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In contrast to the 20th century and the early years of the 21st century, the regional crisis in the 2010s developed at a time when, overall, the role and leverage of major powers external to the Middle East, as either active meddlers or security guarantors in the region, or both, actually declined rather than increased. The United States serves as the most evident case in point: the “post-interventionist” US administration has clearly become “tired of the Middle East”, struggling and often failing to keep pace with the dynamically changing situation and unable to alter or decisively affect the course of events. The same even more strongly applies to the European powers. In terms of activity and impact, regional actors (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Turkey) increasingly appeared to outplay external powers and influence.

For external powers, however, that did not remove a number of risks and threats connected to, or emanating from, the Middle East. The increase and diversification of global energy supply and the latest crisis in energy prices made the region less central to the global economy than it had been in the past. At the same time, the fundamental socio-political, statehood and security crisis in the Middle East brought with it new security concerns and implications. They mostly stemmed from reinforced perceptions about the long-term nature of regional instability, the continuing potential for further destabilization, and the related consequences and implications beyond the region, ranging from terrorist connections to migration flows. These challenges affect external powers unevenly. For instance, the role of the Iraq-Syria area as the main focal point for global terrorism activity and magnet for transnational flows of violent extremists in the mid-2010s poses a threat to everyone (but mostly to the countries of the region itself, as well as to those in Europe and Eurasia). In contrast, the avalanche of refugee and migrant flows from the Middle East primarily targets Europe (rather than North America, Eurasia, or other regions).

Nuclear threats always have to be taken seriously, and great care taken in responding to them. There are several reasons, however, to regard Putin’s threats as posturing and to treat them as such.

First, his threats have involved insinuation and bluster, but have not actually involved any corresponding military moves. This might make Putin look tough to his domestic audience, might scare public opinion in Ukraine and in the West, but without actually risking the consequences of military escalation. Were Putin in fact to put his nuclear forces on alert, that might have real consequences. Washington might increase the alert status of its own forces, and, at worst, there would be the risk of a U.S. preemptive strike. But by engaging in dramatic rhetoric while making sure that U.S. intelligence can see that he has not moved his tactical nuclear arms from their storage facilities to military bases, Putin shows that he appreciates the dangers of nuclear weapons. Indeed, in March 2022, the United States and Russia established a “deconfliction hotline” to avoid any inadvertent escalation in Ukraine. In May, the U.S. Secretary of Defense and Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff re-established communication with their Russian counterparts for the first time since the war began.

At the same time, Russian nuclear specialists have been quick to pour cold water both on suggestions that the material was in fact HEU and on claims by Moldovan police that the material may ultimately be traceable to Russia. For one, the €20 million price tag quoted by the smugglers is way too low for real HEU, says Sergey Novikov, spokesman for Russia’s nuclear-energy corporation, Rosatom. Moreover, Rosatom claims that security in Russia’s nuclear installations is now so tight that “not even low-grade uranium has appeared on the black market” in more than a decade. Novikov says, “This Moldovan story is grandmother’s fairy tales.”

Experts in the U.S. agree that Russia has come a long way from the scary days of the early 1990s, when nuclear scientists went unpaid for months and guards at nuclear facilities left their posts to go foraging in the forests for food. Declassified documents from 1994 released earlier this month paint a disturbing picture of post-Soviet Russia, a place where “no system of nuclear accounting existed” and stolen nuclear materials began showing up on the black market in Leningrad, Istanbul, and Munich.

In the spring of 2022, the competent financial managers at Russia’s central bank and finance ministry, forced to deal with unprecedented Western sanctions and a capital flight at almost three times the 2021 rate, drove down the exchange rate with temporary capital controls. An even bigger help was a jump in energy prices caused by Europe’s war-driven fears of a cold winter. Russia reaped its benefits until the actual cold season, which showed Europe could survive almost without Russian gas and with much less Russian oil than it had been using. The second quarter of 2022 saw the third highest exports since 1994, when the central bank started publishing trade balance statistics, but only the 60th highest imports: The massive sanctions hit left Russia’s private and state-owned companies struggling to keep their supply chains going.

Since that first shock, energy prices stabilized and a $60 price cap on Russian oil supplies came into force in December. Russia has found ways to keep oil exports stable and even increase seaborne deliveries despite a Western embargo: More than 70% of Russian crude supplies now go to India and China, compared with less than 20% before the invasion. But the price cap has weakened Russia’s negotiating position in Asia, and the fears of a fuel crisis have subsided. At the same time, exporters found ways to bypass the sanctions, switching to suppliers in China and South Asia and moving Western goods via Turkey and some former Soviet republics. In the first quarter of 2023, Russia’s balance of goods and services trade shrank to $22.6 billion from $91.4 billion in the second quarter of 2022.

