混乱和崩溃的油价正在中东剧焦虑

“我们非常焦虑，”阿拉伯联合酋长国高级官员告诉我一杯热味的薄荷茶。“中东是着火的，”他说，穿过北湾的绿松石水域，“但石油价格落下。”

忧虑珠子在温暖海域的浅水区锻炼伊朗人称波斯湾和阿拉伯人当然叫阿拉伯海湾。阿拉伯语有99个细分MISBAHA., normally used to count out the names of God. But these days the four big anxiety-inducing beads on the string are the ISIS, Iran, Barack Obama and Brent.

我应该补充说，希腊语变种的珠子珠子上有较少的珠子，称为akombolói, which John Negroponte always carried around with him as ambassador to Iraq and then as director of National Intelligence (when he was my boss). “It’s a useful diplomatic device,” he told me once. “It gives me more time to think in a negotiation.” The number of segments on akombolóiis typically a prime number, usually 17, 19 or 23 — Go ponder that, all you quants.

Chaos in the Middle East’s arc of fire from Lebanon through Iraq is viewed by global macro traders as one variable in the multivariate regression whose dependent variable is the price of oil. The emirs, kings and princelings of the Gulf weigh that chaos as one variable in a shorter equation whose endpoint is their own survival. Their equation also assigns a large weight to the price of oil, their sole source (in addition to natural gas) of exports and revenue and the wellspring of funds with which to mollify their citizens and purchase security in a dangerous world. Brent crude has fallen 30 percent in a few months, hence the worries.

I spent a week kicking around the Gulf to get a better sense of how the world looks from there. It is a tough neighborhood, and the residents have good reason to be nervous. Thegeopolitical equation is indeed shifting on several fronts, not least the frighteningly rapid rise of ISIS in what used to be the countries of Syria and Iraq. And as Brent implodes, so does the fiscal position of all Gulf exchequers.

As for the first worry bead, “ISIS has now supplanted al-Qaeda in the U.S.’s demonology of extremist groups, but it has already occupied a similar position for a growing number of Middle Eastern states,” says Crispin Hawes, a Middle East analyst at Teneo Intelligence in London. “To Iran and its Hezbollah allies, ISIS is the bastard child of Western intervention and Wahhabi extremist anti-Shiism. To the Saudis, it is a revisitation by the Rule of Unintended Consequences, originally written during the 1980s Afghan war. To governments in Amman, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi and beyond, ISIS appears a very real and immediate threat.”

A year ago, when I made this same trek, my Arab friends were most worried about a Shia arc of influence from Iran across Iraq, through Bashar Assad’s Syria and down into territories controlled by Hezbollah and Hamas, whom they viewed as Tehran’s proxies. They saw Iranian machinations behind the restive Shia minorities along the west coast of the Gulf, and especially the Shia majority in Bahrain.

But now they are equally worried about radical Sunni Islam, not just Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s self-proclaimed caliphate under ISIS but also the embittered remnants of theMuslim Brotherhood, which have been driven underground in Egypt and across the region.

“卡塔里斯曾经相信他们可以达成穆斯林兄弟情谊，并在埃及的政治参与 - 实际管理埃及政府的责任 - 将转变[前总统穆罕默德] Morsi和他的同事进入鄂尔多安和他的AKP等事情，“在该地区长期经验，指的是土耳其总统的大陆外交官Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “But that ambiguity is over. Now all the Gulf emirs and the House of Saud have thrown their lot in with military autocrats like[Egyptian President Abdel Fattah] al-Sisi. They are writing some very big checks to fund this. It’s a struggle to the finish with the Muslim Brotherhood. No more studied ambiguity ortous azimutsdiplomacy. They are all exposed now.”

Some optimistic observers believe this mutual exposure may be enough to drive fractious Gulf monarchs, Turkish politicians and even the Iranian ayatollahs together. “The silver lining in this dark ISIS cloud is that their savagery may drive governments in the region to set aside their enmity for a bit and cooperate as required to put down this common threat,“ suggests a Lebanese banker based in Abu Dhabi.

Teneo的Hawes找到了这态度的思维。”As the conflict continues, rather than acting as a unifying factor between Iraq’s various sectarian and ethnic communities, the geographical pattern of violence is starting to reinforce Shia sentiment that the problem is one inherent to Sunni areas and that, rather than being confronted by a unified Iraqi government, it is in fact only Shia soldiers and Shia militias that are holding ISIS back,” he says. “As this perception hardens, it will be increasingly difficult for [Prime Minister Haider al-] Abadi to convince his Shia governing colleagues of the benefits of further compromises to the Sunni population. Moreover, as the threat from ISIS continues, the deeper Iran’s involvement in Iraq becomes, particularly on a military level. Iran’s influence will add to this reluctance.”

