there's 62 countries around the world today who have small populations Less Than 3 million people because of their small size they're all generally Limited in their power and influence to their immediate surroundings and even then in the case of places like Armenia Moldova or The Gambia they're usually minor players even within their own neighborhood the fascinating exception to this rule of thumb for the world's smallest countries however is Qatar a small Dusty and largely empty Peninsula no larger than the state of Delaware that juts out from Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf while Qatar has an overall population of around 2.8 million people which is already smaller than Albania only 320 000 of them are actually citizens of the country while the remaining nearly two and a half million people are almost entirely foreign and expatriate labor that have come to the country from abroad that means that with only around 320 000 citizens qatar's citizen population is only about the same size as Tiny Vanuatu a little island country in the Pacific Ocean and yet despite its tiny size in both land and people Qatar commands Global prestige power and influence on the same scale of countries that are dozens of times larger than it for years now Qatar has often been described as the wealthiest country in the world with the highest GDP per capita of all the world's Nations for multiple years in a row the Qatari economy was larger than Ukraine's even before the Russian invasion and with nearly 16 times fewer people even when including all the foreign labor the state of Qatar wields the ninth largest Sovereign wealth Fund in the world with assets exceeding 450 billion dollars including a large 10 and a half percent stake in the Volkswagen group and the outright ownership of the Paris Saint-Germain football club the seventh most valuable football club in the entire world this is all in addition to a Diversified Real Estate portfolio that makes the state of Qatar the largest single property owner in London including a 95 stake in the tallest building in Western Europe The Shard 100 ownership of the herod's department store a majority stake in the Canary Wharf financial center and a 20 stake in London's Heathrow Airport the 7th busiest airport in the world by International passenger traffic this Sovereign wealth funds assets equate to more than 1.4 million dollars per citizen of Qatar by far the largest of any Sovereign wealth Fund in the world the state-owned airline Qatar Airways is one of the largest and most influential in the entire Global aviation industry ranked by assets Qatar Airways is the ninth largest airline in the world and is roughly equivalent in scale to Air France KLM and they have even greater Revenue numbers than Turkish Airlines the state-owned media company al-jazeera is one of the largest public media conglomerates in the world second only to the BBC and the number of news bureaus located across the world and perhaps most infamously of all they are by far the smallest country and the first in the Arab world to ever host the FIFA World Cup which is currently ongoing as of the release of this video the Qatar of today is a fabulously wealthy country for its small size and with that wealth also comes enormous Global influence and power and as a result I would argue that Qatar is by far the most overpowered country in the 21st century world with a level of influence ringing it as a middle power alongside states that are many many times larger than it like turkey South Korea the Netherlands or Canada and they're only going to continue getting even more overpowered as this decade advances but it wasn't always so certain to be this way because Qatar only really started getting rich and overpowered pretty recently in the 1990s for thousands of years before then hardly anybody would have ever been able to guess how qatar's fortunes would eventually turn out because geographically Qatar possesses very few advantages to help it become powerful it's just a small Dusty flat Peninsula covered in deserts with scarce arable land little rainfall and without even a single River to use for fresh water or irrigation the prospects for anyone living here were Bleak for thousands of years and the only way anybody could really make a living was limited either to fishing or to diving for pearls in the gulls and consequently hardly anybody actually did live here Qatar was an isolated impoverished and underdeveloped Backwater for basically all of human history until things finally began changing when oil happened to be discovered in 1939 across the duken field here found across the westernmost edge of the peninsula but of course the same year it was discovered was the same year that World War II began so it was never really developed until a decade later in 1949 by the 1950s Qatar was producing a modest amount of oil from this field but it paled in comparison to the gigantic oil fields that have been found nearby across Saudi Arabia and Kuwait the largest oil field ever discovered in the world is the kvar field less than 150 kilometers away from the Qatari border within Saudi Arabia and it alone contains nearly twice the amount of oil found across all of Qatar but after scouring across their tiny Peninsula the qataris never discovered any other significant oil reserves on land and that pushed Qatar and their partnered Western oil companies to begin searching for offshore oil reserves around the peninsula within their territorial waters on the gulf several were found but again none of them were anything like the huge earth-shattering finds that the Saudis and kuwaitis were making just nearby it would eventually turn out that Qatar had the 14th largest reserves of oil in the world a significant asset and a boon for the people of the tiny Peninsula but in the grand scheme of the Persian Gulf these oil reserves were still fairly small they were about a quarter of the reserves found in Kuwait in the United Arab Emirates and only a tenth of those found just next door in Saudi Arabia if it was only ever going to rely on oil Qatar would never grow to be as rich as its neighbors naturally Qatar wanted to strike it big like the