Iran War Update: UAE's historic move and the Arab world's opportunity | Hour 1

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetcleanershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. A pretty big development out of the Middle East, And if you didn't know any better, you would think this is further proof that we are totally losing the war against Iran. We are approaching actually the sixty day notice thing or whatever warpowers acts on. Curious how that's going to play out. I have no predictions on that. But the United Arab Emirates announced that it is pulling out of Opek Opek, the oil cartel created in nineteen sixty in order to eliminate essentially a free market, a free oil market, so they could control the world's energy pricing and access to the oil. And this is big because it moves us now towards a more free marketplace, and it signals like this rift between these Gulf countries. It's not and that is a good thing to separate these countries from this Opek agreement. But also it highlights a lot of the misreading that people in the West do when it. Comes to. Arabs Muslims in the Middle East. And I will get to that. There's a very interesting piece by an author I've quoted before, Zeneb Ribua've been reading a lot of her writings on the conflict, and this one that she wrote is a little bit more general about the war the Arab world is watching. So I'll get I will get to that, but let me Pisaki back here to or p circle back to the UAE announcement. So the UAE is the third largest oil producer in Opek okay. Opek was formed nineteen sixty by Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. That's important keep that last country in mind for a little bit later. This is by Amit Sigahal in his daily newsletter It's Noon in Israel. He's an Israeli journalist. The principal aim of the organization shall be the coordination and unification of the petroleum policies of member countries and the determination of the best means for safeguarding their interests individually and collectively end quote that is from their charter, from the OPEC charter. Okay. And they set this up, as he reports, ostensibly to ensure the global stability of the oil supply, but fundamentally to act as a cartel to fix the price of oil at a level that benefited the members. The organization has defined its interests quite broadly over the years. Most notoriously, the cartel decided in nineteen seventy three that the member's interest was the punishment of the global economy because Israel won the Yamkipur War and that led to a period of stagflation and economic decline, and that should have been the and that should have been the like the wake up call. I think I feel like it should have been for the rest of the world that like, maybe we should, you know, get our own oil supplies going so we're not dependent on this cartel. That wasn't their only time flirting with political manipulation. Other instances include pressuring Iran during the Iran Iraq War, as well as cutting production to keep prices high. In twenty twenty two, in the wake of the pandemic. But it also punished the US because you'll recall Joe Biden criticized the Saudi government and enriching Russia during its invasion of Ukraine. But the oil market is vastly different from that of the nineteen seventies. The first blow to the monopoly of opek was US we and the shale revolution that started about a decade ago. Right, we are now among the world's top three exporters of crude. I was listening to a very interesting interview with a fella, one of the founders of an organization called State Armor, and they work at the state levels to combat Chinese influence and such. He was on the Winston Marshall Show, and he was talking about how this is a stress test for what would happen if. China closes this the. Or moves on Taiwan rather right, And the whole point of China cozying up with Iran was that we are their primary target. And if China wanted to move on Taiwan, Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz and that would send this, you know, shock through the world economy. It would impede oil flows except for China, right, so how are we reacting? How is the world reacting to this closure without China actually trying to take Taiwan. Well, Texas is exporting a metric buttload of oil now, like all those ships that were getting oil from the Middle East, they're all now heading to the Gulf of America. Right. So it was a very interesting interview. It was mainly about China, but they talked about like these like these actions that are occurring, like people are looking at these things like Greenland. We talked about Greenland and that was that's a check on Russia, but also on China. They would both come up and over to get to us, like all of these moves. The tariffs. He talked a little bit about all of Trump's tariffs, and remember he put a bunch of tariffs on China in his first term and Biden did not take them down. You've got states that are waking up to Chinese ownership of farmland and such around military bases. And he was like, if you look at if you look. At where Chinese investment in America is, for some reason, it's always around critical infrastructure. Or military bases. It's very very interesting