第二个担心是伊朗ad. The Gulf rulers believe they are increasingly on their own in the face of persistent Iranian proxy warfare and regional ambitions. They believe President Hassan Rouhani is a master diplomat, “a smiling wolf in sheep’s clothing” as one Kuwaiti banker quips, running circles around the major powers (P5 + 1) seeking to negotiate a containment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“你可以在新闻中看到P5 + 1如何几乎任何东西都在与伊朗核对核协议的良好面孔，让伊朗人在突破中留下几个月。我认为Ayatollahs对此很好，“银行家预测。“这是GCC [海湾合作委员会]国家，这些国家将在水域上对几乎核伊朗的前景来扼杀牙齿。也许比你的朋友更多的是以色列人。“

The Saudis have been repressing the Shia citizens in their Eastern Province since 2011 in an escalating cycle of demonstrations, police crackdowns and jailings. According to the crowdsourced chronicle Wikipedia, so far the Saudis have killed 17, injured several hundred and arrested 145 demonstrators. They arrested a prominent Shia cleric, Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, in July 2012. A Saudi court sentenced al-Nimr to death for sedition in mid-October, setting off a new cycle of demonstrations, capped by an apparent Sunni-extremist attack on a Shia procession on November 3, the Shia holy day of Ashura, that killed seven and wounded ten.

The Saudis’ cousins the Khalifa, the ruling family of Bahrain, have been engaged in an even more existential struggle against their Shia-majority subjects over the same period. The body count grows each month, with violent encounters on the outskirts of Manama when I was flying over. Again, according to Wikipedia’s careful documentation, since 2011 more than 80 Shia demonstrators have been killed and 2,929 arrested, of whom five died in police custody. The intensity of the struggle can be viewed atVice.com, where an inside view is presented by their intrepid reporter Ben Anderson in “Bahrain: An Inconvenient Uprising.”

The third worry bead is Washington. “The Saudis and the Gulf Arabs distrust the Obama administration as feckless and ignorant in equal measure,” says a British diplomat over dinner in Dubai. “They believe Washington is forging a détente with Tehran that will leave them on their own. They know Obama loathes [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and doesn’t really give a damn now that he’s a lame duck.” He smiles grimly. “Who else could bring the Saudis and the Israelis together than Hussein Obama?”

他的另一个sip盗版杜松子酒补剂。”My Arab friends call this Obama’s ‘East of Suez’ moment,” using the phrase for Britain’s historical withdrawal of military forces from East and South Asia in the late 1960s. “Your president’s okay with sending airplanes but is adamant against boots on the ground in the Middle East, even though his own generals are telling him that you can’t win this war just from the air.”

A Kuwaiti businessman complains to me with quiet bitterness that the Obama administration doesn’t even know what side it’s really on, so confused is the landscape now. “What sort of strategy do you Americans have?” he asks with a palms-up gesture. “ISIS cuts the head off two American journalists on video, and Obama starts bombing? After standing by doing nothing for two years while 100,000 Syrians are slaughtered and Assad even uses chemical weapons? I call that no strategy at all.”

The fourth worry bead is oil. The eyes of macro traders and Gulf princes alike will be on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ drab modernist building on the Helferstorferstrasse in Vienna later this month when cartel ministers meet to consider reducing production quotas — or not. Nobody knows if OPEC cuts in output can bring Brent back toward $100, or whether the Saudis even want to try.

Back in June I polled three dozen global macro traders for their market forecasts for the balance of the year, including their expected price of oil. In retrospect, most of them were way wrong. Our traders assigned an average 53 percent probability that Brent oil would stay within a band of $100 and $120 through December 31, and 31 percent that it would end the year above $120. The mean bet was just 16 percent that Brent would fall below $100. But fall it did, plunging to $78.92 on November 17.

Those forecasts of $100-plus oil were based on a pessimistic assessment of geopolitics in the region. In the same June poll our traders assigned an average probability of 33 percent that Egypt would descend into violence, and 58 percent that Iraq would erupt into full-blown civil war. Guess what: Egypt is violent and half of Iraq is under ISIS’s sway, with the Kurds acting as a de facto independent state and the Shia east hardening against their Sunni brethren each day the conflict goes on.

