Nawaf Obaid, a former Saudi Arabian government advisor from 2002 to 2015, is the author of The Failure of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab World, and was a Harvard fellow from 2012 to 2018. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.

When Saudi Arabia, OPEC's de facto leader and most influential member, decided at its latest meeting in Vienna to break its recent strategic oil partnership with Russia and adopt a new policy to maximize production levels, oil prices crashed — posting their biggest slide since the Gulf war in 1991.

But even more importantly, this new policy recalibrated global oil markets, giving Saudi Arabia the long-term advantage. This move marks a big change for the world's largest oil exporter, which has in recent years attempted to manage the global oil markets by altering production levels, while garnering the difficult cooperation of Russia. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has finally decided to pursue a long-term policy that not only preserves and ultimately increases the kingdom's market share, but also may signal the end of OPEC as a united functioning organization.

This decision is very unpopular with most oil exporting countries, international energy companies and American shale producers because collapsing prices will drastically decrease their revenues and, in some cases, force them into bankruptcy.

There are several reasons why the kingdom is finally taking this aggressive approach.

First, the successive Saudi monarchs have all recognized the strategic importance of spare production capacity to manage the global markets because it provides the vital indicator of the world's oil market's ability to respond to sudden crises that jeopardize the free flow of oil supplies.

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