choice, right that they always seem to end up like one of the main focuses for the Chinese is the Mississippi River. They've been buying land all along the Mississippi River because if they could shut that down, if you know, it ever goes to a hot war, they would have people to shut down the Mississippi and that would that would choke off a lot of the movement of goods and as well, yeah, well mainly goods in the commercial sense. That would be very, very bad. So anyway, our shale revolution has now pushed us into the top three exporters of crude. The u US is impending control over the reserves of one of OPEC's founding members, mainly Venezuela or namely Venezuela, and finally Operation Roaring Lion. Right during the recent conflict, production policy was coordinated through OPEC, but in some ways it was every oil nation for itself. The Saudi's had their contingency for bypassing the Strait of Hormones, and the UAE had its own pipelines. Right. So the UAE leaving also resolves long standing tension between that country's rapidly expanding production capacity. They are targeting five million barrels per day by next year. Okay. However, they've got a quota that doesn't let them go that high, and so they're operating right now about thirty percent below its capability. This is reflective of a fundamental difference in interests. I was not a of this. Saudi Arabia has to have the price of crude at eighty dollars a barrel. If they don't, they're not able to balance their national budget and fund the You know, the Crown Prince's ambitious plans for the country, So they have to have it at eighty dollars a barrel. So do you think they're ever going to let it go below eighty dollars a barrel. Conversely, the UAE possesses a vastly more diversified economy and massive sovereign wealth funds. This is a big difference. I'll tell you why in a minute. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video started in nineteen ninety seven and Mint Hill North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories, all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creative video dot com. I meet Seagall back to his piece here It's noon in Israel headline the end of the Opek Era. So the UAE has a very different, more diversified economy than Saudi Arabia does, has massive sovereign wealth funds. The UAE's overall economic health has tied more closely to global macroeconomic growth than to the nominal price of a barrel of oil. By exiting OPEK and actively increasing global supply to lower energy costs, the UAE can deliberately stimulate the global economy, curb Western inflation, and thereby bolster the returns of its own massive international investment portfolios. The UAE is now charting a more permanent, independent course, one that hugs the US and Israel rather than being bound to the Saudis. The Saudi Crown Prince or his top advisor expressed disappointment with the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council. Yes, they've been disappointed in their neighbors. For decades, the West operated under the belief that the Middle East was a unified, monolithic block. The uaes exit from OPEK further proves that this framework is outdated, if it was ever true at all. Now, I well, I think, and I saw an analysis about this when the Operation Epic theory began. Like Iran is being forced to decide whether it is a movement or a nation. The Islamic regime, right, the Revolutionary Guard, the revolutionary Islamic Republic, or they have to decide are they a movement because that's what they've claimed to be right, that they are spreading the revolution in all of these other Arab countries and all over the world, and you know, the first step is the eradication of Israel. Well, now you're going to have to decide are you a nation or are you just that idea that movement. Maybe they're just an idea like Antifa, Right, it's possible, I guess. But I think you've got these these Gulf nations that are that are now more comfortable thinking of themselves as nation states, right rather than part of you know. The quote Muslim world like. I'm hoping that this is a positive development in that course, Segul goes on to say, the region is not a monolith. It's a collection of sovereign states with divergent and often competing national interests. I'm losing count of the tectonic shifts occurring in the Middle East under the Trump administration, but this is easily one of the most significant. The transition of oil toward a true free market commodity is virtually unprecedented in global history. And UAE promised another historic day is imminent, but we don't know what it is yet. All right, So now to this piece from Zenebribua. Well, actually, hang I played a clip from a guy who runs the x account inside Israel Intel. His name is Josh Wicklough, and he broke down the UAE news and what it means. Let me play this real quick too. Oh, hang on a second, it would help if I unmuted. There we go. The UAE is leaving OPEK, and this is happening because of Iran. Over the past months. Iran hasn't just pressured Israel or the United States. It is directly threatened and attacked Gulf states, including the UAE. That changes the calculation. For years, countries like the UAE tried to balance, maintain