In the parlance of political risk assessment, a Black Swan is an event regarded as highly improbable or even impossible before it happens. A Black Swan is not only. Treasure hunters will find plenty of gems to drool over at Shannons Melbourne auction this week. The auction is headlined by a brace of American V8 muscle cars, with. A few years later, the Black Knight seemed have made another appearance when American newspapers reported in 1960 that there was an unusual object in. This account of sixty years of the Howard University Department of. A Plague of Black Swans in the Middle East « Lobe. Log. Analysis. Published on February 2. A Black Swan is not only surprising but has the capacity to disrupt or severely alter the anticipated course of events. Once a Black Swan is sighted, however, the expert community quickly adjusts to the new reality and begins to explain why, under the circumstances, a Black Swan was likely to appear and, perhaps, was even inevitable. As a card- carrying member of the chattering class, I am intimately familiar with all aspects of this phenomenon. And as someone who focuses on the Middle East, I can produce a number of historical examples. The Iranian revolution was a Black Swan. The Saudi- led oil boycott of 1. Black Swan, even though the self- inflicted wounds of the embargo persuaded the Saudi leadership and its Arab allies to renounce the use of such tactics in the future. Some of the wars and coups in modern Middle East history might count as Black Swans. However, once the dust settled, things frequently returned to approximately their previous state, little changed except perhaps the cast of characters and the national balance sheet. Fate Of Homeless Liberians And Others Removed From The Streets CDC Youth League Writes to LNP There is a level of concern that we have as regards the manner in which. Industry information at your fingertips. Over 200,000 Hollywood insiders. Enhance your IMDb Page. Yea, pretty much this. It’s not really the huge deal people continue to make of it, it’s just a nice curiosity in an industry of bad news. Directed by Norman Jewison. With Ted Neeley, Carl Anderson, Yvonne Elliman, Barry Dennen. Film version of the musical stage play, presenting the last few weeks of.The persistence of a seemingly unshakeable, if highly disagreeable, status quo made outcomes more predictable. The Middle East today is in a new stage altogether. It seems as though an entire flock of Black Swans has descended on the region, confounding both experts and local populations. Since the region shows no signs of returning to what we came to regard over a period of generations as “normal,” it is worth cataloguing some of these events and their implications. The Swans of Spring. The obvious starting point is the self- immolation of a Tunisian street vendor five years ago that touched off a series of political consequences that are still ongoing. Originally labeled the Arab Spring, it has produced anything but spring- like conditions across the region. Governments have fallen in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen. Associated revolts have reduced Syria to abject civil war and have shaken Bahrain and the Arab oil monarchies in the Persian Gulf. In only one of the cases of regime change – the Egypt of General Abdel Fattah el- Sisi – does the present in any way resemble the past. The original incident and its repercussions were truly Black Swans. In hindsight it is possible to see conditions that contributed to this outcome, but the sequence of events was unpredictable. More important, at least in the foreseeable future, there is no evidence that things will snap back to anything resembling the previous status quo. One could, of course, go back a little further. Iraq, which had been ruled by Sunnis for centuries, suddenly was transformed into a dominant Shia state by the George W. The United States thus removed Iran’s greatest rival to the west (after having removed Iran’s greatest rival to the east by its invasion of Afghanistan two years earlier) and insured that Iran would emerge as the superpower of the Persian Gulf. That was clearly not the intent, but it transformed the landscape of the Middle East and led to the emergence of a Sunni resistance that in time morphed into what we now know as the Islamic State (ISIS or IS). IS is another Black Swan. Radical Sunni Islam had been around for a very long time. But this combination of political anger, a ready- made ideology in the form of hyper- Salafi jihadism, and the availability of swathes of ungoverned territory in Syria and Iraq turned a fringe movement into a political force that burst onto the scene in 2. Sykes- Picot arrangement after World War I. IS may or may not survive as a political entity. But the concept of an Islamic caliphate is a potent idea, and this is its most tangible manifestation in more than a century. It will not easily vanish. The nuclear agreement between Iran and the world’s leading powers is not exactly a Black Swan, particularly since Iran had signaled its willingness to place severe restrictions on its nuclear activity as early as 2. U. S. Still, the successful completion of the very complex formal agreement that emerged from nearly two years of intense negotiations could have occurred only under a U. S. Similarly, it required a team of sophisticated Iranian negotiators under the leadership of Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and President Hassan Rouhani, with the backing of a skeptical Supreme Leader in Tehran. Finally, and no less important, was the political cooperation and active contributions