Very little that we have reviewed in this book will come as a surprise to the informed reader. Moreover, by the time that this book is printed and made available to readers, many of the “latest development” discussions would have long become old news. In today's world, an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times is already outdated by the afternoon, as hundreds of widely read blogs would have superseded it with later news and several iterations of blogosphere analysis thereof. Those daily and higher-frequency outlets will also contain many very good technical ideas about how to address various issues in the short and long terms. The only advantage that a book-length argument retains in this world is the ability to bring together many seemingly unrelated trends into a coherent framework, especially if the categorical-data points are so few (two phases of the cycle) as to preclude any credible quantitative analysis of the type favored by academic-journal outlets.

We hope that we have made a compelling argument that energy policy, the regulation of financial markets and institutions, and international relations as they pertain to Middle East geopolitics are so closely intertwined that it makes little sense to contemplate any of the three without contemplating the other two simultaneously. Understanding the three intertwined cycles over the past two phases does not provide a perfect guide for what we should expect, but it does provide some guide.