The Decline of Saudi Hegemony and the Emergence of a Multipolar Gulf Order

By Majid Maleki

June 13, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

The transformations that have unfolded across the Persian Gulf over the past two decades cannot be adequately explained through the conventional language of interstate rivalry, geopolitical competition, or shifting regional alliances alone. What is taking place is a deeper restructuring of power in one of the world’s most strategic energy regions—a restructuring rooted in changes within global capitalism, evolving patterns of capital accumulation, the crisis of traditional rentier-state models, and the relative decline of the United States’ capacity to sustain a unilateral regional order.

For decades, Saudi Arabia functioned as the dominant power on the Arabian Peninsula. Massive oil revenues, a larger population than its Gulf neighbors, control over Islam’s holiest sites, a strategic partnership with the United States, and a central role in global energy markets gave Riyadh a position from which it could shape regional politics and exert considerable influence over neighboring states.

What is declining today, however, is not Saudi Arabia’s power in an absolute sense. Rather, it is the historical form of Saudi hegemony itself—a hegemony grounded in the relative monopoly of oil wealth, religious legitimacy, and unwavering Western support.

Gulf Capitalism in Transition

Throughout much of the late twentieth century, the Gulf monarchies were organized around a common economic model: the oil-based rentier state. Hydrocarbon revenues enabled governments to maintain political stability and provide extensive welfare benefits without relying heavily on taxation or broad social participation.

The globalization of capital, the expansion of financial markets, and technological transformations have gradually altered this model. Gulf states are no longer merely exporters of oil and gas. Their sovereign wealth funds have become major actors within global capitalism, channeling hundreds of billions of dollars into international banking, logistics, technology, renewable energy, military industries, tourism, and financial markets.

As a result, competition among Gulf states is no longer centered exclusively on hydrocarbons. Increasingly, it revolves around securing advantageous positions within the global circuits of capital accumulation.

Different states have pursued distinct strategies of integration into the world economy. Qatar has relied on its vast natural gas reserves, activist diplomacy, and transnational investments. The United Arab Emirates has established itself as a financial, commercial, and logistical hub linking Asia, Africa, and Europe. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, seeks to diversify its economy through Vision 2030 and reduce its long-standing dependence on oil revenues.

These divergent pathways of accumulation have gradually weakened the material foundations of Riyadh’s traditional regional dominance.

Qatar and the UAE: New Centers of Capital Accumulation

The rise of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates is not simply the result of ambitious political leadership. It reflects their changing positions within the global economy.

Following the transfer of power in 1995, Qatar used its immense liquefied natural gas resources to become one of the world’s leading energy exporters. Through Al Jazeera, extensive international investments, and a diplomacy centered on mediation and strategic engagement, Doha transformed economic power into political influence. The Saudi-led blockade imposed on Qatar in 2017 ultimately revealed the limits of Riyadh’s ability to dictate regional outcomes as it had done in previous decades.

The UAE pursued a different trajectory. Dubai and Abu Dhabi emerged as major financial, logistical, and commercial centers whose economies are less dependent on direct oil exports than those of many neighboring states. Simultaneously, normalization with Israel through the Abraham Accords expanded the UAE’s access to advanced military, cyber, and security technologies, strengthening its position within the region’s evolving security architecture.

Power in the Gulf is therefore no longer concentrated in a single center. Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh have each become distinct poles of capital accumulation and political influence.

Iran, Yemen, and the Limits of Saudi Power

If political economy constitutes one dimension of the Gulf’s transformation, the changing regional balance of power constitutes another.

Despite decades of sanctions and international pressure, Iran has succeeded in cultivating networks of influence across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. Regardless of one’s political assessment of these policies, their cumulative effect has been the emergence of a regional balance that constrains Saudi Arabia’s capacity to exercise unilateral dominance.

The war in Yemen offers perhaps the clearest illustration of this transformation. Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in 2015 was intended to restore a regional order favorable to Riyadh. Instead, the conflict evolved into a prolonged war of attrition that imposed significant financial, political, and strategic costs on the kingdom.