rest of them and so they kept on searching for more and then in 1971 they would finally end up making the geologic discovery of the century and it wouldn't even be oil with the assistance of shell what they ended up discovering was this a big offshore natural gas field in the middle of the Persian Gulf split roughly 60 40 between their own exclusive economic zone in Iran's their side of the field became known as the the North Field while Iran's became known as the South pars field and its Discovery would ultimately change both countries Destinies forever because this field is by far the largest natural gas field ever discovered in the world it is so enormous that the Qatari side of the field alone contains an estimated fifth of all the entire world's natural gas reserves this single field overnight catapulted little Qatar into the number three position in the world for natural gas reserves just behind Iran and Russia and nearly double the natural gas reserves found across the entire United States its Discovery would one day transform Qatar into the financial and economic Juggernaut that we know it has today and it is the primary source of qatar's op status on the world stage but when it was first discovered the qataris and shell were actually disappointed that it wasn't oil and thought it was almost useless you see back at that time in the 70s the natural gas industry was completely different than it is today natural gas is of course a gas and that means it takes up a lot of volume exporting natural gas to somewhere else while it's still in its gas estate takes up a lot of space and that means that exporting the gas by ship is incredibly inefficient and doesn't make any Financial sense this is why the liquefying natural gas or LNG business was born shortly after the second world war by converting natural gas into a liquid it takes up only 1 600th of the same volume it does when it's in its gas estate and that means that LNG can be transported in huge quantities by tankership from any source to any destination in the world in theory the problem with LNG has always been that it's the most expensive way to transport natural gas because of all the complicated and advanced infrastructure that needs to be put in place to get it all running you need complicated Refrigeration plans at the source of the gas that can cool it down to its liquid state at negative 161 degrees Celsius no easy test to do around the Persian Gulf which has some of the hottest average temperatures in the world you need a commission specialized refrigerated tanker ships that can continue keeping the gas that cold for weeks to months on end while They Carried across the world's oceans and you need another specialized plant at the Final Destination that can safely transform the LNG back into gas to be used by consumers it costs billions of dollars to get all of this set up before the first shipments even arrive and worse in the 1970s there was nowhere near enough of a market or a demand for LNG Europe received plentiful cheaper gas from pipelines coming in from places like Russia Norway and the Netherlands meaning that expensive LNG was not going to be competitive there but the increasingly advanced in developing Island economies of East Asia were a completely different matter altogether Japan in particular is an island nation that is bereft of fossil fuels meaning that as their economy developed and their demand for gas increased their geography was better suited towards importing gases LNG from container ships rather than through long pipelines built across or beneath the ocean the same became true of Taiwan and eventually South Korea as well which effectively functions as an island as well for the purpose of importing energy from abroad because of North Korea and the ocean to their other three sides all three of these Rising East Asian economies demand for LNG began to grow over the years and at first their demand was almost entirely met by nearby producers in Southeast Asia Indonesia Malaysia and Brunei this was the world of Qatar and shell found themselves in in 1971 when they suddenly discovered the biggest natural gas field in the world and they initially decided that they couldn't economically compete for any of the market in Asia building up an LNG industry from scratch was thought to be too costly and too risky and building out long pipelines to markets in Europe was just too ridiculous and expensive to even consider they had both hoped that their Discovery was oil because unlike natural gas oil is naturally a liquid and so it's far less costly there's loaded up on tankers and ship it around the world so rather than developing qatar's natural gas in the North Field shell abandoned the project and with global oil prices skyrocketing following the Arab oil embargoes in the 70s Qatar continued to focus on its smaller oil reserves for the next 20 years and then everything would begin to change again in the late 1980s in 1986 the price of oil unexpectedly crashed by more than 50 percent production and revenue from oil sales in Qatar crashed alongside it and the Qatari economy which almost entirely relied upon selling oil at the time was put into a crisis mode by the 1990s with oil prices and revenue still low the qataris began turning their attention back towards all of that natural gas they found 20 years previously in the biggest field in the world and at the same time Global demand for natural gas was beginning to increase natural gas emits 50 percent less CO2 than coal when it's burned for energy and about 30 percent less than oil while releasing less air pollution as well making it a desirable and slightly cleaner fuel to use for electricity for nation's weary of climate change and pollution or for Nations seeking a transitory fuel source while they move towards full carbon neutrality and green energies like wind or solar and at the same time the costs of building out LNG infrastructure had dramatically come down after more than 20 years of continuous technological developments and understanding in 1995 the ambitious son of the ruling Qatari Emir launched a bloodless coup d'etat against his father and overthrew him and it would be under