How U.S. Policy on Iran Got Stuck Between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait
To make Iran oil sanctions work better, the fields in the neutral zone must produce oil. They aren’t.
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Jean Paul Getty became the richest man in America, and its first billionaire, thanks to a barren strip of desert where he discovered oil in the 1950s. The land was a “neutral zone” straddling Saudi Arabia and Kuwait—a relic of the time when European powers carved implausible ruler-straight borders across the Middle East. The fields continue to be a tremendous resource: They can pump the equivalent of $15 billion of crude a year at current prices. The famously stingy Getty squeezed oil out of the fields as hard as he could. In contrast, the Saudis and the Kuwaitis aren’t pumping a single barrel nowadays because of a century-old sovereignty dispute, pride, and money.
In other circumstances, the fight over the neutral zone would be an obscure local dispute of interest to a handful of government officials, foreign diplomats, and petroleum executives. But these aren’t normal times in the oil market—or in the Middle East, which is caught up in the policies of President Trump, who has an eye on containing Iran, and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who also has an eye on Iran but is surrounded by controversy over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.