economic ties where possible, avoid direct confrontation, stay flexible. That space is gone. Iran made it clear that proximity doesn't protect you and neutrality doesn't protect you. So now you're seeing a shift. One of the clearest expressions of that shift is energy policy. OPEK works by constraining supply. That's how it maintains influence, keep production limit, keep prices elevated. The UAE has spent years building the capacity to produce more oil than it was allowed to under those limits. Leaving OPEK removes that constraint. That matters because how Uron is trying to fight this war. Uran's leverage comes from disruption. It doesn't need to fully close the Straight. Of horror moves. It just needs instability to push prices higher and create pressure on the global economy. That only works if. Yuah oh buffering, Oh my gosh, this Internet. Well, it only works if supply stays tight. And what the UAE is doing is adding more supply into the marketplace. Let's see if it picks up. Supply stays tight here. If supply expands, disruption gets absorbed. And what the UAE is signaling is that over time, supply may become more flexible, not less that weakens Iran's strategy, not immediately. The Straight of hormones is still a bottleneck. Flows are still constrained, but structurally it changes the direction. There's also a deeper point. Iran expanded this conflict outward to increase pressure, but in doing so, it forced countries in the region to choose, and those choices are not breaking in Iran's favor. The UA is. Moving from a coordinated energy constraint and toward a model that aligns more closely with stability, global markets and Western partners. So step back. Iran is trying to weaponize disruption, the UAE is positioning itself to eventually neutralize it through supply, and if that shift continues, one of Iran's most effective tools doesn't disappear, but it starts to lose its edge. If you like this post and my other content, please help me get back into your feed. Yeah, by following him and retweeting and that sort of thing. Because the X algorithms got tweeked last week. And people who produce content if they use the words like breaking you update, if you use these certain keywords or whatever, you're getting throttled. So he apparently was getting throttled anyway. So that's the video from inside Israel in tell is the name of the account. Josh Wickoff is his name, And I'm just curious, like, I'm looking at the list of these other OPEC nations and might somebody else break ranks next? Could you imagine what that would do for, you know, for global stability when it comes to energy markets. All right, So now here's the zeneb Ribua piece at our website Zenebribua dot com. Western coverage of Operation Epic Fury has unfolded almost entirely on Iran's own terms. The coverage has the dominant frame across America across Europe. The frame treats the Islamic Republic as the aggrieved party, narrating its resistance and the discussion in mainstream outlets and across social media platforms. It's largely been organized around what Iran claims, what Iran endures, and what Iran dare to threaten. This frame leaves an enormous gap in the picture, and the gap is the Arab world, a civilization that has spent forty years watching the Islamic Republic erode their own institutional, theological, and cultural foundations. So to grasp what is actually happening in the Middle East, a Western observer has to hold three dimensions simultaneously. Okay, these three different angles, if you will, or or ways of looking at what's going on and specifically you know Iran's behavior. The first is the Arab relationship with Iran, the second is the proxy question itself, and the third is that Iran represents a greater and more immediate threat than Israel does. I'll explain, well, she'll explain in a moment. The Hellian says, Opek taught me about scarcity at a very young age. I always wanted that up they need to compete. Mike says, this is good news about breaking OPEC a little bit. Maybe you can help us understand this or confirm we the USA has to have OPEC oil or I guess South American Venezuelan oil because the oil we produce in this country can't be refined by our oil refineries that turn oil into gas. Love your show. I listened to as much as I can. Good luck today, Thank you. I have heard this. I know there are different kinds of oils and different kinds of like refinement that it goes through. Like I know, like the Northeast, A lot of the homes up there run off of a different kind of oil than like gasoline in your engines obviously, and so a lot of refineries that have to convert over to a different blend or something. So but I yeah, but I don't. I don't know what the refining capacity is and the different types of refinement that America possesses. So sorry, I cannot. I'm not an oil industry expert on that. Sean wants to know how much is a metric butt load in gallons? I wasn't raised on the metric system that's fair. It is a better system to be fair, and it is like we really should I mean not in my lifetime because I don't want to have to relearn everything. But at some point in the future it would probably behoove us to move to the metric system. Except not, but not for