Russia is seeking to spend its way out of the self-inflicted economic crisis that threatened to deliver the deepest recession of President Vladimir Putin’s more than two-decade rule.

Roaring exports of commodities funneled capital into the coffers of the government and companies, feeding an upswing in business investment that was without precedent during previous economic contractions and proved crucial to powering the war effort in the year since the invasion of Ukraine.

Many of us focused on the problem of climate change have been waiting for the day when renewable energy would become cheaper than fossil fuels.

Well, we’re there: Solar and wind power are less expensive than oil, gas and coal in many places and are saving our economy billions of dollars. These and other renewable energy sources produced 30 percent of the world’s electricity in 2023, which may also have been the year that greenhouse gas emissions in the power sector peaked. In the United States alone, the amount of solar and wind energy capacity waiting to be built and connected to the grid is 18 times the amount of natural gas power capacity in the queue.

Saudi Arabia’s economy is undergoing a transformation, as it implements reforms to reduce oil dependence, diversify income sources, and enhance competitiveness. This year marks an important juncture as the midpoint of Saudi Arabia’s ambitious Vision 2030 journey. As shown in the latest IMF annual review of the country's economy, progress has been most notably reflected in non-oil growth, which has accelerated since 2021, averaging 4.8 percent in 2022. Despite lower overall growth reflecting additional oil production cuts, non-oil growth will remain close to 5 percent in 2023, spurred by strong domestic demand.

Diversification has been driven by improvements in the regulatory and business environment. As a result of a new set of laws to promote entrepreneurship, protect investors’ rights, and reduce the costs of doing business, new investment deals and licenses grew by 95 percent and 267 percent in 2022, respectively. In addition, the Saudi Investment Fund (PIF) has been deploying capital, including to help stimulate private sector investment.

Russia hosts only 143.2 million inhabitants, less than Nigeria. Its natural gas, oil, coal, and uranium reserves are immense. Why then should Russia be willing to develop electricity production from intermittent wind and solar energy, or start manufacturing electric vehicles?

The reasons, I argue in this study, are of economic and industrial nature. The ongoing rapid and massive uptake of new energy technologies enabling energy self-sufficiency via a combination of electricity production from renewable energy sources, energy storage, and digital technology,6 threatens to dramatically lower the abundant revenues earned by Russia from selling abroad oil, fuels, natural gas, coal, and even uranium. This picture is further worsened by the concomitant and imminent uptake of battery electric vehicles (BEVs)7 well beyond China where BEVs are now a large fraction of the >20 million vehicles sold every year in the Asian country.

This oil price downside risk is by far the biggest factor in determining the resilience of global E&P upstream portfolios, along with the potential for rising costs for emitting carbon dioxide. Rystad Energy has studied the portfolio resilience of the top 25 non-national oil and gas companies and found big differences in how robust they are to the risks of lower commodity prices and increased CO2 taxes.

This empirical analysis provides significant insights into the short-term and long-term relationship between WTI oil prices and various factors, including U.S. crude oil production, global oil prices, natural gas prices, renewable energy production, and clean energy company returns. Our findings suggest that renewable energy production currently complements crude oil production, rather than substituting it, with an increase in renewable energy production associated with increased oil prices when crude oil production remains constant. Our model is represented by stochastic variables in nature, but there is a long-term equilibrium towards which the considered set of variables converges over time. The deviation from the equilibrium trajectory is corrected very quickly because the speed of adjustment is very high.

Currently, various policies and investment efforts are being applied to stimulate the production of energy from renewable energy sources, and as a result, an increase in energy consumption from renewable energy sources is expected. Since renewable energy technologies are expensive and these products are expensive, they keep oil prices high.

Oil demand will peak in 2025, years earlier than previously expected, the International Energy Agency said in its World Energy Outlook on Tuesday.

But while the transition away from oil is arriving sooner than expected, IEA executive director Fatih Birol warned that this year will see the second-largest annual increase in CO2 emissions in history, leading to an “unsustainable economic recovery” from COVID-19.

Growth in the world’s demand for oil is set to slow almost to a halt in the coming years, with the high prices and security of supply concerns highlighted by the global energy crisis hastening the shift towards cleaner energy technologies, according to a new IEA report released today.

