For many observers, the instability in North Africa bodes ill for the oil-rich Persian Gulf states, which constitute the world’s primary oil-producing region — and what bodes ill for the Persian Gulf would also be a grave concern for the global economy. But it is important to keep in mind that North African states are quite poor as a rule, while the Arab states of the Persian Gulf are among the richest locations on the planet, largely due to their petroleum wealth. Moreover, while Arab leaders in the Persian Gulf certainly take a large slice of the national wealth for themselves, they do not hoard all of the wealth as the regimes of Egypt and Libya traditionally have done.
In many of the Persian Gulf states, the elite realize full well that the groups they represent do not form a plurality, much less a majority, of the populations of their states. The ruling family of Saudi Arabia is only 100,000 (at the most) out of a population of roughly 20 million. More than 80 percent of the inhabitants of the United Arab Emirates are imported labor without citizenship. At least two-thirds of Bahraini citizens are Shiite while the ruling family is Sunni.
The Arab elite’s solution to this demographic mismatch is to mix an authoritarian political setup with an aggressive sharing of the petroleum largess. Subsidy rates — whether for food, electricity, housing or gasoline — are lavish. The rulers of the Arab states of the Persian Gulf essentially purchase political quietude.
The real reason STRATFOR sees the Persian Gulf’s Arab states as being threatened has less to do with spontaneous protests and more to do with foreign-instigated unrest — and this would-be instigator is Iran. Iran has struggled to increase its sway on the western shores of the Gulf since long before the mullahs rose to power in 1979, and in this new viral-protest age, Tehran sees an opportunity.
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