his leadership that little Qatar would be transformed into a world power Hamad bin Khalifa al-thani strongly believed in the potential of the natural gas reserves in the North Field and in the growing LNG business equipped with billions of dollars worth of Investments secured from Western energy companies like Exxon Mobil the qataris and their Partners set out to Bill no less than the largest and the most competitive LNG business the world had ever seen backed up by the single largest gas field ever discovered the qataris managed to increase the scale of their LNG operations to never before seen Heights they constructed the largest artificial Harbor in the world for the Ross lafon industrial city which became their primary production and Export Center for Qatari LNG they commissioned larger and larger LNG container ships that could carry in increasingly larger volumes of LNG to customers abroad and by 1996 Qatar was exporting their first shipments of LNG through the Strait of Hormuz and abroad to Global markets it would end up revolutionizing both Qatar and the entire world in the process within just 10 years of the beginning of their operations by 2006 Qatar had already overtaken all of its LNG competitors like Malaysia and Indonesia to become the largest exporter of LNG in the world with the bulk of their shipments eating into the market share in the East Asian economies of Japan South Korea and Taiwan South Korea became their single largest customer and they still continue to purchase roughly 27 percent of their entire natural gas supply from Qatar alone and the vast revenues that these countries were paying for Qatari LNG flooded back into the coffers of the Qatari government which of course made the mind-bogglingly rich this is a chart of the gross domestic product per capita Qatar from 1987 to the present this year 1996 is when Qatar first began exporting LNG to the World Market and you can clearly see how immediately afterwards their wealth began to absolutely Skyrocket to the point in 2006 where they became the largest LNG exporter in the world tens of billions of dollars a year began flowing directly to Qatar in exchange for their shipments of LNG but all of this newfound wealth came with a problem Qatar was growing too overdependent on a single source of income and was transforming into the world's first LNG state by the 2010s 70 of the entire government's Revenue 60 of the entire country's GDP and 85 percent of their export earnings were all simply coming from the LNG and petroleum business if the business were to ever crash or run out of supplies Qatar would be forced into going back to the impoverished empty Peninsula that it had been for thousands of years beforehand and of course the government has always been aware of this and so in order to diversify their income streams and secure their future they began investing into other businesses ideas and avenues Qatar Airways was founded in 1993 and expanded with the LNG and oil money to become one of the top 10 largest airlines in the world today the guitar Sovereign wealth fund was established in 2005 as a means to invest their massive revenues into projects real estate and companies abroad to the point where today the funds assets are nearly equivalent to the entire annual GDP of Egypt a nation of more than a hundred million people and then in 1996 the same year they began exporting LNG they also founded the state-owned Al Jazeera Media Group translating from Arabic into English as literally the peninsula the Qatar Peninsula but Qatar still had a low natural population base in addition to being located in a dangerous geopolitical neighborhood Saddam Hussein's Iraq had previously launched Wars of Conquest into both Iran and Kuwait in order to seize control over their oil Industries and little Qatar was hypothetically a much more vulnerable Target than either of those had been there was also the fact that Qatar shared the largest natural gas field in the world with Iran which meant that each of their governments had to collaborate together and remain friendly to an extent in order to safely and mutually extract all of the gas there a situation that made next door Saudi Arabia the greatest rival of Iran intensely apprehensive qatar's solution to defending themselves in this precarious geopolitical neighborhood was by simply aligning itself very closely to the United States at the same time as they were getting their LNG business up and running Qatar invited both the American and British militaries to assist in constructing the aluddade air base in the country which eventually went on to become the U.S military's largest base in the entire Middle East with more than 11 000 total personnel and more than 100 operational aircraft as of today it became an invaluable asset for the United States through multiple conflicts used as a primary Air Base to conduct operations from in Afghanistan Iraq and later against Isis in Syria and beyond that base Qatar also supplied enormous quantities of energy supplies to many of America's most important allies in Asia Japan South Korea Taiwan and India this is all in part why the Biden Administration would eventually label tiny Qatar as a major non-nato Ally of the United States at the beginning of 2022 a status that is similarly bestowed upon great Power Nations like Japan and Brazil with nearly a hundred times qatar's population meanwhile qatar's low population base of only a few hundred thousand people also proved to make it difficult to actually use all of that money from LNG and petroleum to build things like skyscrapers and stadiums for the World Cup and so to solve that problem Qatar began encouraging enormous migration to the country for low-skilled workers coming primarily from South Asian Nations like Nepal India Bangladesh and Pakistan this is why today qatar's demographic structure is one of the strangest and the most exploitative in the entire world nearly 9 in 10 people in the country today are far workers without any citizenship who have recently moved to the country from abroad including more than 700 000 from India since the overwhelming majority of the foreign workers who have come to Qatar are also men qatar's