When OPEC slapped a “plus” onto its name, it was less a show of strength than a confession of weakness—like an aging rock band adding extra members to hide the fact the originals can’t hit the high notes anymore. There was a time when those four letters could send shockwaves through the global order. With a single announcement, they could make superpower alliances buckle, halt military aid between friends, and reduce national economies to rubble. Presidents and prime ministers once bent the knee, shuffling humbly into gilded chambers to beg for a little more crude.
That era is dust.
Today, the world is ringed with wars—some of them involving OPEC’s biggest players—slaughter on a scale not seen since the last great global bloodletting. Others sit perched in regions so unstable you can hear the political tectonics creak. By any rational calculus, oil prices should be screaming into the stratosphere. Instead, they loiter stubbornly below the triple-digit mark, like an underachiever who never shows up for class.OPEC’s might hasn’t just waned—it’s been broken, ground down into something almost pitiable. OPEC+ isn’t the imperious cartel of old; it’s a stitched-together survival club, a coalition of exporters crossing their fingers and whispering to the market gods for a price bump big enough to keep their own treasuries from drying up.