temperature whatever that stupid Celsius thing is. That's just dumb, okay, because it's always twenty two degrees. It seems like it's like, oh my gosh, it's going to be freezing today, it's twenty one. Oh my gosh, it's a scorch er, it's twenty three. Like, that's just dumb. Allan. Also, metric buttload does not appear on my unit's converter app. Can you please restate in either stone or bushel something I can relate to. Yeah, it's just it's a lot. That's that's what I know. It's a lot. RJ says. It sounds like the UAE has been talking to Scott Bessant. It does, doesn't it, Ian says, I recall Opex nineteen seventy three squeeze and media speculation about getting around it. CBS used to run in the news spots in ad breaks during kids shows. One talked of the US having tremendous shale reserves but had yet to figure out how to separate oil for retrieval. Since then we learned about fracking. We can now bury OPEC. Yeah, I mean those were different times airing a segment like that during kids programming, like cartoons and stuff. But then again, like millennials have no ideas, zoomers, you guys have no idea, Like they literally had to run ads on TV so our parents wouldn't forget that we existed, like they had to tell our parents, like it's eleven o'clock, do you know where your children are? That's how that was benign neglect at a level you cannot even comprehend. Bain says, I've got a thought relative to you breaking away from opek. Greenland doesn't want to be the fifty first state. Neither does Canada. But what would happen if a nation like the UAE actually asked if they could become the fifty first state versus being coerced? Would that be good? I don't think so, especially if the if they paid to be the fifty first state. Long before Trump, my old man used to say, we should make Israel the fifty first state. What a kick if forty seven establishes fifty one and fifty two in the UAE and Israel, sure would be a neat shell design. Yeah, I don't. Oh a shell design like on the beach for Jim, comey forty seven fifty one, fifty two. The light sweet crude is easiest to refine, so there you go. Yeah, I'm I would not be on board with adding nations as states, So I just especially established countries like those two, I would not be on word with that. Plus they're really far away, you know, think about the travel costs for their representatives and senators to get the DC for the meetings. You know, Ray, welcome to the program. Hello, Ray. Yeah, I wanted to brought a little bit. Of clarity on the like crude heavy crude issue. All right, talk, but you got to do it as if you got to do it as if I'm like like an American, So I'm not going to know a lot of the stuff you're talking about. It's okay. Venezuelan and oil pulled from the ground is very heavy cruit, so we can't go out onto the market. And we had good reasons with and our oil that pice fruit. So we lost them. Ray, your cell is dropping in and out. Are you are you like walking around? Are you driving or something? Your cell phone signal keeps dropping. I'm driving, unfortunately. I hope, I hope that's clear now a bit? Yeah, okay, Yeah, So they would. Buy our oil and lighten up their oil so that they can and get it on the market. So javas nationalizing Indus oil industry and. That relationship ended. They had to find a new partner. The only partner that they confined was across the Atlantic and Africa if they get the nation. But that made it much more expensive for them now to mix their heavy crud with a light crew coming from Africa. Before it was just crossing the Gulf of Mexico, easy peasy right there. So now their oil is much more expensive to now refine to get it out on into into the market. So you can see the motivation now. It was really. Noup. He had another dead spot. All right, Ray, I'm gonna Ray, I gotta let you go. You're in another dead zone there. That's interesting. I appreciate that. Yeah, there there were there were a ton of reasons I think that could explain or that do explain the uh, you know, the the hugging of Venezuela, and part of it was also to keep China and Iran and Russia out of our backyard. China is looking at us as their enemy after the Soviet Union fell. They were the prime enemy when they fell, then they shifted to us and we were not prepared for that. And China calls this the smokeless battlefield, right through economic and through technological, like with your espionage as well. I mean, you got all of these students that are in China now, and they got any family back in China, then they're going to be called upon to do things for the Communist Party back in China or their family is going to suffer. I mean, there are a lot of reasons why the move in Venezuela is going to be very beneficial. This is from Scott on the text line. There are basically two types of crude oil, light sweet and heavy sour. Our refineries on the Gulf Coast are set to run heavy sour. That was why the Keystone Pipeline was being built. It was to transport Canadian tar sans oil to be refined north Sea. Brent is a light suite A lot of Opec oil is heavy sour. All right, there you go, your crash course in oil refinement. You're welcome, all right. Let me Pisaki back now to this piece the war the Arab world is watching by