{"id":449570,"date":"2026-04-07T11:22:22","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T09:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/?p=449570"},"modified":"2026-04-07T12:05:25","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T10:05:25","slug":"give-us-yamani-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/2026\/04\/07\/give-us-yamani-back\/","title":{"rendered":"Give Us Yamani Back"},"content":{"rendered":"

There comes a moment, in every crisis, when one person\u2019s absence speaks louder than a hundred others\u2019 presence. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed since 4 March 2026. A hundred and fifty tankers lie at anchor in the open waters of the Persian Gulf. Brent crude has touched 126 dollars a barrel. The International Energy Agency calls it the greatest challenge to global energy security in history. And the world of oil \u2014 traders, analysts, ministers, journalists \u2014 has no interlocutor. No voice that can address markets and foreign ministries in the same breath, that knows how to calibrate silence as deftly as an announcement, that carries the moral authority to sit at the centre of the table and say, with the credibility of someone who did it for a quarter of a century: \u201cEnough. We talk.\u201d That voice, for twenty-four years, was Ahmed Zaki Yamani. There is no other.<\/p>\n

Were Yamani still alive (he died in London on 23 February 2021, aged ninety; he is buried in Mecca, where he was born) he would probably have surveyed the scene from the eighteenth floor of the InterContinental in Geneva, seated on one of the three large sofas surrounding the coffee table of the hotel\u2019s grandest suite, fingering his misbaha<\/em> \u2014 the thirty-three-bead Muslim rosary used to count the names of Allah and the praises owed to Him. He would sip his pomegranate juice, telling whichever journalist happened to be present, in that soft voice that never betrayed an emotion: \u201cIt has to go down. It has to go down.\u201d Exactly as he used to do in the Seventies, when microphones ambushed him as he stepped from the Rolls or the black Mercedes and he chose his words with care, knowing that each one could shift billions of dollars. He rarely wore the kefiah<\/em>, preferring suits of British cut and cloth with Italian or French ties. Curly, wiry hair, a determined profile. Impeccably fit, he kept himself in shape with short exercise sessions throughout the day. A gourmand, but a moderate one.<\/p>\n

Yamani served as Saudi Arabia\u2019s Minister of Petroleum from 9 March 1962 to 5 October 1986 \u2014 twenty-four years and seven months, the longest tenure in OPEC\u2019s history. He was never formally its head, but he was its head in everything except title. Seven times President of the Ministerial Conference, Secretary General in 1968\u201369, and above all, the man without whose consent no decision of consequence could be taken. He had become the very embodiment and symbol of the new age of oil, as politicians, diplomats and journalists all came to recognise.<\/p>\n

Geneva was his natural stage. OPEC had its original headquarters there from 1960 to 1965 before moving to Vienna. But after 21 December 1975, when Carlos (the Jackal of films and television series) and five accomplices took eleven oil ministers hostage at OPEC\u2019s Vienna headquarters, killing three people and placing explosives under Yamani\u2019s seat, the Sheikh never set foot in the Austrian capital for a meeting again. In 1981, when the organisation\u2019s hawks (Algeria, Libya, Nigeria) demanded an extraordinary conference, Yamani insisted on Geneva. Forcefully.<\/p>\n

He owned a flat in the city, a fifteen-room villa on the lake \u2014 with manicured lawns, period French furniture, Persian carpets, an indoor swimming pool and a room set aside for prayer \u2014 and a chalet in Crans-Montana, in the Valais. But his true headquarters was the top-floor suite of the InterContinental, in the Petit-Saconnex quarter, a stone\u2019s throw from the Palais des Nations. The hotel\u2019s manager, Herbert Schotte, had converted the panoramic restaurant into a royal suite with a Chinese dining room, ready, he said, to receive President Reagan should a summit ever be arranged. In the meantime, it housed Yamani, with his security detail of six former British SAS commandos, closed-circuit cameras in the corridor, and a personal valet to attend to every need.<\/p>\n