gender profile is by far the most lopsided in the world with roughly three men in the country for every one woman and ever since these migrations began to Qatar there have been countless reports of terrible human rights abuses that have been made against them with many Publications suggesting that the treatment of the millions of foreign workers in Qatar essentially amounts to modern day slavery South Asian men would be promised by Qatari officials of high pay and good conditions and then lured to the country where they would then often have their passports confiscated and with no way to leave forced into much lower paying labor jobs with much worse conditions than they had initially been promised over the past decade Qatar spent more than 200 billion dollars of its LNG and petroleum wealth to build out stadiums and infrastructure for the world cup and put millions of their foreign laborers to work and according to some reports at least 6 500 of those workers died building everything simply due to atrocious working conditions that is simply unacceptable and it is a dark stain on guitar success story and the World Cup in general at the same time qatar's LNG wealth was also coming under threat in the later 2010s after an investment of more than 250 billion dollars into their own LNG industry Australia suddenly surpassed the qataris for the number one largest exporter of LNG at the end of 2018 and the United States wasn't very far behind them with billions worth of investments into the industry of their own Australian and American LNG were suddenly competing with Qatari LNG for market share across Asia and not content with playing second or even third fiddle the guitaris decided to double down in 2019 they announced a 30 billion dollar plan to expand their LNG production from the north field with billions of more dollars coming from Western Energy giants like shell Exxon and Chevron among others the plan was that qatar's LNG exports would be increased by nearly two-thirds by 2026 which hypothetically would have enabled Qatar to regain the position of the world's largest exporter and to then keep it indefinitely but many people were worried at the time that such a massive investment into even more LNG production would have never paid off with the stiff competition growing from the Australians and the Americans where would all the excess Qatari LNG go to the Asian Market's demand was already largely being met North America was growing increasingly energy independent and less reliant on Imports and Europe hardly bought any LNG at all with most of their gas Demand Being met by the Russians Norwegians and algerians through their pipelines and then of course everything changed when the Russians invaded Ukraine and the Europeans began to cut out all other gas imports from Russia suddenly out of nowhere brand new enormous market for LNG that is roughly the same size as Asia's Market opened up to the suppliers and Qatar immediately became one of the best position to capitalize on it there is perhaps no other country in the world that will benefit more from Russia's invasion of Ukraine than Qatar a flurry of high-ranking European union and German energy Executives have now been flying back and forth with Doha to discuss new LNG contracts and shipments and now the Qatari economy is expected to grow by more than four percent this year alone and it could potentially only be the beginning with Russian gas now being completely locked out of the European market LNG Replacements from elsewhere will be highly in demand and competitively priced and Qatar is currently estimating that at least half of their ongoing LNG expansion in the North Field will now be headed straight for Europe by 2026. ensuring them billions of dollars a year in extra revenues from today and increased leverage over European demand and influence influence naturally qatar's Newfound wealth has also come with Newfound Ambitions and abilities to influence the world around them and this has often gotten them into trouble since they share the largest natural gas field in the world with Iran Qatar has always maintained that fairly close working relationship with him out of necessity which like I said before has never sat well with Saudi Arabia Iran's fiercest geopolitical rival but qatars in Saudi Arabia's foreign policies clash in many more ways than just this following the Arab Spring revolutions that swept across the Arab world in the early 2010s Qatar and Saudi Arabia nearly always found themselves supporting the opposite sides in every conflict all throughout the region Qatar came to support the wave of democratic and islamist revolts against long-standing Arab regimes such as by supporting the Muslim brotherhood's Democratic rise to power in Egypt with billions of dollars generous media coverage with an Al Jazeera of the uprisings and Bahrain against the monarchy and eventual backing of the Tripoli base government of national Accord during the Libyan Civil War all of which the Saudis fiercely opposed and fought against there became increasing concerns within Riyadh the qatar's overt support for revolutions against long-standing autocratic regimes across the Arab world meant that one day they would also be bankrolling a revolution against the nearly century-old absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia with both money and generous media coverage by 2017 the Saudis had had enough of their conflicting Ambitions and all on the same day Saudi Arabia the United Arab Emirates Bahrain Egypt Jordan Djibouti Senegal Mauritania the comoros the Maldives and the Saudi supported tobruk-based government in Libya as well as the Saudi supported Hadi government in Yemen all announced the severing of their diplomatic relations with Qatar Saudi Arabia and the UAE went another step further by also shutting down all of their ports to Qatari registered ships and shutting down all of their airspace to the state-owned airline Qatar Airways the Saudis also shut down their entire land border with Qatar effectively transforming the country into an Island state and then to make qatar's isolation even more permanent the Saudis even proposed digging a canal across their