A long brewing war between Saudi Arabia and Russia came to a historic head on Monday, with oil prices plummeting past record record lows and West Texas futures into the negatives. To the rest of the world, the plunge may have come as a shock, but bad luck and bad faith negotiations made this path all but inevitable.

After the U.S. ramped up oil production starting in 2014, OPEC member state Saudi Arabia crafted OPEC+, which included an informal alliance with Russia, not an OPEC member, to slash oil production and keep global prices artificially high. Russia agreed to renewed production caps through 2019, keeping oil strong enough that state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco raised more than $25 billion in the world’s largest initial public offering late last year.