How Qatar Became the World's Most OP Country

Currently, there are 62 countries around the world with populations of less than 3 million people. Due to their small size, these countries are generally limited in their power and influence to their immediate surroundings. Even within their own neighborhood, countries such as Armenia, Moldova, or The Gambia are usually minor players. However, Qatar is a fascinating exception to this rule. Despite being a small, dusty, and largely empty peninsula no larger than the state of Delaware, Qatar commands global prestige, power, and influence on the same scale as countries that are dozens of times larger than it.

With an overall population of around 2.8 million people, 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. This 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. Yet, despite its tiny size in both land and people, Qatar wields enormous global influence and power on the same scale as middle powers such as Turkey, South Korea, the Netherlands, or Canada.

Qatar's wealth and power come from its diversified real estate portfolio, which 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 Harrods 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. Qatar also has the ninth-largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, with assets exceeding $450 billion, including a large 10.5% 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 sovereign wealth fund's assets equate to more than $1.4 million per citizen of Qatar, by far the largest of any sovereign wealth fund in the world.

Qatar's state-owned airline, Qatar Airways, is one of the largest and most influential in the entire global aviation industry, ranked by assets as the ninth largest airline in the world and roughly equivalent in scale to Air France KLM, with 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 in the number of news bureaus located across the world. Perhaps most infamously of all, Qatar is 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.

Qatar's fortunes have not always been so certain. Geographically, Qatar possesses very few advantages to help it become powerful. It is 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. For thousands of years before the discovery of oil in 1939, hardly anybody would have ever been able to guess how Qatar's fortunes would eventually turn out. 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 found across the westernmost edge of the peninsula.

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 had been found nearby across Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. However, in 1971, Qatar 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 a big offshore natural gas field in the middle of the Persian Gulf, split roughly 60-40 between their own exclusive economic zone and Iran's. 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 is the primary source of Qatar's op status on the world stage.