57 Japanese, Italians, Germans, and Spaniards.

1:57:59 The American base has also helped with refueling

1:58:01 Saudi warplanes as they bomb Houthi targets across Yemen.

1:58:05 While Saudi Arabia's own future base in Djibouti will

1:58:07 help them do this themselves after the Biden administration

1:58:10 in the United States withdrew all of their direct American

1:58:13 support for the Saudi war effort in Yemen back in 2021,

1:58:16 like helping them refueling their aircraft.

1:58:18 And then the Chinese naval bases there officially help fight against piracy

1:58:22 in the region and ensure that critical

1:58:23 maritime shipping lanes remain open and secure.

1:58:26 Though it has generated a fairly high degree of geopolitical angst

1:58:30 with the American military base that is only a few miles away from it.

1:58:34 Both the Americans and the Chinese have

1:58:36 lodged official complaints with the Djiboutian government accusing

1:58:39 the other of using their base to spy on their own base [music] with one

1:58:43 incident even being reported by the Americans

1:58:45 of Chinese troops in their base on the north side of town shining laser beams

1:58:49 into the cockpits of American planes flying nearby.

1:58:52 But nonetheless, Djibouti allows them both to remain along with all of the other

1:58:56 military bases in the country as well

1:58:58 because they all serve Djibouti's own purposes.

1:59:01 Who would dare attack little defenseless Djibouti

1:59:04 and provoke both of the emerging global superpowers,

1:59:08 the United States and China?

1:59:11 Djibouti's strategic calculus here is really nothing short of a genius play

1:59:15 and the best possible use of the geographic hand that they have been dealt.

1:59:23 Perhaps more than any other country today in the 21st century,

1:59:26 Saudi Arabia has the most uncertain future ahead of itself.

1:59:30 The country truly has almost countless problems ahead of it that it

1:59:33 must overcome in order to survive and they've only been able to overcome

1:59:36 all of these problems so far because of their dominance over a critical

1:59:40 resource that everyone in the world has wanted for the past 100 years,

1:59:44 but from which the world is currently starting to move away from, oil.

1:59:49 The Saudi Arabian state is one that is nearly

1:59:51 utterly defined by its control over this black liquidy resource.

1:59:55 As recently as 2018, the petroleum business in the country accounted

1:59:59 for a whopping 87% of the government's annual budget,

2:00:03 90% of the country's export earnings

2:00:05 and a massive 42% of the country's entire GDP.

2:00:10 This is because Saudi Arabia is known today to control approximately

2:00:13 a quarter of all the proven oil reserves in the world,

2:00:16 the second largest reserves of all the world's countries,

2:00:19 second only to Venezuela.

2:00:21 But unlike Venezuela's technically larger oil reserves,

2:00:24 which are highly crude, difficult and expensive to access,

2:00:27 Saudi Arabia's only slightly smaller reserves are

2:00:30 located under pressure just beneath the earth's surface

2:00:33 and they are extremely easy and cheap

2:00:36 to access and they're much easier to refine.

2:00:39 This is why for decades Saudi Arabia was

2:00:41 the largest producer of oil in the world

2:00:43 and is currently the world's second largest

2:00:45 producer just barely behind the United States.

2:00:48 Alongside Russia, these three countries are collectively referred to as the big

2:00:52 three of global oil production today because no single

2:00:55 other country comes anywhere close to matching them and they

2:00:58 combined produce approximately 40% of all the oil in the world.

2:01:02 But America's population is 332 million and so most of America's

2:01:06 oil production is consumed within the country and not exported abroad,

2:01:10 which is why America is only the world's 14th largest oil exporter.

2:01:14 Saudi Arabia has just about a tenth of the American population,

2:01:18 but produces nearly as much oil as it,

2:01:20 meaning that they simply have far more that they can never possibly consume

2:01:24 on their own and so they have far more left over to export to other countries.

2:01:28 Saudi Arabia is thus by far the largest exporter of oil in the world and oil

2:01:33 continues to provide roughly a third of all

2:01:35 the energy that humanity collectively consumes worldwide.

