Saudi Arabia needs stability to attract investors. That's creating a rare window for peace with Iran. At the yellow desert stone convention center at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Riyadh, people were chatting about the potential size of what Saudi Arabia hopes will be the world’s biggest-ever IPO. This was Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s end-of-October “Davos of the Desert” conclave — formally called the Future Investment Initiative summit, held as Saudi Aramco, the Saudi oil giant, prepares to launch its IPO on Dec. 4, expecting to fetch $25 billion in investment. Just six weeks earlier, the cautiously optimistic conversations around the Aramco IPO at the Riyadh summit would have been hard to imagine. When a series of deafening explosions rocked the world’s largest refinery in Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia, in the early hours of Sept. 14, fresh regional conflict appeared only hours away. Fire also rained on the oil collection center of Khurais. As the smoke and haze cleared from the sprawling oil facilities, Saudi Arabia’s oil managers realized that they had lost 85 percent of their daily production. Yet even as the U.S. and Israel quickly blamed Iran for the attacks, Saudi Arabia held its horses, reluctant to name Tehran. |