Saudi Arabia’s Saturday Night Massacre
By George Friedman
Now is the beginning of a new Saudi Arabia or the end of an
experiment.
For nearly a century, Saudi Arabia
has been ruled by the elders of a royal family that now finds itself
effectively controlled by a 32-year-old crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman.
He
helms the Defense Ministry, he has extravagant plans for economic development,
and last week he arranged for the arrest of some of the most powerful ministers
and princes in the country. A day before the arrests were announced, Houthi
tribesmen in Yemen but allied with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival, fired a
ballistic missile at Riyadh. The Saudis claim the missile came from Iran
and that its firing might be considered “an act of war.”
Saudi Arabia was for a long time
the unchanging, even rigid, center of the region. But things changed after
2008. Saudi Arabia, like Russia, had counted on oil revenue to maintain the
stability of the regime. The financial crisis pushed the world into an extended
stagnation where even 2 percent growth in gross domestic product was considered
a boom. This of course put a cap on industrial production, which ultimately cut
the ground out from under oil prices. The increased capacity developed while
oil was nearly $100 per barrel – including the stunning transformation of the
United States into an oil exporter – also forced prices down. OPEC, Saudi
Arabia and Russia all tried (and continue to try) to boost prices using various
schemes. The problem was that, whenever production was cut, some producer,
desperate for oil revenue, rushed in to a fill the vacuum. This placed the
Saudis in a terrible position.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (R), along with International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde (L), attends the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh, on Oct. 24, 2017.
FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP/Getty Images
Cash Is King
Saudi Arabia was created between
the two world wars under British guidance. In the 1920s, a tribe known as the
Sauds defeated the Hashemites, effectively annexing the exterior parts of Saudi
Arabia they did not yet control. The United Kingdom recognized the Sauds’ claim
shortly thereafter. But since then, the Saudi tribe has been torn by ambition,
resentment and intrigue. The Saudi royal family has more in common with the
Corleones than with a Norman Rockwell painting.
The Saudis maintained their rule
partly through financially supporting particular segments of Saudi society. For
the House of Saud, cash was a strategic weapon. Spread around prudently, most
of it to the royal family but a generous amount to other groups in the kingdom,
it bought stability, hiding but never eliminating the malice that was always
there. Among the most critical recipients of money were the Wahhabi clerics,
the gatekeepers of Saudi Arabia’s ultraconservative brand of Islam. When the
Sauds conquered Mecca and Medina, they became the protectors of the holy
cities. This was an honor, a singular responsibility and a political burden.
The Saudis had to fund the Wahhabis and became trapped by them. The royal
family and others knew how to have a good time in London, Paris and other European
cities. Some, though not all, clearly didn’t take conservative Islam seriously.
But others in the kingdom did, and this became a fault line in Saudi Arabia,
one that was buried under money.
Money, however, eventually ran
short, and a faction of the royal family began to grasp their vulnerability.
Oil on the global market was plentiful, and the United States was less than
solicitous of Saudi needs, particularly while the Saudis – the Wahhabi side of
the royal family – was underwriting jihadist groups. With oil prices low, the
Saudis also lost their lever within the peninsula. Countries like Yemen that
had historically been overawed by the Saudis destabilized. In Iraq, the Sunnis
allied with the Saudis were on the defensive – and losing.
Low oil prices demanded an
alternative strategy. For the Saudis to survive, they would need to generate
income from an additional source. Thus, King Salman handed the keys to the
kingdom to his son, Mohammad bin Salman. In one of his first moves undertaken
while he was still deputy crown prince, he unveiled a staggeringly ambitious
plan called Vision 2030 to transform Saudi Arabia from an oil-based
economy to an advanced industrial power. For this to work, two things had to
happen. First, the members of the royal family and others had to align their
economic interests with the Saudi state. The crown prince had to squeeze out
money from inside and outside Saudi Arabia. The plan to sell part of
state-owned oil firm Saudi Aramco was such an attempt, and it also symbolized
the fact that oil could no longer be king.
