Er, did the author mean the 'Teheran' that just a paragraph earlier he claimed the Israelis turned into a glowing crater lined with smoked glass?
Hot tip to budding Apocalyptic fiction spinners: After a nuclear exchange, there's not going to be anyone in the receiving government to negotiate with.
Perhaps the revised ending ought to be 'The West and China agreed to divide up the oil supplies of the former Arab states'.
China doesn't need Arab oil. They are going to take the Spratleys.
Other than self-imposed restraint, there is no reason for this scenario not to play out. The primitive mass murderers are only accidental owners of the world's oil suppy. It was given to them by the very countries who then turned around and bought the stuff from them, instead of simply taking the territory back; mistake number one.
Other than the suicidal impulse to "do the right thing" There is no reason whatsoever why Great Britain, and the US did not take back the rich oil fields, once their importance was clear.
How long have those fields been in sandmaggot hands? Eighty years? Out of a world history of 6000 years?
The problem with this analysis is that it presumes that a rational solution is not possible. There are an infinite number of permutations, in all of which the overreaching muslims are the permanent losers: among them, China, Europe, and the U.S. jointly take over the oil fields, permanently, and divide production (and the cost of recovering it) among themselves in proportion to population.
Since Russia has a more or less independent source of oil, I don't see them taking on the rest of the civilized world for a piece of the action (even if they could).
Hot tip to KG9 -- in a "nuclear exchange," BOTH sides are on the receiving end.