After several military routs, the Arab ruling class, whose interests became progressively more rooted in international financial capital, has relinquished sovereignty and autonomy over policy. The crucial point at which the surrender occurred coincided with the Camp David accords of 1979. These treaties ripped Egypt out of its Arab milieu and slivered the Arab world, further weakening its already flaccid security agreements. In this context, for developmental growth to take hold, oil revenues, or better yet nationally generated finance, ought to more than cover the political instability premium. They should exceed the costs of security as well as the sunk costs of public spending and investment. It is hypothetically possible for an Arab economy to grow under stable conditions with low oil prices because the ‘peace’ (or defused-tensions) dividend in a state that promotes the rights of labour could be channelled into the social infrastructure and production. In reality, of course, the opposite of this desirable path was followed. The regressive developmental process leading to the Arab uprisings was reinforced at every stage by WB/IMF-proposed procyclical policies. These measures accentuated the many shocks to which the AW was subjected. The downturns were lasting because the vacillation of oil prices intertwined with a precarious political environment to deepen the troughs in the cycle. Rooted in the interests of their own class, the ruling classes' commitment to the WB/IMF neoliberal framework engineered a whole set of macro prices (wages, exchange and interest rates) that ensured antidevelopmental outcomes.