2:01:39 Countries like India, China, Japan,

2:01:40 South Africa and numerous European states all import

2:01:44 enormous volumes of their own oil supplies from Saudi

2:01:47 Arabia and are thus all heavily reliant

2:01:50 on keeping those flows of oil continuing for now.

2:01:53 It is this simple calculus that has given Saudi

2:01:56 Arabia enormous geopolitical power and clout over the past

2:02:00 century because they've just got more oil to give

2:02:02 others than anybody else and more than any other country,

2:02:06 Saudi Arabia is the one most capable of influencing

2:02:09 the global price of oil either negatively or positively.

2:02:13 This is because besides being by far the largest exporter of oil,

2:02:17 Saudi Arabia also has by far the largest spare capacity of oil production

2:02:22 and this is what truly gives the Saudi

2:02:25 state its unbelievable levels of global power.

2:02:28 Spare capacity in the oil business refers to the number of oil

2:02:31 wells that a country possesses that are not currently being used,

2:02:34 but which can be brought online again

2:02:36 in a very short notice to rapidly increase production.

2:02:40 Saudi Arabia wields the largest spare capacity of oil

2:02:43 production in the world and they usually keep

2:02:45 around 1 and 1/2 to 2 million barrels per

2:02:47 day of oil production reserved in this spare capacity.

2:02:50 By rapidly turning this spare capacity back online,

2:02:53 Saudi Arabia can rapidly increase its globally significant oil

2:02:56 production and dump those extra supplies onto the world market,

2:03:00 thus decreasing global prices of oil.

2:03:02 And by doing the reverse,

2:03:04 by shutting more wells offline and increasing its available spare capacity,

2:03:08 Saudi Arabia can rapidly decrease its globally

2:03:11 significant oil production and restrict global oil supplies,

2:03:14 thus increasing worldwide oil scarcity and increasing global oil prices.

2:03:19 This is why Saudi Arabia is often referred to as the central bank of world oil

2:03:24 and it's how the Saudi state can exert

2:03:26 significant leverage over every single country in the world,

2:03:30 including the world's most powerful country, the United States.

2:03:33 Well, America only imports a fraction of its

2:03:35 oil supply from Saudi Arabia these days,

2:03:37 overall oil prices in the United States can still be severely

2:03:41 impacted by the whims of the absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia.

2:03:44 After the Russians invaded Ukraine in February of 2022,

2:03:47 the Western world immediately passed a series of sanctions against

2:03:50 Russia that shut that country's oil supply out of their markets,

2:03:54 which obviously reduced the supply of oil in their markets

2:03:57 and led to a rise in oil prices.

2:03:59 And when oil prices rise, it tends to increase inflation in every

2:04:02 other sector of the economy because nearly every

2:04:04 business in the world relies on oil

2:04:07 at some point in time in its production process,

2:04:09 which means that when oil prices go up, businesses have to raise their prices

2:04:13 in order to offset their increased production costs.

2:04:15 So, after the Russians invaded Ukraine and the global price

2:04:18 of oil shot up and inflation rates went up along with it,

2:04:21 the Biden administration in the United States requested that Saudi

2:04:24 Arabia turn more of their spare capacity on and ramp up

2:04:27 production to place more oil onto the global market in order

2:04:30 to decrease oil prices that would help tame global inflation.

2:04:33 But the Saudis instead did the complete opposite.

2:04:36 They ended up cutting more of their production

2:04:38 over and over these past several months,

2:04:41 adding more wells to their offline spare capacity and decreasing

2:04:45 the supply of global oil in coordination with Russia,

2:04:48 which is increasing oil prices around the world,

2:04:50 which is enabling the Russians to earn more money

2:04:53 on their own oil sales that is being plowed

2:04:55 into waging their war in Ukraine and it is

2:04:57 increasing inflationary pressures in gasoline prices in the United States.

2:05:01 [music] As of May 2023, the American Strategic Petroleum Reserve or SPR,

2:05:06 the usually massive emergency stockpile of petroleum

2:05:09 that the United States keeps stashed

2:05:10 away in tanks in Louisiana and Texas to release during an oil supply crisis,

2:05:14 has been gradually depleted every single day since the invasion of Ukraine

2:05:18 began to the lowest level seen in 40 years right now since 1983.

