The shock of the new

摘要

The past few years have uncapped an unprecedented gush of anxious, often hostile writing about Saudi Arabia. Two statistics explain why. First, three-quarters of the September nth hijackers were Saudis, and second, the kingdom contains a quarter of the world's known oil reserves. Those numbers imply that the main source of the most important global commodity, and one that has become in shorter supply, is a land that also incubates monsters; in other words, the world economy relies increasingly on a country that may be dangerously unreliable.