[iguy]

But the resources in question here (for stability of mid-east countries) are local: there's only so much land along the Nile, and only so much oil in the Saudi wells. Quadrupling the population makes every fight over slices of the pie more intense within these countries.

The miracle is really that somehow they have almost kept up. Here's the green revolution: Egypt has roughly doubled yield, and (if you click around) roughly trebled the harvest, while quadrupling in population:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.YLD.CREL.KG?location...