2:05:23 Doing so has helped tame gasoline prices in the country for now,

2:05:27 but with the reserve now heavily depleted Washington possesses very little

2:05:31 other options available to keep gasoline

2:05:34 prices from spiraling upwards leading up

2:05:36 to the November 2024 presidential election other than calling Saudi Arabia

2:05:41 and requesting them to turn more of their spare capacity back online,

2:05:44 which the Saudis will surely only do if they are given certain favors.

2:05:49 This is precisely how Saudi Arabia is able to wield its oil

2:05:52 might and exert geopolitical influence across the entire world in the process.

2:05:57 But Saudi Arabia's great challenge in the 21st

2:06:00 century is that this greatest of its

2:06:02 powers has a finite lifespan remaining and at a certain point in the future,

2:06:07 a day will come when this power will

2:06:09 completely evaporate altogether because over the next several decades

2:06:12 as countries around the world steadily continue moving

2:06:15 their economies away from oil as an energy source,

2:06:17 Saudi Arabia's great advantage of being the global

2:06:20 oil business's central bank will matter less and less.

2:06:24 And if the country does nothing to change itself between now and whenever

2:06:27 that uncertain future day arrives it will only be left with sand,

2:06:31 one of the worst human rights records on the planet,

2:06:34 an archaic religious absolute monarchy that most

2:06:36 of the outside world finds repugnant and a lack

2:06:40 of protection from the United States while being

2:06:43 surrounded by countless enemies from both within and without.

2:06:46 [music] If Saudi Arabia does nothing to change,

2:06:49 Saudi Arabia will no longer exist at all by the end of the century.

2:06:53 But change is also going to be very, very hard and uncertain.

2:06:58 And if you want to understand Arabia is going in the future,

2:07:01 you've got to understand where Saudi Arabia came from in the first

2:07:05 place and why the country would have almost certainly never managed

2:07:08 to exist at all in its current form were it not

2:07:11 for the very fortunate discovery of oil very early on into its history.

2:07:16 For thousands of years,

2:07:17 the Arabian Peninsula was divided between various different tribes,

2:07:20 sheikhs, kings and empires.

2:07:22 There was very little to note about the lands

2:07:24 in the center of the Arabian Peninsula where the House

2:07:26 of Saud first originated in history a little more than

2:07:29 300 years ago in a region known as the Najd.

2:07:32 The overwhelming majority of Saudi

2:07:33 Arabia's current lands are completely uninhabitable.

2:07:36 The country is after all the largest in the world today

2:07:38 that doesn't have a single river anywhere to be found within it.

2:07:42 Rainfall across most of the country's land is extremely scarce and so fresh

2:07:46 water for drinking and agriculture have

2:07:48 historically been extremely difficult to come by.

2:07:50 Across the south of the modern country is

2:07:52 a vast desert known as the Rub' al Khali,

2:07:55 better known in English as the Empty Quarter.

2:07:57 It is the largest continuous expanse of sand

2:07:59 that can be found anywhere in the world.

2:08:01 It is nearly completely devoid of life and it

2:08:04 is larger in area than the entirety of France.

2:08:07 The region of Najd deep within the interior of the Arabian

2:08:09 Peninsula was an extremely sparsely populated and isolated backwater separated

2:08:14 from the rest of the world by vast empty deserts and high

2:08:17 mountains with nothing of value to offer anyone in the outside world.

2:08:21 It was a place hardly anyone paid any

2:08:23 attention to and its extreme isolation from the rest

2:08:26 of the world was partially why an extremely

2:08:28 strict interpretation of Sunni Islam gradually developed there,

2:08:32 now sometimes known as Wahhabism.

2:08:34 It was an unlikely place from which one of the most powerful

2:08:37 nations of the modern world would arise from, but so it did regardless.

2:08:42 Across the 18th and 19th centuries,

2:08:44 two small and largely unknown family clans within

2:08:46 the Najd region cemented an alliance between themselves,

2:08:49 the House of Saud who had run the politics

2:08:51 and day-to-day governance of the lands they controlled and the clan

2:08:54 of Wahhab who had run the lands' religious affairs

2:08:56 based upon their own extremely strict interpretation of Sunni Islam.

