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The Baghdad Dissolution
In September 1960, delegates from Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela met in Baghdad to answer unilateral price cuts by the major oil companies, but the conference broke up without a binding charter, and no permanent cartel emerged from it. Oil-exporting states continued to coordinate only through ad hoc, non-binding consultations for the following decade, leaving pricing power divided between the major companies, national producers acting alone, and periodic bilateral deals. The absence of a standing organization altered how the 1967 and 1973 crises were bargained, delayed the nationalization wave in the Gulf, and reshaped the postwar energy order that grew up in its place.
Diverged 1960 · “The Baghdad conference fails to establish OPEC as a permanent international cartel.”
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TodayOil markets remain structurally more volatile than in a cartelized order, with price swings absorbed by a dense layer of futures exchanges, national oil companies acting as price-takers more often than price-setters, and recurring but short-lived coordination pacts among Gulf and non-Gulf producers alike. Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United States each hold large, uncoordinated shares of marginal supply, and no single body speaks for exporters as a bloc, which has made energy diplomacy far more improvisational and crisis-driven than production planning.
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