On Valentine’s Day in 1945, US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt met Saudi King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud on the American cruiser USS Quincy. It was the beginning of one of the most important geopolitical alliances of the past 70 years, in which US security in the Middle East was bartered for oil pegged in dollars.
But times change, and 2023 may be remembered as the year that this grand bargain began to shift, as a new world energy order between China and the Middle East took shape.