2:09:00 The previously mentioned branch of the faith

2:09:02 that is sometimes referred to as Wahhabism.

2:09:04 After joining forces,

2:09:05 the Saud and Wahhab alliance went on to carve out the first Saudi state

2:09:09 that survived between 1744 and 1814 before

2:09:12 it was ultimately destroyed by the Ottomans.

2:09:14 A group of survivors managed to take back the Saud's ancestral capital at Riyadh

2:09:18 in 1818 and from there they carved out

2:09:20 the second Saudi state that survived for most

2:09:22 of the rest of the 19th century until

2:09:23 1891 when catastrophic infighting among the royal family

2:09:27 and conflict with a rival family clan known

2:09:29 as the Rashidis led to the state's ultimate collapse.

2:09:32 The surviving Saud family members were forced to flee from Riyadh as exiles

2:09:36 into nearby Kuwait where they were powerless

2:09:38 without any lands and without any wealth.

2:09:40 But with a very good historical claim to the supposedly

2:09:43 worthless lands of Najd in the interior of Arabia.

2:09:46 There and then the Saud family probably would have vanished

2:09:49 into irrelevance never to be seen or heard from again

2:09:52 were it not for the ambitions of a young

2:09:54 man of the family ultimately become known as Ibn Saud,

2:09:57 the man who would create the modern-day kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

2:10:01 Determined to restore his family's position of power,

2:10:04 a 27-year-old Ibn Saud in 1902 led a party of a couple dozen loyal men

2:10:08 from Kuwait to recapture his family's ancestral

2:10:11 seat in Riyadh from the rival Rashidi clan.

2:10:13 It was the beginning of a decades-long campaign

2:10:16 of conquest waged across Arabia for the young man.

2:10:19 But at first very few people from the outside world paid any attention to it.

2:10:23 The lands that now constitute Saudi Arabia back

2:10:25 then in the early 20th century may have only been home to as few as 2 million

2:10:29 people who were almost entirely very poor desert-roaming nomads.

2:10:33 And so the squabbling between two rival clans in these lands

2:10:36 was hardly noticed by any of the great powers of the day.

2:10:39 But things began shifting during World War I.

2:10:42 The Rashidi clan was allied to the Ottoman Empire and after the war broke out

2:10:46 the British began supplying weapons and cash

2:10:47 to Ibn Saud who was fighting against them.

2:10:50 That combined with Ibn Saud's own alliance to the ultra Sunni Wahhabi

2:10:54 clan provided tens of thousands of fanatical

2:10:57 and now well-armed troops proved decisive.

2:11:00 By the early 1920s the Najd region of Arabia had been entirely conquered.

2:11:04 But the campaigns weren't quite finished yet.

2:11:06 After World War I's conclusion and the collapse

2:11:08 of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East,

2:11:10 the British appointed the Arab Hashemite family

2:11:12 as the new reigning monarchs in three newly created kingdoms:

2:11:16 Iraq, Jordan, and the Hejaz which crucially included

2:11:19 the two holiest cities in Islam, Mecca and Medina.

2:11:23 But relations between the British and the Hashemite

2:11:25 family quickly soured after the war's conclusion.

2:11:28 After the British transformed Jordan and Iraq into colonial

2:11:30 mandates and began letting Jews settle in Palestine.

2:11:33 The Hashemites ruling the kingdom of Hejaz

2:11:35 refused to ratify the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.

2:11:37 And so the British withdrew their support for the family

2:11:39 and backed up their other Arab wartime ally,

2:11:42 Ibn Saud and his expanding kingdom in the Najd.

2:11:45 Emboldened, Ibn Saud launched a new military campaign by invading the kingdom

2:11:49 of Hejaz in 1924 which was fully conquered within only a single year.

2:11:54 By 1925 the modern territory of Saudi Arabia

2:11:57 was fully under the control of Ibn Saud after

2:11:59 more than 20 years worth of nearly constant

2:12:01 warfare including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

2:12:04 A few years later on in 1932 Ibn Saud proclaimed the creation of a brand

2:12:09 new kingdom over all of these lands

2:12:11 and he named it after himself and his family,

2:12:14 the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with himself

2:12:17 naturally as the new kingdom's absolute monarch.