Yemen exposed a fundamental reality: even the wealthiest Arab state in the region could no longer impose its will on neighboring societies through military force alone.

In this sense, Yemen was not merely another regional conflict. It became a critical site where the structural limits of Saudi power were revealed. At the same time, Ansar Allah evolved from a localized insurgent movement into a regional actor capable of influencing the security of the Red Sea and major global trade routes.

The Beijing Agreement and a Relative Post-American Order

The Chinese-mediated rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023 should be understood within this broader context. Its significance extends beyond the reconciliation of two regional rivals.

For decades, the United States served as the principal security guarantor and diplomatic broker in the Gulf. Today, however, China has become the largest trading partner for many states in the region, while its political influence continues to expand. Russia, meanwhile, has strengthened its role in regional energy and security affairs.

This does not signify the end of American influence. Rather, it suggests that the era of uncontested U.S. primacy is gradually giving way to a more complex configuration of power characterized by multiple centers of influence.

The Gulf monarchies themselves increasingly seek to diversify their strategic relationships rather than remain dependent upon a single external patron.

Contradictions of Gulf Capitalism

Despite remarkable economic achievements, the Gulf development model remains marked by deep structural contradictions.

A substantial share of economic activity depends on migrant labor. Millions of workers contribute to the production of wealth while remaining excluded from many political and social rights. This contradiction lies at the heart of contemporary Gulf capitalism.

Dependence on hydrocarbon revenues also persists. Although governments frequently emphasize diversification, oil and gas continue to constitute the central pillars of state finances. The global transition toward renewable energy and mounting climate pressures introduce significant uncertainties regarding the long-term sustainability of this model.

At the same time, widening inequalities, concentrated wealth, dependence on global financial capital, and vulnerability to fluctuations in the international economy raise fundamental questions about the durability of Gulf development strategies.

These tensions reveal that the region’s challenge is not simply geopolitical competition but the sustainability of a particular model of capitalist development.

Conclusion

The Persian Gulf is undergoing a transition away from an order in which Saudi Arabia functioned as the region’s uncontested hegemonic power. The rise of Qatar and the UAE as autonomous centers of capital accumulation, Iran’s growing influence within the regional balance of power, the consequences of the Yemen war, China’s expanding role, and the relative decline of U.S. unilateral dominance have all contributed to the emergence of a more multipolar regional order.

Yet the central issue is not merely the redistribution of power among states. Beneath these geopolitical shifts lie the deeper contradictions of Gulf capitalism itself—a system built upon the intersection of energy rents, global financial capital, migrant labor, and great-power security guarantees.

From this perspective, the decline of traditional Saudi hegemony should be understood as part of a broader process of regional restructuring driven by transformations in both capital and power. The decisive question facing the Gulf is not which state will ultimately prevail, but whether the region’s development model can adapt to the challenges posed by energy transition, climate change, demographic pressures, and the instability of the global economy.

The answer to that question, more than any geopolitical rivalry, is likely to shape the future of the Gulf in the decades ahead.Email

Majid Maleki

Majid Maleki Meighani, (sometimes writing under the name Majid Maleki), is an Iranian political analyst, writer, and translator. He was imprisoned for his political activities. His work focuses on critical analysis of Iran’s labor movement, the political left, anti-imperialist critiques of geopolitics, and social movements in West Asia and the Global South. His analysis is grounded in direct fieldwork and interviews within local communities. He has translated into Persian Walter LaFeber’s Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America and the collection Voices of the Arab Spring. He has been a contributor to ZNetwork, Tribune Zamane, and Akhbar-e Rooz. You can access his full body of work on his author page on ZNetwork.

Geopathology and the Econopathology Behind it

Michael Hudson

 June 8, 2026

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

America’s 2025 National Security Strategy calls for gaining control of the world’s oil trade. Toward this end, Donald Trump’s Oil War aims at depriving Iran, Iraq and its neighboring OPEC countries of their sovereignty over whom they may sell their oil to, just as he has done to Venezuela. There is no remorse for the collateral damage being caused by the disruption in energy trade that is plunging most of the world’s economies into depression.

