Gov Blog 18

On this week’s episode of “GPS”, Fareed Zakaria interviewed a variety of guests to contribute on the issues of Saudi Arabia and the oil economy. He first spoke to Tony Blair, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom about the death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. I found Blair to be the most interesting guest because of his personal opinion and experience with King Abdullah, and he described the king’s attitude in describing a country that in some ways is a very conservative country. Blair stated that Abdullah said that they were doing the change, but wanted to let the Saudis do it at their own pace. He also mentioned how he always have a debate as to whether Saudi Arabia should accelerate or and go faster and so on. In the end, Blair said that he believed that what Abdullah was really trying to do, was to create these vehicles of change in the country. Blair’s statement on using Saudi Aramco, the oil company, was that it is not run like many oil companies around the world but still actually is a really top well-run company. The university he established, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, featured men and women being treated equally and educated equally. Blair believes that the term science and technology was chosen for a reason, and claims that Abdullah’s view would be that he was moving as fast as he could. This rather favorable opinion of Saudi Arabia, a controversial country and oil power was very informative and helped create an interesting conversation. Another one of Fareed’s featured guests was Martin Wolf, who spoke about the oil economy. As an economist, Wolf believes that in the current oil situation, the Saudis have another possible choice, which is for them is to start cutting production. Wolf claims that this might raise oil prices, but he believes that they would then bear a disproportional part of the losses. It would depend on how they think that would affect other country's output and what they think the