The Daily Populous Wednesday April 29th, 2026 day edition
Authored by yahoo.com and submitted by NickInTheMud

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Additional-Library55 on April 28th, 2026 at 13:46 UTC »

This is a massive news! Esp. For people like me from the region. This shows the silent rift between KSA and UAE is quickly turning into a gulf.

Pretty early to comment, but I don’t think other comments who are linking this with oil quotas, US pressure etc. are correct here. Traditionally UAE has been a highly diplomatic country - always working silently behind the scenes. They don’t like to show disunity publicly, esp with KSA. They had coordinated their actions in very much lock step - Yemen attacks or stabilizing oil prices post Covid with production cuts.

But more recently UAE seems to have broken ranks - first they publicly asked for more militaristic response to Iran, then shunned Pakistan for being too diplomatic (and not standing in their corner against Iran) and now left Opec.

What will happen to cartel - it already was difficult for KSA to control all members with production cuts with news that Iraq frequently surpassed its quotas. Now it will feel even more difficult to control the members. It can eventually lead to the cartel collapsing. Only time will tell, but surely this is a very significant geopolitical move by UAE, and completely out of its nature

itchslap on April 28th, 2026 at 13:42 UTC »

OPEC is a Saudi controlled organization and it has been a source of a bottleneck for the UAE. This is a direct effect of the GCC and Arab League being weak in terms of their response to the Iranian attacks. Saudi Arabia benefits the most from OPEC while smaller countries like Qatar and UAE are bottlenecked by the quotas imposed by their neighbor. Qatar had already taken the 2017 diplomatic rupture as a prelude to exit it.

UAE has endured the brunt of the Iranian attacks, and Qatar lost major gas production capabilities. Bahrain and Kuwait are also not in a good shape. Iran has targeted these smaller countries particularly because their response and diplomatic outlash is not as effective and the damage can be severe.

This is technically UAE saying to Saudi Arabia and Russia, we have our own back and we do not need you to cap our capabilities specially when we are under attack. Since there is no GCC united front against Iran and no Russian leash on Iran, then we are on our own as well and will not follow your demands.

NickInTheMud on April 28th, 2026 at 12:38 UTC »

United Arab Emirates just announced it’s leaving OPEC after more than 60 years as a member. This is a blow to Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of OPEC.

UAE blames the other gulf countries for not doing more to protect the UAE during the recent Iran war.