The UAE’s exit from the OPEC signals not just a rupture in oil diplomacy, but a shift toward a more buyer-friendly energy order. For much of the modern economic age, oil has been less a commodity than a lever of power. Industrial growth, geopolitical alignments and even wars have turned on access to crude. For decades, that lever was held firmly in Western hands by the clutch of companies famously dubbed the ‘Seven Sisters’ that dominated the global oil trade from the 1920s t