A most important aspect of the decision by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), reported in The Common Sense yesterday, to leave the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is that it has an oil export route that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz entirely.

The Fujairah pipeline gives the UAE a direct route from its oil fields to the Gulf of Oman, outside the Strait of Hormuz. That means it can move crude to global markets without relying fully on the narrow maritime chokepoint between Iran and Oman.

This could ensure up to two million barrels a day to global oil supplies (the world burns around 100 million barrels a day) at a moment when fears over Hormuz are rising.

OPEC was established in 1960 (the UAE first joined the group in 1967) amid a wave of post-colonial nationalism that marked the beginning of what would be a five-decade long shift in the balance of global energy power towards the Middle East. (Up until that point oil had been a buyers' market; the West determined demand and disparate Arab producers took what prices that could). Over the ensuing six decades no actor ever pulled the trigger in the weak link in the new arrangement – the Strait of Hormuz. The Soviets never did during the Afghanistan war. The Iranians didn’t after the fall of the Shah. Saddam Hussein didn’t during the invasion of Kuwait.

It took the immense pressure applied by the Americans to the Iranian regime this year to finally force a Middle Eastern actor to pull that trigger. While a lot of attention has been focussed on the immediate-term implications, it is what that decision may mean in the longer term, for global energy and related balances, that matters most.

The UAE’s decision to leave OPEC is the most significant break in global energy power balances since the Arab states used that monopoly to turn off the oil taps to punish the United States (US) and the West more broadly for their support of Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur war.

What an irony that an Arab state would now further fracture that cartel to an extent in support of the US and, by extension, Israel.

For a hint of where this may all lead there is no better contemporary example than the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022. That led to Russian gas to Europe being cut, with Europe turning to the US to make up the difference.

Continued uncertainty around the Strait of Hormuz may end up having the same effect on global oil power balances. The US has emerged as a dominant energy power, not only through shale production but also through its ability to influence supply chains and capital flows. Add its de facto seizure of Venezuelan production potential, and read that against the vast potential of South American oil fields more broadly, and the balance of global energy power appears to be shifting back to where it was at the end of 1959 - which is good news for the Western liberal order.