Zenebribua, and she says, to grasp what's actually happening, Western observers need to hold three dimensions simultaneously. The first is the Arab relationship with Iran. Iran presents itself as a resistance movement with a grievance against American hegemony and Israeli occupation. Okay, and this presentation maps very comfortably onto familiar Western anti colonial frameworks. That's why that's the focus. You know that a lot of us are subjected to. But what it does not map on to is the lived experience of Arab populations in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria and across the Gulf. Right, they've been dealing with these Iranian revolutionaries terrorists inside their countries, destabilizing them. The Arab world's corarel with Iran runs far deeper than American bases or Israeli airstrikes. What drives it is the systematic subversion of Arab sovereignty. By a foreign power that uses the language of Islamic solidarity as cover for an imperial project conducted through proxies. Right, they are a colonizing entity. To put it in the frame that Westerners might better understand, they are colonizers. The second dimension, the proxy question itself. Iran goes far beyond just supporting armed groups. They set up parallel state structures that are built inside Arab countries. Financial systems get captured, political figures get installed, who owe their existence and survival entirely to Iran. But it's framed as sort of this exportation of revolution. But what Arab populations have experienced is closer to a colonial occupation. When Westerners treat these proxy networks as instruments of legitimate resistance rather than as mechanisms of subjugation, they endorse an imperial project while believing themselves to be opposing one. Like that is the irony here, Like there are so many people that are you know, so willing, And you saw it with Hamas, you know versus Israel. So many people willing to just swallow the Hamas lie that they are this you know, they're the oppressed, they are the they're the colonized that's the revolutionary Marxist oppress or oppressed framing, and that's what Iran exports into these countries. But in fact they are the colonizers, they are the oppressors themselves. And finally, the third dimension, Iran represents a greater and more immediate threat than Israel does. This is a position that Western media are structurally ill equipped to render intelligible. She says, why because Western discourse on the Middle East has been organized for decades around the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and that's the primary axis of regional injustice. Iran has paid lip service to the Palestinian cause for decades. Right, But notice when push came to shove and they wanted to start talking, you know, about stopping the attacks, they didn't mention the Palestinians. I highlighted this in their first round of negotiations, the first talks that were held in Pakistani, Oh sorry, Pakistan, that they didn't mention the Palestinians. They didn't mention Hamas. No, they mentioned Hesbala because his Baala was attacking Israel. They're like, you got to stop bombing Hisballa, you got to stop that war. They didn't mention the Palestinians after saying that was the central defining issue around Israel, and all of this m M never has been. The result is that when Western governments in Western publics take strong positions against Israel's actions against Iran's operations, they believe themselves to be standing with the Arab world, but in reality they are advancing a position that the Arab world does not share and has not asked for, while ignoring the threat that Arab governments and Arab populations actually have to live with. The rhetorical use of Israel as a perpetual alibi for Iranian aggression has been one of the regime's most durable tools, and Western opinion has served as an amplifier of that tool. But Nowation fury has accelerated a reckoning. But it was kind of already underway. The Arab world is watching the proxy architecture that Iran spent decades building. They're watching it be dismantled, and it's processing the implications for their own political future. They've been absorbing rocket attacks and drone attacks while still maintaining full civilian life and political composure, and it's revealed a military steadiness that decades of condescension from Western and Arab nationalist commentators had written off as impossible. The second is a region at a genuine inflection point, one where the destruction of Iran's proxy architecture opens a real possibility of Arab states governing themselves without external interference for the first time in at least a generation. This is the first serious challenge to this ideology that was never democratically adopted, never welcomed, and imposed through violence and subversion from the moment of its founding. This is what's actually being discussed on Arab TV, she says, and then she gives links to multiple interviews. This is the conversation that the Arab countries are having, like this may be our opportunity to finally rid ourselves of this terrorist cancer next door that's been trying to subvert our nations for decades. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.