Beyond the windows, to the left, Lake L\u00e9man stretching into the distance and, on the clearest days, even Mont Blanc over a hundred kilometres away, flanked by the Grandes Jorasses. Otherwise, a rather charmless great slab of a hotel. A Swiss graphic designer friend from the Eighties reckoned the InterConti<\/em> had all the allure of a suburban hospital from the previous decade\u2026 but it had been chosen for the security it could offer and its uncomplicated proximity to Cointrin airport.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
AHMED ZAKI YAMANI, Rome 1995 (Imagoeconomica)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jeffrey Robinson, who in 1988 wrote the authorised biography Yamani: The Inside Story<\/em> (an international bestseller, though banned in Saudi Arabia), spent a full year with the Sheikh in at least five countries. They played backgammon relentlessly, sailed on his yachts, walked together and dined an incalculable number of times. Robinson recounts a scene in Sardinia: after a swim, Yamani suggested going for an ice cream. He drove himself to the local harbour\u2019s gelateria. They both ordered the three-flavour special. Yamani stared at his with a quizzical expression, then asked: \u201cTell me something\u2026 when you have three flavours like this, do you eat the one you like best first, or save it for last?\u201d A snapshot of the man who set the global price of oil \u2014 someone who gave serious thought to the sequencing of gelato.<\/p>\n

Revisiting Robinson\u2019s book proved essential in bringing back into focus certain episodes and turning points of Yamani\u2019s career, and in ordering, vividly, the memories of a young, presumptuous journalist who regularly found himself in Geneva amongst the press pack, but who had in fact built closer ties with the banking and financial analysts covering the meetings than with his fellow reporters.<\/p>\n

Anyone wishing to understand Hormuz today must retrace the sequence of crises Yamani lived through. In 1967, during the Six-Day War, he tried to persuade his OPEC allies not to use the embargo as a weapon: he knew the Americans, still largely self-sufficient, would not be intimidated. He was right. But by 1973, with the Yom Kippur War, the context had changed: American consumption of Saudi oil had surged. Yamani led the offensive: prices quadrupled, petrol queues paralysed the West. It was OPEC\u2019s moment of supreme power.<\/p>\n

The Hormuz crisis of 2026 might recall 1973 in the violence of the shock, with twenty per cent of global supply removed from the market, but the difference leaps out, and Yamani would have spotted it before anyone: in 1973 it was the producers shutting off the tap, a calculated political gesture; here it is a country under bombardment blocking the Strait out of desperation.<\/p>\n

The current crisis more closely resembles 1979\u201380, when the Iranian Revolution triggered the second oil shock. But there too Yamani had a strategy: in 1983 he persuaded OPEC to cut prices to stimulate demand (an absolute first) and accepted Saudi Arabia\u2019s role as the \u201cswing producer<\/em>\u201d, modulating its own output to balance the market. This was the Yamani paradigm: never maximise the short-term price, but protect market share over the long run.<\/p>\n

Faced with Hormuz 2026, Yamani would probably have done what he did better than anyone: he would have expanded and modernised the Saudi East-West pipeline and perhaps extended it to the Mediterranean at speed, if he had not already done so years earlier, to bypass the Strait, and Suez, accepting capacity constraints but demonstrating that Saudi Arabia is no hostage to Iranian geography. He would have worked behind the scenes, most likely in the corridors of the InterContinental, to build OPEC+ consensus on a coordinated release of strategic reserves, as his successor did, following his playbook, during the 1991 Gulf War. And above all he would have spoken to the markets in that soft voice that \u201ccalmed traders better than Valium\u201d: measured words, signalling that supply would be guaranteed. He would certainly not have done what the market fears today: run the terrifying risk of allowing the crisis to become structural. Yamani knew that every extra dollar on the barrel is an investment in solar, in nuclear, in shale \u2014 in everything that will one day render oil irrelevant.<\/p>\n