Such reckless (and wreckful) behavior conforms to the letter of what psychologists call a sociopath. The Mayo Clinic applies this term to “a person [who] consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. People with antisocial personality disorder tend to purposely make others angry or upset and manipulate or treat others harshly or with cruel indifference. They lack remorse or do not regret their behavior.” To cap matters, “people with antisocial personality disorder [who] often violate the law, becoming criminals. They may lie, behave violently or impulsively …” This diagnosis can readily be applied to any nation aspiring to empire by conquest. But U.S. foreign policy has carried it to new extremes.

Just as sociopaths lack a sense of right and wrong (and fight against any such moral values constraining their abusive behavior), U.S. diplomats have rejected the United Nations Charter’s body of international laws of war that ban attacks on civilians. American weaponry and missile guidance systems are serving religious and ethnic genocide from Ukraine to the Middle East as Ukrainian, Israeli and various Wahabi al-Qaeda client armies have been recruited to serve as America’s foreign legions.

Trump’s impulsive, aggressive and manipulative demands, accompanied by bullying violence, violate the most fundamental laws of international behavior that formerly were considered to be the essence of civilization. The UN Charter’s rule not to interfere with the sovereignty of foreign countries is the legacy of Europe’s 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that ended its Thirty Years’ War. The United States has overthrown foreign governments and tried to bring about regime change from Russia to Iran by bombing civilians, especially young students and doctors, schools and hospitals, in the hope that such terrorism will lead populations to replace their governments with U.S. client oligarchies to stop the bombings that have become the hallmark of U.S. policy.

U.S. diplomacy also violates international maritime law, bombing fishing boats from Venezuela and Colombia in Latin America to the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf, without warning or probable cause, simply to demonstrate its immunity from the constraint of international law and the inability of the United Nations or any other international body to prevent piracy and murder on the seas.

Insisting that other countries obey its own sanctions aimed at isolated Russian oil production, the United States has destroyed Libya and grabbed Iraq’s oil production and taken control of its revenue, refusing Iraqi government demands for the United States to leave. It has likewise seized control of Venezuela and devoted all its oil-export proceeds to U.S. accounts in Miami under the Trump Administration’s direct control.

Trump’s behavior has gone seamlessly to the U.S. presidency from his background as a notoriously cheating real estate developer, lying and breaking contracts with his suppliers, bankers and labor, and treating fines and penalties simply as a cost of doing business, not to mention his predatory behavior toward women. There is almost a natural kinship between his former life and his present political role. Much as U.S. foreign policy seeks to block countries from having their own sovereignty and self-reliance, today’s financial and real estate magnates in the One Percent class, along with the ambitious politicians they recruit to gain control of U.S. policy, are reducing a widening swath of the U.S. population to debt dependency and the insecurity of living paycheck to paycheck.

U.S. strategists fear (and bullies are cowards) that foreign independence from U.S. control of trade in oil, information technology and automatic intelligence would enable them to resist the demands of America’s abusive imperial power. The creditor class, monopolists and other members of the rentier One Percent share a similar fear that the U.S. government might enact and apply laws that would limit their concentration of financial power and monopolization of wealth at the expense of the increasingly indebted 99 Percent, being forced more deeply into debt (and debt arrears) just to make ends meet.

Similar drives for power characterize the CEOs and CFOs of today’s largest corporations, as well as gangsters, religious cult leaders and many politicians pursuing their respective ambitions. Sociopathic self-indulgence is celebrated as the driving force of progress, “free” of public checks and balances to permit economic polarization and the kind of self-destructive decadence that brought down the Roman Empire.

A vocabulary to describe today’s global fracture and its civilizational war

We need an appropriate vocabulary to describe these phenomena, and also to characterize their attempt at self-justification by promoting today’s neoliberal ideology. I suggest the following two words:

Geopathology: the abusive conduct of international relations in an exploitative manner that injures and victimizes other countries by imposing a unilateral double standard of behavior. All imperialism aspiring to empire building is characterized by such geopathology.

Econopathology: the doctrine to defend the absence of social empathy. Its core is today’s libertarian “greed is good” individualism advocating unlimited self-interest and rejecting any government constraint or regulation to protect the basic social principle of reciprocity and mutual aid that provided the foundation for civilization’s takeoff.