of an unlikely array of individuals and governments from Russia and China to the often quarreling members of the European Union. The improbability of all those factors coming together at the same time prompted widespread predictions of failure from the very beginning of the talks to the present. This Very Gray Swan will, however, affect the politics of the region for the foreseeable future by taking the Iranian nuclear threat off the table while perhaps slowly reintroducing Iran into regional politics as a difficult but potentially constructive player. Saudi Swans. The Saudi decision to let the price of oil fall was also, strictly speaking, not a Black Swan since Saudi Arabia had insisted for years that it was no longer going to play the role of swing producer. Still, even the Saudi technocrats who decided to raise production at a time of over- supply did not likely anticipate that the price would drop below $3. The effects of this 7. While Saudi actions have slowed the fracking industry in the United States and battered the economies of Russia and other competitors, the Saudis may find it far more difficult in the future to raise the price of oil back to a more budget- friendly number. As pointed out by Ed Morse, a veteran analyst of the oil industry, the fracking industry in the United States can recover far more quickly than traditional oil and gas drilling. The price of recovering undersea oil has fallen dramatically, as have the production costs of solar, wind, and other renewables. There is a lot of oil in Iran, Libya, Iraq, and the Saudi- Kuwaiti Neutral Zone ready to come back on the market depending on political and market conditions. So, if the price begins to rise, it will trigger additional supply from both traditional and non- traditional sources that could bring the price down again. This is the real Black Swan: the dominance of Persian Gulf oil in the world’s energy markets may be waning—not just for the moment but potentially for the long term. Perhaps the most startling Black Swan to appear in recent months was the total transformation of leadership and political style in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. King Salman was next in line for the throne, so that was no surprise. And it was understood that a transfer of power to the next generation of leaders drawn from the Saudi royal family was imminent. Still, no one expected that the new king would in the matter of a few weeks overthrow the line of succession and place unprecedented power in the hands of his 3. Mohammad. For generations, Saudi Arabia had managed its role as the custodian of world oil markets with skill and caution. It played its role with modesty, mostly operating behind the scene with dollops of money for projects both good and bad. It was subject to error, but it never lost sight of its function as a responsible broker for international commodities and trade. Whatever one thought of the way the Kingdom was run, the world of oil would have been far different had Saddam Hussein rather than the Saudi royal family been in charge. But those days are over. The new Saudi leadership is out to demonstrate that it can act boldly, engineer change, and lead the charge into a new Middle East. Years ago, Saudi Arabia cautioned the United States not to invade Iraq because of the political consequences. They were right, as they never tired of reminding their American colleagues. But now they have invaded Yemen and seem poised to repeat all of the worst errors of the U. S. Quite apart from the damage being done to Yemen, the war is placing huge demands on the Saudi treasury just at the moment when low oil prices have slashed revenues. It is a supreme test for the brash young deputy crown prince, who is seen as the architect of this unprecedented burst of Saudi activism. Another Thirty Years War? Any of these dramatic changes—and others that might occur in the near future such as Kurdish independence, the end of Christianity in the region, or a radical Islamist Syria—would stand as historic inflection points. However, their interaction elevates the changes to a total that is greater than the sum of its parts. Complexity is the norm in the Middle East, and prediction there has always been a fool’s game. However, the current level of uncertainty is an order of magnitude beyond anything that we have seen for at least a century. And the past provides few reliable clues about what may happen next. In fact, the past has been so very different from the present that it may be the worst of all possible guides. This violent chaos and unpredictability have prompted comparisons between this moment in the Middle East and the Thirty Years War in Europe (1. That terrible time, which started as a religious war but which was actually a restructuring of the power relationships in the center of Europe, destroyed entire regions and killed or displaced so many people that it took many generations to recover. In that case, the warring parties fought themselves to exhaustion and then settled their disputes in a series of agreements that defined a new rule- based political order—the Westphalian system—that is widely regarded as the essential underpinning of modern Europe and the West. The Middle East could follow such a trajectory out of the current chaos. Certainly the process of peace- making after all other avenues have been exhausted—the so- called Lebanonization of the crisis—seems to be the way events are presently moving. But the timing and nature of the end game are impossible to know. Obama and the Swans.
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