As one experienced energy trader said in June, “I strongly believe that the geopolitical risks are the highest I’ve seen in my career. There is a good chance Libya never comes back online. Iran is in trouble. The market is counting on Iraq to raise production, but the country could fall apart at any time. Inventories are at record lows, but prices continue to do nothing. In the context of the oil market, this does not make sense. My strongest view on the oil market is that this low-volatility environment cannot persist. If something happens in Iran or Russia or Iraq, prices will spike very high, very quickly.”

Yet Brent is below $80 and still headed south. “Earlier this year crude oil was the most overvalued and overbought commodity in the world,” says Michael Lewis, global head of commodities research at Deutsche Bank in London. “We estimate that crude oil prices would need to fall to $70 per barrel to bring oil as a percent of global GDP back to its long-run historical average.”

Standard & Poor’s recently revised its Brent crude oil price assumption to $85 per barrel for the remainder of 2014 and $90 for 2015. At this price, only four of the Gulf countries can still run a government budget surplus: Oman, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE. Saudi Arabia’s fiscal balance is red below the mid-$90s, Libya below $110 and Iraq below $115. The two Shia-majority countries, Iran and Bahrain, run red below $135.

Will the Saudis use their pivotal production capacity to reduce output and edge prices up closer to their own fiscal break-even price? Currently OPEC pumps 31 million barrels a day, just shy of 34 percent of world oil production; the Saudis account for more than a third of this. Most analysts agree that OPEC would need to cut production by 1 million or 2 million barrels a day to steady prices.

“沙特政策制定者对降低价格对欧佩克国家的影响并不是视而不见的影响，但现实是该制度对试图保护最脆弱的主要生产者的预算没有兴趣，这是伊朗，伊拉克和委内瑞拉”的最脆弱的主要生产者的预算“observes Teneo’s Hawes. “If, however, Naimi and his colleagues come to a view that prices could dip below $75 per barrel for a protracted period, they will take into consideration the impact on their key GCC allies, Kuwait and UAE,” he adds, referring to Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi.

Venezuela和伊朗可以成立石油输出国组织(OPEC) 1949, when they first approached Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq to “explore avenues for regular and closer communication among petroleum-producing nations.” Their initiative bore fruit a decade later when OPEC was formally set up. Now they are supplicants. In October Venezuelan Foreign Minister Rafael Ramírez called for an extraordinary meeting of OPEC to steady prices. He got no response. And he’s unlikely to get a sympathetic hearing at the regular Vienna meeting later this month.

ISIS’s al-Baghdadi may care about the slumping price of oil as well. “It is clear to me that ISIS is a sophisticated organization,” muses Michael Hintze, founder and chief investment officer of London-based hedge fundCQS，在访问科威特期间。“我担心他们将获得对石油生产领土的控制，并且来自这些地区的石油将停止。相反的是通过，而他们所拥有的资金来源是出售石油。因此，传输机制进入全球金融系统 - 即油价上的尖峰 - 尚未通过。事实上，我的理解是他们一直在廉价地销售石油。“它昂贵的建筑哈里卡特并对一个战争反对，因为isis和库尔德人都发现了。两者都正忙于卖出大量的石油进入黑色市场。入场地缘政治的招待价格是金钱，很多。

An old friend formerly with an Arab intelligence service takes a slow draw on the hookah water pipe of fragrant tobacco one evening in Dubai. Ironically, the hookah is referred to assheeshaon the Arabian Peninsula, derived from the Persian word for “glass.” I confess a lifetime addiction tosheesha, and yes, I do inhale.

”We like to blame ISIS on the Americans,” he says. “In fact, the Iranians agree, and it is part of their propaganda. But really, if you want to blame anyone for ISIS, blame Maliki,” he adds, referring to former Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. He takes another puff, reflectively looking out at the slender, towering Burj Khalifa in the warm night sky. “Of course you can blame Maliki on the Americans, but then Maliki was actually an Iranian puppet. So do you ultimately blame ISIS on Tehran? Welcome to our geopolitical hall of mirrors.” The small embers of charcoal on thesheeshabriefly flicker red, then go gray.

詹姆斯唱is a lecturer at Princeton University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science (jshinn@princeton.edu) and chairman of Teneo Intelligence. After careers on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, he served as national intelligence officer for East Asia at the Central Intelligence Agency and as assistant secretary of defense for Asia at the Pentagon. He serves on the advisory boards ofKensho, a Cambridge-based data analytics firm; Predata, a New York–based predictive analytics firm; andCQS, a London-based hedge fund.