The UAE, Iran, and the Hostage at the Heart of the Oil War

The David McWilliams Podcast

David McWilliams

News & Politics

4.5 • 692 Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2026

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The UAE has just walked out of OPEC after nearly 60 years, and the timing is no accident. This week, we head to Abu Dhabi and Dubai to ask what's really going on. Why now? Why leave the cartel in the middle of a war? What does it mean for the price of petrol in your car, for Trump's midterms, and for the geopolitics of the Gulf? We get into the strange tacit alliance between the UAE and Israel, why Iran's real leverage isn't the Straits of Hormuz but the Emirates themselves, and how Saudi Arabia's old swing-producer power is being quietly dismantled. We also draw a much bigger lesson for small countries everywhere, including Ireland: the multilateral world that small states have hidden inside since the 1940s is breaking down, and the UAE's gamble is a glimpse of the hard choices that lie ahead. Oil, war, money, and the end of an era, all in one episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before we start, today we are all, UAE, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
0:08.6	We're talking about why they left OPEC, what this decision means for politics, for the price of petrol in your car,
0:16.5	and for the choices that small countries might have to make in the future.
0:21.4	So it's politics, geo-economics, petrol, oil, oil crises, all that stuff,
0:28.6	all coming up in a couple of minutes.
0:32.6	If you're interested in what's coming up in the podcast,
0:34.8	you may well be interested in this wonderful, wonderful event at the Dokey Book Festival. It's going to be called the oil shock.
0:41.9	Will energy prices crush the economy? It's Mark Blythe, Sonny Kapoor, Samaya Keynes.
0:47.8	It's all about oil, economies, inflation, and what happens next. That's at dokeybookfestival.org for tickets.
0:57.2	We'll see you in Docky in June.
1:02.2	To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature.
1:08.5	This podcast is powered by ACAST.
1:14.5	How you're doing there? It is time for the podcast.
1:19.1	I am in Croatia.
1:21.3	I've just had the launch of Novats, John.
1:24.9	Novat's.
1:25.3	Money in Croatian. It went really well. Big, big crowd. Lots of media. It's apparently selling very well, so the publisher is very happy with that. Brilliant. And it is, yeah, and it's lovely to be back to this part of the world. It's great to see the book in a different language, you know, and the different script, the different grammar, the different language,
1:45.3	all that sort of...
1:45.9	How many is that now?
1:47.5	21, is it?
1:49.5	Yeah, it's about...
1:50.4	I mean, it's 21 languages it has been bought in, and it's been published in about 11 of those
	...

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