Saudis woke up last Saturday to find the crown jewel of their oil industry in smoke. The attack on the al-Abqaiq oil processing facility, allegedly conducted by cruise missiles and launched from a staging area inside Iran, resulted in the sharpest single-day increase in crude prices since the 1991 Gulf War.
Saudi Arabia’s largest oil installation, however, wasn’t the only thing that went up in smoke last weekend. The volley of missiles screeching into Saudi airspace may have also ruined French president Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to deescalate tensions in the Persian Gulf and save the 2015 Iran nuclear deal from a slow and agonising death.
The French president has been hard at work all summer trying to coax Washington and Tehran, two long-time adversaries, into the same room. Like all of his European colleagues, Macron is dumbfounded about why Donald Trump tore up an accord that, while far from perfect, capped Tehran’s enrichment, research, and development activities and provided the international community with far better access to Iran’s nuclear program than it ever had.
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