The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was founded and formulated by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Venezuela, with the intention to join together so as to control the international pricing of oil, which meant in effect to not undercut each other in the global markets and to therefore make more money over the lifespan of their natural resource by, if necessary, setting quotas on the production and sale of their oil to foreign markets. Since, the formal inception of OPEC in 1960, another nine countries have been added, but a careful look at the members of OPEC, indicate that there is only one country, that is the master of OPEC, and that country is Saudi Arabia which by far has the most influence upon its policies, because it is Saudi Arabia which pumps out more than twice as much oil as any other nation, and consistently exports the most oil in the world.
When it comes to cartels, which are considered to be illegal in America, it is first important to understand that a cartel is basically defined as a group of companies that get together in order to set prices and quotas so as to artificially sell their product at a higher price than what these products would sell for if these companies were actually competing against each other. Although, OPEC does not like to be called a cartel, their pricing coordination and quota agreements, per their formal meetings, belies that.
Yet, logically, there are two basic reasons why OPEC is not a true cartel, of which, the first one is that a careful look at the member states within OPEC, indicates that not a single one of these nations, is a military powerhouse, though Saudi Arabia has consistently spent an inordinate amount of monies on their military budget year after year, but the purpose of those expenditures is to create the impression that it cannot be conquered domestically, nor by any other middle eastern nation, as well as giving it the ability to threaten other middle eastern states, up to a point, for Saudi Arabia does not wish for any of its proposed military actions to be met with overt objection by the western world, in particular, the United States. For, if OPEC was truly a cartel, it OPEC truly controlled oil resources and oil prices, in a world in which nations must have oil in order to survive and will fight wars for it, than all of OPEC would be under the hands of the western nations in conjunction with China and Russia, because they have the collective might to assert their will, if they so wanted to.
This leads to the second reason why OPEC is not a true cartel, which is the fact that two out of the three major producers of oil, that is, Russia and the United States, are not members of OPEC, and therefore are not members of that cartel. In fact, half of the top ten producers of oil, are non-OPEC members, signifying that when people within America as well as other countries rail against OPEC in regards to their price fixing and such, they somehow fail to recognize that in reality the price of oil isn't controlled by OPEC, though it has its influence upon it, but is actually controlled by no single entity, of which, it is essentially the market forces in conjunction with the major international oil gas producers such as Exxon/Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Total S.A, amongst other super-major oil companies that maintain, heavily influence, and control the pricing of oil, so that, while the press may inveigh against the rising price of oil, when it does rise, and blame it all on OPEC, the truth of the matter is, OPEC has a lot less pricing power and a lot less power in general to dictate much of anything to the world, for the consequences of their missteps would be rather tragic for those nation-states.