Qatar's Departure From OPEC Suggests Gulf Rift Is Here to Stay - Bloomberg

Qatar's Departure From OPEC Suggests Gulf Rift Is Here to Stay - Bloomberg:

The campaign to isolate Qatar, launched 18 months ago by Saudi Arabia and three other Arab nations, may have peaked with a tweet in August.

That’s when Saud al-Qahtani, a top aide to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, told his 1.36 million followers that he was “waiting eagerly” for news on a 40-mile canal construction project which would turn Qatar into an island and place a radioactive waste dump on its border, changing the geopolitical map of the Gulf forever.

Nothing has been heard since of the project, which was never officially confirmed, and al-Qahtani was demoted in the wake of the Oct. 2 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Yet Monday’s announcement by Qatar that it will leave the Saudi-dominated Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, on Jan. 1 suggests that the proposal’s underlying threat -- of a permanent rift in the Gulf -- is happening anyhow.