speculation informed by much reading & brooding:

KSA, as OPEC leader, as biggest exporter of best light sweet raised at lowest cost-per-barrel, is the point.

“Whose foreign policy will OPEC pricing, production, and future allocation –will KSA support?”

Russia’s, or USA’s?

This is the question in play at the bottom. In the immediate foreground, this explains Mistral, explains Bibi’s trips to Moscow, explains Kremlin’s coming betrayal of Fool Achmadinejad, explains that the One World wants to be ruled from the center and not the periphery –from the middle of the ‘world-island’ just north of the ‘world fuel tank’. This is why Gorby went green, why Medvedyev went green (remembering that a little global warming could make Russia fabulously wealthy as a food producer) –the idea is that through political hamstringing of north American energy production, the control of the new world order would default to Kremlin from the NY/DC axis.

Just one more:

http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/geo/pastanalysis/2009/1204.html

(a huge clue, tying in the cat’s paw of discrediting (literally) of the western system, Citibank that is, is Phibro, its role in the financial crisis set-up via oil markets of spring/summer 2008, and its recent virtual gifting to the same Occidental mentioned in the link)

The ten year direct-action phase began with a half dozen commercial/financial/legislative/political events in 1998. Western political ideals to flip via elections which elect criminals, western financial systems to create bubble after bubble, ultimately to destroy confidence –on the basis that confidence IS vulnerable to control by its nemesis, ‘fear’.

this also explains Palin. Fearless, exuberant, and Drill, Baby, Drill. The American people are not overthinking all this –she is showing us how that is done, how it used to be done, before paralysis-by-analysis as a weapon aimed at the settlers by the old world, was snuck inside the walls of Fort Defiance.