Early civilization could not have evolved if Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, Frederick Hayek and Alan Greenspan had managed to send themselves back in a time machine and arrive as gods from the future offering to enlighten chieftains, priesthoods and the kings of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China. Civilization never could have taken off if it had taken their advice. There would have been no protection of their subjects against falling into debt bondage, losing their land tenure. Such a takeoff would have gone directly from incipient civilization to an economic polarization and subjugation to a narrow oligarchy lording it over the population and fighting to prevent any alternative attempts at takeoffs by protecting personal liberty and widespread self-support as a precondition for progress.

Only a system of mutual aid and protection of personal self-sufficiency for the citizenry could have enabled archaic low-surplus economies to survive. They could not afford the luxury of inequality and deprivation of the population’s liberty and land tenure rights. And by the same token, today’s economies require some public authority empowered to prevent economic and physical aggression from leading to predatory oligarchies. Most have been financial in character and have sought to monopolize the land.

Greek philosophy realized the need to protect society against the pathological behavior that was an inherent result of money-addiction. All wealth, especially in monetary form, was recognized as being addictive, leading to behavior that injured others, and accordingly was regarded as asocial and frowned upon. Usurious creditors assigned such “dirty” activities to their slaves or freedmen to avoid being shunned in polite company. Rules for basic reciprocity and respect for the human rights of others acted to constrain the kind of behavior that today’s financialized and neoliberalized Western societies have lost. Money addiction plays no role in today’s utilitarian economic theory, or in the principles of law or political philosophy. Business school students are taught that their task as corporate managers should be to maximize capital gains for their stockholders and pursue profits to pay dividends toward this end by cutting costs and conquering markets ruthlessly, as if all the ensuing exploitation and destruction is creative.

The common denominator between geopathology and econopathology is their denial of freedom and self-direction for other countries and people. Viewing foreign sovereignty and self-reliance as enabling other countries the ability to resist U.S. diplomacy, it views such sovereignty as threatening the U.S. security of maintaining its tributary empire. And like geopathology, econopathology aims to reduce other individuals to the dependent status of clients, debtors, renters, and ultimately to serfdom.

Wealth and power addiction are natural drives, but societies through the ages have sought to socialize. them Socrates found the ideal to be a wise central authority to keep this drive in check. That social protection against oligarchy was seen to be equally natural as a precondition for societies to avoid polarization and stagnation. But as Aristotle observed, democracies tend to evolve into oligarchies, which then to make themselves hereditary rentier aristocracies. And such nations seek to “free” kindred oligarchies from the constraints of public regulation (e.g., as Trump supports the libertarian Javier Milei in Argentina), and to prevent any such regulations from being applied on an international scale.

How can today’s economies cope with geopathology and its econopathology?

Sociopathology is not self-curing. Neither is econopathology nor geopathology. Ancient societies had cities of refuge to which such sociopaths and other lawbreakers were exiled, at least temporarily until such time as they became socialized and learned to regret and feel remorse for their behavior.

Today’s U.S. foreign policy has spent the past eighty years since 1945 putting in place a body of neoliberal anti-government doctrine and its anti-socialist rhetoric, rejecting all ideas of diplomatic and domestic economic reform. The challenge confronting today’s Global Majority is to create an alternative multipolar system of international institutions and alliances based on the principles of mutual aid and tolerance for each other’s autonomy that has always been the ostensible ideal.

Creating such an alternative requires an alternative doctrine to that of neoliberalism, and also re-creating the basic laws governing international relations. What makes this possible today is that for the first time since 1945, a critical mass of countries now exists to establish new institutions to protect their autonomy and sovereignty.

Michael Hudson’s Killing the Host, The Collapse of Antiquity and The Destiny of Civilization are published by CounterPunch Books.

How Colombia’s Post Electoral Hangover Catalyzed Popular Organizing

By Sandra Rátiva Gaona

June 6, 2026

Source: Ojalá

Dozens of people gathered to paint a street mural reading “Death will not return” in Bogotá on Tuesday, June 2, 2026, as a form of protest against the election results. (Photo: Mariana Mora)

On Monday, June 1, Colombians woke up with an undeniable moral hangover. We felt sad. And angry.

