While Washington ran threat assessments and Brussels mapped jurisdictional gaps and Beijing looked for doors that didn't exist, the mood in three Gulf capitals was different.
Not calmer, precisely. The Bloomberg article had landed in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait City with the same weight it had landed everywhere else, and the people who read it in those cities understood its implications as clearly as anyone in the NSC or the European Commission.
But understanding the implications and being troubled by them were not the same thing, and the three governments that had invited Liam Scott to the Middle East seven months ago were not troubled.
They were calculating.
Seven months ago, the footage of the aircraft that had no business being in private ownership has gone viral.
The next week, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait had each sent an invitation to Liam. He accepted the invitations and travelled to the Middle East for the meetings.
