How many of us would like to be “King for the Day?” With all the reality television shows on these days, it seems suddenly possible. People are becoming overnight rock stars, stunt men, apprentices, Martha Stewart, so why not King?

Actually, if I had my choice, I’d like to star in a slightly different kind of reality TV. I’d like to be the Saudi oil minister for a day.

Imagine that. I could make innocent, but unclear statements about inventory levels and get oil futures traders so hysterical over what I “might have” meant that I could reverse the direction of oil markets instantaneously. In one minute, I could cause thousands of short sellers on Wall Street to lose their shirts. That would teach them a lesson about driving down prices with their rampant speculation.

Then I could meet privately with senior American officials and explain that I increased my new oil field capacity by 800,000 barrels a day last year to help out the oil market and forget to mention that my older fields will have an annual decline rate of practically the same volume on an annual basis. I could announce future increases that also don’t sound large enough to meet demand projections. That would keep the market on edge.

I could opine on the problem of limited refining capacity in the United States and bemoan the fact that I have heavy crude to sell. I could explain why $50 a barrel oil was cheaper than bottled water and secretly wonder what Americans would do if I forced them to sit in long lines again for gasoline.

I wouldn’t have made this wish to be oil minister years back. The late 1980s and early 1990s would have been a really boring time to be Saudi oil minister. In those years, all there was to do is to say that I would supply the market with enough oil to keep prices stable, and I actually had to deliver on it. I boringly held extra inventories in storage facilities near consumer markets in the Caribbean, Rotterdam, and the Mediterranean so if oil prices started to make a sudden move, I had full control of the upside price. I even kept floating tankers filled with stockpiles of oil. I had to make giant investments to have more oil fields on hand than I needed, wasting valuable money just to avoid a possible crisis that might never come.

Those were boring times when all the Saudi oil minister could say was that $18 was a fair and reasonable equilibrium price. If I was minister then, what would have been the fun of it? My inner thoughts would have been known to all the world, including my own people. Every statement I made would be so painfully clear and transparent that I couldn’t make anyone squirm with my obtuseness.

Thankfully, being oil minister now is a more entertaining proposition. Just-in-time oil field management leaves risk and reward to the job. OK, I have to deal with shortages of drilling rigs but I can say that is outside my control. If I left markets guessing about whether enough of my oil will or won’t be available down the road, there would be hysteria about rising demand in China, and I could watch Americans flailing around to find a strategic response.

As Saudi oil minister, it could be so much more fun to be mysterious than boringly clear. And actually, being clear might be dangerous for me. If I keep obfuscating how much oil I plan to bring on to limit price increases, groups who want to wreck my country’s relationship with America will be able to work in an atmosphere of sufficient mistrust to be successful. Making things clear would get in the way of the agendas of everyone from the American neo-conservatives to Al-Qaeda. If I was simply clear and transparent about my oil policies, extremists would be forced to admit that Saudi Arabia is an incredible ally and a stalwart friend who, for two decades, without fail, has raised its oil production every time that it was needed, preserving its long-term market share, discouraging supply substitution and anti-oil consumer policies, and enhancing Saudi Arabia’s international status and national interest. Now that would be boring. Who wants everyone in the world to know that they could count on me?

Ms. Myers Jaffe is a research fellow at Rice University.