The Oil 2023 medium-term market report forecasts that based on current government policies and market trends, global oil demand will rise by 6% between 2022 and 2028 to reach 105.7 million barrels per day (mb/d) – supported by robust demand from the petrochemical and aviation sectors. Despite this cumulative increase, annual demand growth is expected to shrivel from 2.4 mb/d this year to just 0.4 mb/d in 2028, putting a peak in demand in sight.

The International Monetary Fund has downgraded its growth projections for Saudi Arabia by more than any other major economy it tracks, reflecting the kingdom’s decision to reduce oil supplies.

Saudi gross domestic product will rise by 1.7% in 2024, according to the fund, less than the Washington-based lender’s prediction of 2.6% in April. It also lowered the projection for 2025 to 4.7% from 6%.

Saudi Arabia's economic growth will likely be one of the slowest among the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries this year, according to a Reuters poll of economists who lowered growth forecasts from three months ago due to extended oil output cuts.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies led by Russia, known as OPEC+, were expected to start raising production this year but in June said the reductions would continue well into 2025.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, its economy seemed certain to suffer as a coalition of Ukraine’s allies, led by the United States, imposed an unprecedented program of sanctions. Many figures, including U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and EU Sanctions Envoy David O’Sullivan, predicted that these would force Russian President Vladimir Putin to choose between the war and a struggling economy. But Russia’s economy has defied these predictions. Thanks to record state spending, the Russian economy will grow faster than the global economy in 2023. Whereas the latter is forecast by the IMF to grow by three percent, the former is predicted by the Russian government to grow by 3.5 percent. When the exact figures come in, Russia’s economic growth in 2023 will likely turn out to have exceeded three percent, and Putin will no doubt boast about this in speeches ahead of this spring’s presidential election.

Rather than signaling economic health, however, these figures are symptomatic of overheating. The Russian economy’s problems, in fact, are such that Putin is facing an impossible trilemma. His challenges are threefold: he must fund his ongoing war against Ukraine, maintain his populace’s living standards, and safeguard macroeconomic stability. Achieving the first and second goals will require higher spending, which will fuel inflation and thus prevent the achievement of the third goal. High oil and gas revenues, adept financial management by the Russian authorities, and lax enforcement of Western restrictions have all played their part in Russia’s economic growth, but they mask growing imbalances in the economy.

Russia is neither stable nor normal. The presidential election brings to maturity the late-stage Putinism that began with the constitutional referendum in the summer of 2020, when Putin’s potential mandate was extended until 2036. There is more to this stage, however, than mere autocracy. Putin has made clear that Russia is fighting a permanent background war with the West, which gives him both an ideological raison d’être and a way for his ruling elite to maintain power. And to keep it all going, he must continually burn up the country’s resources, financial, human, political, and psychological. All of which points to the country’s political and economic fragility.

Consider the financial and economic situation. Although it retains market fundamentals, the Russian economy is increasingly dependent on government investment. The military-industrial complex has become the overwhelming driver of this unhealthy and unproductive economy, as the 2024 budget makes clear: military expenditures will be 1.7 times higher even compared with last year’s inflated figures, to reach 25 percent of all spending. Meanwhile, Russian exports, primarily of oil and gas resources, are providing diminishing returns because of the closure of Western markets and discounted sales. Nonetheless, these nonrenewables are not exhausted yet, and Putin, at least, seems to hope they will be enough to last his lifetime.

Jennifer Sor 7/13/24, reporter for Markets Insider, BA in Economics and English from UC Santa Barbara, “Russia's weakened energy trade and lost access to the dollar will spark a severe recession within a year, a top economist says”, , vivi!

Vladimir Putin's claims that Russia's economy is doing just fine may soon be hard to back up.

Ultimately, however, it is not the automobile industry that is driving Russia’s economic growth.

Military spending is doing that.

Russia's Central Bank is expected to raise its key interest rate to curb the high inflation that has followed Vladimir Putin's invasion, but one expert said that even higher "shock therapy" rises are needed to cool the overheated wartime economy.

Russia has so far weathered relatively well the turbulence of sanctions imposed to isolate the country from the global financial system as punishment for Putin's aggression. However, there are concerns of economic problems on the horizon.

President Joe Biden’s exit from the U.S. presidential race has left some to question the impact of his decision on gasoline prices at the pump, with more than a month left until the end of the summer driving season.

The news “changes the risk calculus for if the Democrats retain the White House” but, for now, has no real impact on gas prices, Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told MarketWatch.