It was the morning after the vote in the first round of presidential elections. The Iván Cepeda-Aida Quilque ticket, representing continuity with the project of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez, were polling far ahead, but secured only 41 percent of the vote. And the far-right ticket of Abelardo de la Espriella and José Manuel Restrepo Abondano garnered nearly 44 percent. The runoff is scheduled for June 21.

Many of us wondered how it was possible that De la Espriella, who represents an aggressive right-wing political agenda, garnered such strong support in the first round of voting.

There is no clear answer as of yet; it’s a question that could be the subject of its own column. What the results do reveal is that Colombia is deeply polarized. But it’s not a polarization between equivalent extremes. Instead, what we see is a manufactured polarization that has been pushed rightwards.

In the primaries, voters were presented with two conservative platforms: one, led by Paloma Valencia, whose platform was aligned with the institutional right, and the other, who was much more radical, violent, and anti-institutional. It was the second that advanced to the first round, with De la Espriella at the helm.

Some say that Uribismo (the voting block that supports conservative former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez) was playing both sides of the right. I would argue instead that Uribismo is on its deathbed, and that these elections will bury the democratic center as a political force. Yet what we’re left with may be even worse.

Much of Colombian society, including part of the working class, is gripped by the fear of “becoming Venezuela,” compelling resentment and a willingness to sacrifice others’ rights in the name of individual security. Today, 44 percent of Colombian society is accepting the proposal to annihilate the other 41 percent of society. This is extremely disheartening.

The feeling in the popular and democratic camp is one of fear of the armed and deadly capabilities of paramilitary forces, and the dark hand of violence that persists in the country and that serves the far right’s political project.

Despite the moral hangover and confusion, we ought to take a closer look at how specific regions voted, going beyond the matter of the names of a few men. 

Cepeda and Quilcue won the first round in the country’s periphery, which is it say, in the areas most affected by war and systemic impoverishment. Wins in cities and municipalities such as Barrancabermeja, Puerto Wilches, the mining municipalities of Cesar, and various areas of Huila, Córdoba, and Sucre, convey a strong political message.

In these territories, people have said ‘No’ to fracking, land reform has taken place, and communities have directly experienced the benefits of public policies. Significant support emerged for proposals linked to a just energy transition, agrarian reform, and the popular economy, and these were victories for the political project for life.

For this reason, Petro’s stated rejection of the vote tallies was unfortunate—not because there was no fraud, but because his doing so reinforceD the patriarchal tone of presidential politics. 

De la Espriella responded even more aggressively, capping off an embarrassing spectacle of pissing contests politics, organized around male egos competing to demonstrate who has more power, strength, and authority.

This kind of politics fails to meet the needs of our time.

What progressivism has achieved

The tangible achievements of the past four years under Colombia’s first left-wing government—which began when Petro and Márquez took office in August 2022—are hard to deny.

The list includes reducing multidimensional poverty to 9.9 percent, raising the legal minimum wage by 23 percent as of this year, and redistributing government revenue to historically disenfranchised groups, particularly older adults who did not qualify for a pension.

Labor rights were also restored, including extra pay for night and Sunday shifts, which ex-President Uribe Vélez had axed.

One of my favorite achievements is the titling of more than two million hectares, which involved transferring productive lands and large estates to rural organizations and victims of the armed conflict. This was not done through expropriation (contrary to what neoliberal alarmists claimed), but through the purchase of land from large landowners and the recovery of hundreds of properties from drug traffickers via asset forfeiture.

This is undoubtedly a historic achievement that goes straight to the heart of the war in Colombia: inequality in land use and ownership.

But the most profound changes are not necessarily those that show up in  statistics. The main political achievement of this government is the revitalization of broad sectors of the Colombian population who, for decades, were treated at best as objects to be administered, at worst as targets of repression—and never as political subjects.