2:12:20 The third Saudi state had been born covering a large amount of the lands

2:12:23 that the previous two Saudi states

2:12:25 from the 19th and 18th centuries had also encompassed.

2:12:28 The very basis of Ibn Saud's argument

2:12:31 and later the Saudi state's argument right up into the 2020s today that he was

2:12:35 merely restoring his own family's historical territorial claims.

2:12:39 But his new kingdom entered into a life in 1932 as a severely troubled one.

2:12:44 The kingdom had been created through decades worth of violent

2:12:47 warfare and conquest and many of the lands Ibn Saud

2:12:50 now controlled were forcefully conquered and included many people who

2:12:54 found his alliance with the extremely orthodox Wahhabists as off-putting.

2:12:58 Shia Muslim minority populations were found

2:13:00 in the eastern province near the Red Sea and in the south near Yemen who often

2:13:04 felt religiously persecuted by the Sunni fundamentalist Wahhabi-aligned regime.

2:13:09 And even less strict fellow Sunni Muslims

2:13:11 in the now conquered kingdom of Hejaz felt on edge.

2:13:15 Moreover, the exiled and furious Hashemite family continued to rule kingdoms

2:13:19 in neighboring Jordan and Iraq with very good claims to the Hejaz region.

2:13:23 Internal instability within the new kingdom was

2:13:26 rife and to try and preserve the peace

2:13:28 Ibn Saud married a daughter of every one of the other tribes he had conquered,

2:13:32 20 wives in all who would go on to produce

2:13:34 more than a hundred children for him including 45 sons,

2:13:38 six of whom would go on to later rule the kingdom after his death including

2:13:42 the current 87-year-old king today in 2023 who was born when Ibn Saud was 60.

2:13:48 And after decades of warfare the new kingdom's finances were in a pretty

2:13:52 terrible state with nothing but a tiny

2:13:54 tax base of 2 million impoverished people.

2:13:57 The only actually important thing that Ibn Saud's new

2:14:00 kingdom controlled to earn money from was its control over

2:14:03 the holy cities of Mecca and Medina which only brought

2:14:06 in modest amounts of religious tourism to the state's struggling coffers.

2:14:10 At this point in time it was far more likely that either Egypt

2:14:14 or Iraq with their plentiful agricultural farmland

2:14:17 around the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates rivers would

2:14:20 emerge as the dominant source of the Arab world's geopolitical power in the 20th

2:14:24 century just as they had both been

2:14:26 for literally all of human history beforehand.

2:14:29 But of course the discovery of oil suddenly changed everything.

2:14:33 You see oil had been discovered previously

2:14:35 in commercial quantities in nearby Iran, Iraq, and Bahrain.

2:14:39 And Ibn Saud had convinced himself that there was still

2:14:41 oil to be discovered within his kingdom nearby as well.

2:14:45 But it was the British who had discovered oil in Iran, Iraq, and Bahrain.

2:14:49 And Ibn Saud didn't exactly trust

2:14:51 the imperialist and colonial tendencies of them.

2:14:54 So instead Ibn Saud went to the Americans

2:14:57 to get them searching for oil in his kingdom.

2:15:00 In 1933, the year after his kingdom was proclaimed,

2:15:03 Standard Oil Company of California or Socal,

2:15:06 later known as Chevron, was granted the exclusive contract to begin the search.

2:15:10 It was only five years later in 1938 when they made the first discovery of oil

2:15:14 in Saudi Arabia at a well known

2:15:16 as Dammam number seven right by the Persian Gulf.

2:15:19 Initially Socal created a wholly-owned subsidiary

2:15:22 assigned to the oil they discovered

2:15:24 in Saudi Arabia that would eventually be named Arabian Oil Company, aka Aramco.

2:15:29 After Saudi Arabia managed to take full control over the subsidiary

2:15:32 company itself later on it became simply known as Saudi Aramco,

2:15:37 the modern state-owned Saudi oil giant.

