FAISAL AND OIL Driving Toward a New World Order

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a principal factor in raising oil prices, and now holds more power than any other leader to lower them or raise them anew. He is completing arrangements to nationalize the vast U.S.-owned oil properties within his country, bringing an end to an era in which the international oil companies dominated the Persian Gulf and helped to transform its face and fortune. Both in his own right and as a symbol of the other newly powerful potentates of oil, Saudi Arabia's King Faisal is the Man of the Year.

All the King's Spending and All the King's Plans

Last year Faisal's Saudi Arabia earned $28.9 billion by selling nearly one-fifth of all the oil consumed by non-Communist countries. The King channeled part of these funds into a massive development program that aims at building factories, refineries, harbors, hospitals and schools for his 5.7 million people. Faisal also spent about $2 billion on modern weapons for his small but growing armed forces. He granted a large part of the $2.35 billion that the Arab oil producers pledged at Rabat to the "confrontation states" in the battle against Israel; last year he was the primary outside bankroller of the Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians and the Palestine Liberation Organization. He also made $1.2 billion in multilateral loans and grants and pledged to give some $200 million to poor countries outside the Arab world. But all the King's spending and all the King's plans could not come close to using up Saudi Arabia's wealth. The new financial giant of the world, Saudi Arabia in 1974 stood to accumulate a surplus of about $23 billion—a potentially unsettling force in global finance.

Moreover, Saudi Arabia's new wealth is simply the most spectacular symbol of the rising fortunes of the OPEC nations. With their surplus of some $60 billion last year, they took in $164 million more each day and $6.8 million more each hour than, by best estimates, they can currently spend. At that rate of accumulation, the Economist of London calculates, OPEC could buy out all companies on the world's major stock exchanges in 15.6 years (at present quotations), all companies on the New York Stock Exchange in 9.2 years, all central banks' gold (at $170 an ounce) in 3.2 years, all U.S. direct investments abroad in 1.8 years, all companies quoted on stock exchanges in Britain, France and West Germany in 1.7 years, all IBM stock in 143 days, all Exxon stock in 79 days, the Rockefeller family's wealth in six days and 14% of Germany's Daimler-Benz in two days (which in fact Kuwait did in November—though for that little country, the purchase represented all of 15 days of oil earnings).

King Faisal is not merely the richest of the OPEC leaders. He is also a spiritual leader of the world's 600 million Moslems because his kingdom encompasses Islam's two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina. The King, who is 68, wants to pray within his lifetime in the third most holy city, in Jerusalem at the Dome of the Rock,** and to walk there without setting foot on Israeli-held territory. Unless and until he gets his wish, peace is unlikely to have much future in the Middle East. Faisal hates Zionism with a cold passion and often argues, despite the Soviet Union's pro-Arab, anti-Israel policies, that Zionists and Communists are allied to control the world.

In 1974 Faisal used his political