Second, the crown prince had to
break the Wahhabi clerics’ hold of Saudi culture. Building an industrial
culture were not compatible with Wahhabism. The Wahhabis were committed to
fixed social and gender relationships. These were consistent with an economy
built on oil sales, but industrialization requires a dynamic culture with
social relations constantly shifting.
The resistance to the new plan was
intense but quiet, as the culture required. Mohammad bin Salman obviously reached
the conclusion that he had to confront this opposition openly lest it quietly
undermine his plan. His first major open move was to allow women to drive. That represented a direct attack
on the clerics and caused a great deal of upset. His second move was to go
forward with the stalled Saudi Aramco initial public offering. He will select
the exchange where the shares will be traded in 2018.
First Strike
The direct attack was undoubtedly
met with threats of a coup. Whether one was actually planned didn’t matter. He
had to assume these threats were credible since so many interests were under
attack. So he struck first, arresting princes and ex-minsters who constituted
the Saudi elite. It was a dangerous gamble. A powerful opposition still exists,
but he had no choice but to act. He could either strike as he did last Saturday
night, or allow his enemies to choose the time and place of that attack.
Nothing is secure yet, but with this strike, there is a chance he might have
bought time. Any Saudi who would take on princes and clerics is obviously
desperate, but he may well break the hold of the financial and religious elite.
In the midst of this, an external
enemy saw an opening. A day before the strike, a missile was fired at Riyadh
from Yemen by the Houthis – a Shiite sect allied with Iran. Saudi officials say
the missile was produced by Iran, although the Iranians deny this. It was a
serious attempt to strike Riyadh, but the Saudis intercepted the missile.
The Trump administration has placed
heavy emphasis on Iran’s missile program. The Iranians have been doing well
since the nuclear deal was signed in 2015. They have become the dominant
political force in Iraq. Their support for the Bashar Assad regime in Syria may
not have been enough to save him, but Iran was on what appears to be the
winning side in the Syrian civil war. Hezbollah has been hurt by its
participation in the war but is reviving, carrying Iranian influence in Lebanon
at a time when Lebanon is in crisis after the resignation of its prime minister
last week.
The Saudis, on the other hand,
aren’t doing as well. The Saudi-built anti-Houthi coalition in Yemen has failed
to break the Houthi-led opposition. And Iran has openly entered into an
alliance with Qatar against the wishes of the Saudis and their ally, the United
Arab Emirates.
Iran seems to sense the possibility
of achieving a dream: destabilizing Saudi Arabia, ending its ability to support
anti-Iranian forces, and breaking the power of the Sunni Wahhabis. Iran must
look at the arrests in Saudi Arabia as a very bad move. And they may be.
Mohammad bin Salman has backed the fundamentalists and the financial elite
against the wall. They are desperate, and now it is their turn to roll the
dice. If they fall short, it could result in a civil war in Saudi Arabia. If
Iran can hit Riyadh with missiles, the crown prince’s opponents could argue
that the young prince is so busy with his plans that he isn’t paying attention
to the real threat. For the Iranians, the best outcome is to have no one come
out on top.
This would reconfigure the
geopolitics of the Middle East, and since the U.S. is deeply involved there, it
has decisions to make. The U.S. needs regional counters to the Iranians. The
Saudis are the major force, but if they cannot play a role as regional leader,
the U.S. will have to look for alternatives. One option is to engage in another
intervention in the Middle East, something that hasn’t work out well for the
U.S. in the past. The U.S. obviously backs Saudi modernization because it would
weaken the Wahhabis, but this is a long-term project.
Saturday night will stand as the
beginning of a new Saudi Arabia or as the end of the experiment. Either way,
the Saudis are weakening. That is good for Iran and bad for the United States.
Encouraging the Saudis to make these changes might seem like a good idea, but
it has every opportunity to leave the U.S. position in the region much worse.
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