2:15:40 From 1938 onwards more and more oil fields were steadily discovered across Saudi

2:15:44 Arabia's sparsely populated eastern province and production

2:15:48 steadily increased up to the point where

2:15:50 the country was the 22nd largest producer of oil in the world significant

2:15:54 enough to begin attracting the attention

2:15:56 of the American government during World War II.

2:15:58 Oil was becoming more important than ever before during that war

2:16:02 and the American president of the time

2:16:04 Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew that America

2:16:06 and the post-war Washington-led alliance structure needed as much oil as they

2:16:10 could possibly get to compete with the Soviet bloc in the war's aftermath.

2:16:14 Ibn Saud was a man who still had

2:16:16 many enemies with the British-backed Hashemites still in power

2:16:19 in Iraq and Jordan and many Saudis within the country

2:16:22 who didn't like his and the Wahhabists' absolute rule.

2:16:25 And so it eventually became time for him and FDR to finally meet.

2:16:29 They did so upon a ship in the Suez Canal

2:16:31 in February of 1945 mere weeks before FDR's own death.

2:16:35 And their agreement became the basis for the Saudi-American

2:16:38 relationship that has largely endured ever since.

2:16:41 The United States, despite being a secular constitutional republic,

2:16:45 would back the ultra Islamic absolute monarchy of Saudi

2:16:49 Arabia because both had something the other desperately wanted.

2:16:53 America wanted access to the increasingly important Saudi oil fields

2:16:57 both for itself and for its allies all around the world.

2:17:00 While the Saudis wanted America's security because as a sparsely populated

2:17:05 country with nothing of value whatsoever besides for oil they knew

2:17:09 they could never hope to defend themselves or their oil

2:17:12 on their own either against their own people or their external rivals.

2:17:16 But who would ever dare to attack them if they

2:17:19 had the backing of the most powerful country in the world?

2:17:22 Over time this basic arrangement between America and Saudi Arabia,

2:17:26 security guarantees in exchange for oil,

2:17:28 has continually evolved but remained more or less the same ever since.

2:17:33 Ibn Saud died in 1953 and his sons

2:17:35 have ruled the kingdom as absolute monarchs ever since.

2:17:38 Eventually more oil fields were discovered around the initial

2:17:41 Dammam number seven well like Safaniya in the Gulf,

2:17:44 the largest offshore oil field ever discovered in the world,

2:17:47 and the mighty Ghawar field,

2:17:49 the largest onshore oil field ever discovered and the largest single source

2:17:53 of human energy that we as a species have ever so far discovered.

2:17:58 It turned out that the lands Ibn Saud had

2:18:01 conquered for his kingdom were not so worthless or useless

2:18:04 after all because they contained within them the most valuable

2:18:08 oil fields that have ever been discovered on the planet.

2:18:12 Money began flooding into the kingdom

2:18:14 as the oil fields continued to be developed.

2:18:16 But the true era of wealth only came after the 1973 oil crisis.

2:18:21 After Israel defeated the combined Arab armies

2:18:24 of Egypt and Syria during the Yom Kippur War,

2:18:26 the OPEC oil cartel made up of major oil producing countries from all around

2:18:30 the world decided to embargo many of Israel's

2:18:33 most major supporters including the United States.

2:18:36 Saudi Arabia briefly participated in that embargo and the global price

2:18:40 of oil subsequently quadrupled and remained

2:18:43 high for more than a decade afterwards.

2:18:45 The flood of money into Saudi Arabia suddenly became a deluge of money over

2:18:50 the following decade and the kingdom became

2:18:52 one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

2:18:55 And the House of Saud became one of the wealthiest families in the world.

2:18:59 It was with this unbelievable money that Saudi Arabia

2:19:02 made its great bargain with the people of the kingdom.

2:19:05 The centuries-old alliance between the House of Saud

2:19:07 and the clan of Wahhab remained intact.

2:19:10 Meaning that the Saudi state was governed by a set of extremely

2:19:13 fundamentalist Sunni Muslim values that a lot of the state's minority groups,

2:19:18 like the Shia and less fundamentalist Sunnis,

2:19:20 didn't exactly get along with very well.

2:19:23 Which in a vacuum would have led to domestic instability.

2:19:26 But the enormous revenues that the state was earning from its oil business