Why Asia mustn't forget the Middle East 'grey rhino'

Covid-19 was also a grey rhino. Asia’s energy dependence on the region and its combustible politics call for greater attention to the fallout from an outbreak of conflict.

A 2018 photo of a production facility of Aramco’s Shaybah oil field in Saudi Arabi’s Empty Quarter. Asia is still reliant on Middle East crude, and it is a dependency that isn’t going away soon. PHOTO: REUTERS

As Covid first swept across the world last year, a number of commentators declared it to be a "black swan", an outlier event outside the realm of regular expectations that no one could have predicted. In truth, it was not. For years, experts knew that a novel virus would someday appear and cause havoc.

The eruption of the pandemic was instead what the American policy specialist Michele Wucker calls a "grey rhino", a highly probable, high impact, and generally neglected threat. Not surprisingly, a number of governments and companies are now swapping black swan fatalism for grey rhino pragmatism.

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