Bjorn, a gregarious Norwegian in his forties, sits across from Jasper. Prior to engaging me in conversation, the pair spoke passionately in an alphabet of acronyms that left me at a loss as to their mutual business interests. “Oil?” I ask Bjorn, since every Norwegian I’ve met in the Middle East works in oil. He grins. “Halliburton,” he says, handing me his card. If anyone can accurately measure the remaining oil in an Arab sheikhdom, I think to myself, it’s Halliburton, which is moving its headquarters from Texas to Dubai.

Not only Halliburton but General Electric, at&t, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, cnn, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and scores of other banks and energy giants are among the blue-chip multinationals that have made Dubai their Mideast base, attracted by the tax-free environment, modern infrastructure, multinational workforce, and Dubai’s famous tolerance for everyone from the fully veiled to those preferring miniskirts and martinis. Indeed, one of Dubai’s most striking characteristics is its intercultural harmony. With English as its lingua franca, the emirate is globalization incarnate. I spent an afternoon at a café eavesdropping as two local university women clad in black abayas discussed relationships, politics, and religion with a body-pierced Jewish traveller from the United States. He argued that Dubai was mistakenly mimicking a US that is losing traction around the world; the women just liked the way the foreign presence lets them meet people from around the world. “If only everyone would sit and talk like this,” one of the young women observed, “people would understand one another.”

A demure Asian waitress, whose name tag reads “Fang Fang,” comes up behind Bjorn and hovers expectantly. She takes our order — two pints, one Pinot Grigio — and the conversation runs like oil from the ground. Jasper, the scion of an oil family that has worked in the Middle East for three generations, is the first of his lineage to break with Shell and take a job with the petroleum sector of the Dubai government. Though not yet thirty, he’s a veteran of the international oil business. Saudi Arabia is running out, he declares. The Saudis have damaged their oil fields by extracting too much too fast, and everyone knows they’re lying about how much is left.

Jasper isn’t alone in that opinion. Saudi oil reserves have been shrouded in secrecy ever since the national oil company, Saudi Aramco (the world’s largest), bought out its partners in 1980. Saudi Arabia is the third-largest foreign oil supplier to the US, after Canada and Mexico, and the only nation considered capable of increasing production to meet a rapidly growing global energy appetite — particularly as the next-largest easily accessible oil reserves are in Iraq. Yet a detailed study of technical surveys by Matthew Simmons (in his 2005 book, Twilight in the Desert) suggests that all is not what Saudi officials publicly claim: overproduction is indeed harming existing fields, and Aramco has found no major new reserves in more than thirty years. Like Jasper, Simmons predicts a sharp decline in Saudi production in the near future (it fell 8 percent in 2006). Meanwhile, US dependency on foreign oil is expected to increase by one-third in the next two decades.

Iran is the real oil power, Jasper argues. With nearly 10 percent of the world’s oil, Iran’s reserves are smaller than Saudi’s, but its vast untapped fields make it the “jewel” of the “iocs,” as Jasper calls the international oil companies. Long-standing US sanctions have barred American oil companies from the Iranian game, leaving the fields open to Chinese, Japanese, and European companies (though Halliburton was secretly working in Iran until 2004) that have recently come under stiff US pressure to stop signing new Iranian contracts.

Almost as mysterious as the true extent of Aramco’s reserves was Dick Cheney’s visit to Saudi Arabia in November, the same month a Saudi security adviser floated the idea of raising production to lower oil prices in order to strike an economic blow to Iran. Still, even if Jasper and analysts like Simmons are right, the Saudi secret weapon may prove as illusory as Iraqi wmds.

And then there is Dubai, tenuously poised between the regional rivals while doing a brisk business with both. Jasper and Bjorn agree that most negative events in the region end up benefiting Dubai — except terrorism, should it happen here, or a US or Israeli attack on Iran, a hundred miles away, which Jasper anticipates but Bjorn doubts will happen. “Even if it did, that would boost oil prices, and that’s good for Dubai,” argues Bjorn. “Oil is still cheaper than Evian,” observes Jasper, holding up a glass of water and gazing into it like a soothsayer. Fang Fang brings us our drinks; we toast. “This place, it’s like — all I can think of is the California gold rush,” Jasper says. “But if there was a terrorist attack it would be a ghost town.”

Such speculations haunt Dubai’s well-heeled expats as much as whether the real estate bubble is about to burst. Is al Qaeda really holding off on bombing Dubai because it has financial interests there, as residents speculate? “It’s the question on everyone’s mind,” said an elegant Palestinian-Cypriot architect at a dinner party I attended. “One bomb and you’d see everyone run for cover,” added her British husband. “Dubai is what it is because al Qaeda needs it as much as the US does,” said an American architect at the table.

“The US,” says Jasper, draining his pint and slamming the empty glass down on the table, “has fucked up big time. They lost a lot of capital by re-electing Bush. Then Israel admits it has nukes, and no one does anything. Now all the Arab states want to go nuclear.”

Indeed, it was widely reported in 2003 that Saudi Arabia had concluded a secret deal to acquire nuclear weapons technology from Pakistan, driven by fears of Israel’s nuclear arsenal (and anger at international complicity), Iran’s nuclear program, and concerns that the fifteen Saudi hijackers involved in 9/11 had created a rift in the famous US-Saudi friendship. But that was then — a time when Iraq appeared to be “mission accomplished.” More recently, gcc countries announced that they are pursuing a “peaceful” nuclear program that will be a “model” to others. Perhaps sensing it needs Mideast allies after all, in May the United States announced its full support for the initiative.