What happened after King Fahd sacked him in October 1986 (he learnt the news watching television whilst playing belote, the French version of briscola) has a fine irony to it. The Sheikh invested in Genevan luxury. In 1987, he acquired 85% of Vacheron Constantin, the oldest watchmaker in the world, founded in Geneva in 1755. But the cantonal authorities denied him the right to own its historic premises on the Tour de l\u2019Ile: Swiss law forbade foreigners from purchasing property beyond a certain threshold. In 1996 he sold Vacheron to the Richemont Group. The word is that he made a fortune \u2014 roughly tenfold.<\/p>\n

But what Yamani always retained was what he had always possessed: a sense of the long game, a negotiator\u2019s patience, and an awareness (painfully absent in those managing the Hormuz crisis today) that oil is a weapon which invariably turns on whoever wields it without measure. The Strait will reopen. But the real question is not the price of a barrel. It is the absence of a method, a style, a figure capable of holding the table together when everyone wants to overturn it. Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the current Saudi petroleum minister, is a competent technician. But he is not Yamani. He lacks the charisma, he lacks the political independence, and above all he lacks that rare, perhaps unrepeatable, ability to be simultaneously feared by the West and respected by OPEC\u2019s hawks, to speak at Harvard and in Mecca with equal ease, \u201cto bring down the temperature of a room by entering it, not by leaving\u201d.<\/p>\n

Give us back Yamani. Not the man, but the method. That diplomacy woven from whispers and patience, and the clear-headedness to know that whoever controls a third of the world\u2019s oil bears a responsibility to the world, not merely to their own balance sheet. From the suite on the eighteenth floor of the InterContinental, with Lake Geneva and the Jorasses as a backdrop and a glass of pomegranate juice in hand, the Sheikh had built an order. He said it as early as the Seventies, though the phrase was relaunched by The Economist<\/em> in 1999: The Stone Age did not end for lack of stones, just as the age of oil will not end for lack of crude.<\/em><\/p>\n

And yet, here in Brussels, as in 1973, what truly bears reflection is something else: Yamani had no need to speak to Europe because Europe did not speak with a single voice. And the pattern repeats itself, point for point, with the Hormuz crisis of 2026, where, as the European Council showed at the end of March, the energy crisis has done what energy crises have done since 1973: lay bare how profoundly European prosperity depends on imported energy it does not control. And how urgently it still needs to find unified paths of response and decision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘The Stone Age did not end for lack of stones, just as the age of oil will not end for lack of crude’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7904,"featured_media":449561,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":{"format":"standard","override":[{"template":"1","parallax":"1","fullscreen":"1","layout":"right-sidebar","sidebar":"default-sidebar","second_sidebar":"default-sidebar","sticky_sidebar":"1","share_position":"top","share_float_style":"share-monocrhome","show_featured":"1","show_post_meta":"1","show_post_author":"1","show_post_author_image":"1","show_post_date":"1","post_date_format":"default","post_date_format_custom":"Y\/m\/d","show_post_category":"1","show_post_reading_time":"0","post_reading_time_wpm":"300","post_calculate_word_method":"str_word_count","show_zoom_button":"0","zoom_button_out_step":"2","zoom_button_in_step":"3","show_post_tag":"1","show_prev_next_post":"1","show_popup_post":"1","show_comment_section":"1","number_popup_post":"1","show_author_box":"0","show_post_related":"1","show_inline_post_related":"0"}],"image_override":[{"single_post_thumbnail_size":"crop-500","single_post_gallery_size":"crop-500"}],"trending_post_position":"meta","trending_post_label":"Trending","sponsored_post_label":"Sponsored by","disable_ad":"0","subtitle":""},"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_override_counter":{"view_counter_number":"0","share_counter_number":"0","like_counter_number":"0","dislike_counter_number":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[30800,25711],"tags":[33338,33676],"class_list":["post-449570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy","category-opinions","tag-hormuz","tag-yamani"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7904"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449570"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":449583,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449570\/revisions\/449583"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/449561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eunews.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}