entire land border and filling it in with water from the Persian Gulf which would have literally transformed Qatar into an island they made several demands of Qatar in order to lift the blockade including that they shut down Al Jazeera reduced their diplomatic relations with Iran end their alleged support for foreign organizations considered to be terrorists by the Saudis like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas and Gaza among others agreed reparation payments and 10 years of monitoring and to align themselves fully with a geopolitical interests of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States naturally Qatar refused all of the demands and The Economic Consequences of the saudi-led blockade over them immediately became apparent Qatar Airways had relied extensively on both Saudi and emirati airspace for a significant amount of their routes and nearly overnight they have how to suddenly change all of their flight paths to longer and more costly routes to avoid both countries entirely the saudi-led blockade over Qatar would go on for another three and a half years until January of 2021 and it largely only ended out of the Saudi regime's own desire to Rebrand their image with the incoming Biden Administration over in the United States many figures in Washington had been frustrated with the blockade for years because both Saudi Arabia and Qatar are nominally strategic allies of the United States and even more strange the United States Qatar and the Saudis had all actually been cooperating together alongside of each other for years and another major conflict in the region the Civil War in Yemen in late 2014 or early 2015 a Shia Muslim adjacent group called The houthis managed to seize control over the capital in Yemen and declare themselves as the sole legitimate government of the country sparking a civil war between themselves and the previously Sunni muslim-led government the sudden possibility of Yemen flipping into a shia-led country immediately sent shockwaves throughout the Islamic world and especially in Saudi Arabia over the fear that a Shia LED Yemen could end up aligning itself with Iranians the world's most preeminent Shia power were this scenario to take place Saudi Arabia would be placed into its worst imaginable geopolitical position with its primary enemy Iran being theoretically capable of blockading the Strait of Hormuz the leads between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea and an iranian-aligned Yemen theoretically capable of simultaneously blockading the Bob almend Deb strait between the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea were that to happen Saudi Arabia would economically collapse because the country relies so extensively on selling their oil exports to countries in Asia on the backs of tanker ships the most direct route to Asia for these tanker ships to take from Saudi Arabia are of course from either the Saudi East or West Coast through either the Strait of tour moves or the babelman Deb straight but if both of them are blockaded then the only possible way that Saudi oil could actually continue reaching their Asian customers would be through the Suez Canal and around the entirety of the African continent which would make Saudi oil far more expensive and less competitive and potentially crash their economy in the process so in order to prevent that from ever happening the Saudis gather together a massive military Coalition that included the qataris and support from the Americans and they began invading and blockading Yemen in March of 2015 in order to topple the houthis from power and ever since the war in Yemen has transformed into what could very convincingly be described as the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the entire 21st century as all eyes in the west have been fixated on Ukraine this year Yemen has continued to suffer through the same apocalypse that it has been endearing for years nearly 19 18 million people there are currently facing famine right this very second largely due to the Saudi and Coalition navies continue Naval and Arab blockade of the country and their Relentless bombing campaign the war in Yemen is directly connected to the greater oil and gas politics of the Middle East that catapulted Qatar to being the most overpowered country in the world and it's also all a part of the complicated web of the greater Saudi Iranian Cold War it is one of the 21st Century's most important and horrific conflicts but unfortunately if I made a video covering this darker side of the Middle East energy struggles and politics the disturbing violent and controversial details of discussing a still ongoing Civil War would cause the video to become demonetized and age-restricted which I completely understand and frankly agree with but It ultimately also means that YouTube's algorithm wouldn't promote the video to you and there's simply no way that you would ever see it here and that's why instead I created yet another full-length companion video to this one in my ongoing modern conflict series that's about the same length as this video that covers the entire course and explanation into the Civil War in Yemen and uploaded it directly to nebula which as you've probably heard by now is home to tons of exclusive ad-free content like my entire modern conflict series with 19 other full-length episodes containing nearly 7 hours worth of additional combined content that you can go and watch right now covering recent major Wars and conflicts that'll help you stay up to date on what's going on in our world and why from these videos covering Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine to this one covering the Chinese genocide of the uyghurs in xinjiang to this one covering the Russian military's intervention into Syria and many more I'm uploading one new feature-length video to this series on nebula every single month and of course the reason why all of these videos are only available on nebula is because they just wouldn't ever work here on YouTube and would never be able to be viewed because of the way this site Works in relation to highly controversial and 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