An alternative narrative has been created in Colombia. Petro did not create it alone, is it the product of his Pacto Histórico electoral movement. Rather, it is a narrative that the popular and democratic movement built over decades, against an economic model that Colombia’s neoliberal oligarchy built and imposed through bloodshed and violence.

The new national narrative is a vision for the future centered on the saying that “Colombia is a country of beauty.” This appealed to our national self-esteem (I don’t consider this nationalism; rather I see it as a way to recover from collective trauma from the war), and it articulated, through an economic project, the idea that Colombia is a country with potential in nature-based economies. 

It means that our love of dancing and good food and drink are net positives. That we can build productive (and not just rentier) economies and innovations linked to conservation. That if we manage to consolidate the defense of the mountain highlands and the Amazon, we can open a window of prosperity and well-being, even in the context of  climate crisis.

It would be naive to ignore the challenges. As has happened with other progressive movements in Latin America, Petro’s Change (Cambio) government ended up reproducing a deeply presidentialist logic. 

President Petro’s charisma often took space that should have gone to democratic deliberation. A project that spoke of democratizing power ended up relying excessively on a single figure, embodying the “progressive macho”: transformative in discourse, centralizing in practice.

A well-organized Colombian left

It must be said that Cepeda and Quilcue’s campaign was relatively insular. Various organized sectors attempted to reach out, contribute ideas, and build bridges, but encountered obstacles in doing so.

There was a tendency to close ranks, to rely on a small, trusted circle, and to use a communication style more concerned with being right than generating enthusiasm. This has felt almost like a kind of mistrust within the movement itself—a sentiment that is understandable given the disastrous scandals surrounding Petro as a result of his links with political opportunists.

Cepeda is an untarnished senator and politician, he’s an admirable figure deeply loved on the left. He has also proven to be somewhat unresponsive to sectors outside his political tradition. Culturally, he’s very Bogota-centric, even though his vice-presidential running mate is the Indigenous Nasa leader Quilcue.

Despite the fact that much of the electoral enthusiasm stemmed from the current government’s track record, and that polls fueled a certain sense of triumphalism, it is true this campaign lacked political imagination, strategic joy, and the ability to mobilize beyond core supporters.

Even so, it would be unfair to reduce the campaign to its limitations. Plazas were packed throughout the run up to the elections, as thousands of organized people from popular political traditions came together to defend a common project.

We cannot forget that this scenario is a historic achievement of popular movements—of the social and community minga (communal uprising) of 2008, of the People’s Congress and the Patriotic March in 2010, of the 2013 agricultural strike, the Ethnic, Rural and Popular Summit that brought the country to a standstill in 2016, the signing of the Peace Agreement in 2016, the youth uprising of 2019, and the social uprising of 2021.

All these moments planted the seeds of today’s mobilization and organization.

They can’t take away what we’ve already achieved

Something extraordinary began to take place in the wake of our shared moral hangover on Monday. Impromptu assemblies, meetings, calls, and conversations were held within unions, feminist collectives, rural organizations, faith communities, friend groups, family chat groups, migrant networks, neighborhood spaces, and student circles.

Amongst the fear, sadness, and frustration being shared, we have witnessed a burst of political imagination.

This runoff will belong to those who self-organize, those who don’t ask for permission, and who will lead this political project through affection, kind words, “I love you,” and hard, hands-on work.

We have many reasons to be afraid: the Colombian right is armed, and supported by Donald Trump, by Javier Milei, by Miami. The elites have been forced to face historical grievances they refused to hear for decades. They, above all, do not want the country’s model—extractivist, capitalist, Bogotá-centric, and white—to change.

But four years are not enough. No government could, in a single term, heal the wounds accumulated over generations. 

We’re aware of Petro’s mistakes and those committed by the first government that has worked for the people. Today’s campaign is not just about the presidency. It is about how the future of the country, about a future for life and a people, is organized. And no one can take away what we have already achieved. 

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This article was originally published by Ojalá; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Sandra Rátiva Gaona

Sandra Rátiva Gaona is a Colombian environmentalist, mother, and feminist. She has a master's degree in sociology from the Autonomous University of Puebla. She’s a researcher in political ecology and has worked as a cooperative member, activist, and environmental educator.