This past spring the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia experienced an unusual occurrence in its staid and usually boring politics. On March 27, King Abdullah , the 89-year-old reigning king, promulgated a royal decree establishing not only his own heir but that of the next king as well. Accordingly, after Abdullah passes, Saudi Arabia’s next king will be Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud — age 78 — and after him, should he live long enough, Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud — age 68.
Altogether, the changes to the royal succession mean that the geriatric rule of Saudi Arabia’s post-founder generation could extend another 20 years, all the way to 2034. For the short-sighted few comfortable with the country’s status quo, this is no doubt cause for relief. Old men rarely contemplate making great and sudden changes, after all, and stability is prized above all else in this most conservative of kingdoms that serves as both the guardian of Islam’s holy places and the central bank for global oil supplies.
Yet Saudi Arabia is beset with problems that are not likely to be solved by old men entering into their doddering years, and the move to establish who will rule over the next decade or two is a blow to those in the younger generation who seek reform. While it is true that the two heirs are thought to be liberals of sorts, who — in the case of Muqrin, at least — are not deemed personally corrupt, the continuation of slow and steady, carefully paced and staged change simply may not be enough to stave off the kingdom’s many problems.
Among these, for example, is the rapidly changing nature of Saudi Arabian society itself. When it was established and for many years thereafter, the kingdom’s people were largely poor, uneducated and simply unprepared to meet the world and its competitive global economy on equal terms. Though the discovery and subsequent production and sale of staggering amounts of oil raised the kingdom’s economic and geopolitical fortunes, the shift from a traditional society to one much better equipped to take its proper place in the modern world has been a slow process.
During that long transition, the kingdom’s social contract was effectively based on a mutually-reinforcing tripod that served the country well. Two of these legs consist of the monarchy and the people, which have existed in symbiosis with one another for decades. That’s because while the Saudi monarchy is absolute, it is not stupid and it has used its huge oil revenues to slowly bring Saudi society into the modern world. Consumerism, easy living and a relatively high standard of living are the most obvious consequences of this policy of no representation without taxation, but it also coincided with the increasingly educated and sophisticated Saudi society that naturally came with economic development.
The third leg of this political deal rested with the kingdom’s clergy, which plays a special role in not just serving as the conscience of the kingdom but also in being the direct custodians of its holy places. While this has always been important, the religious establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has always had counterweights elsewhere in the broader Islamic and Arab worlds to counterbalance its more conservative tendencies. However, oil wealth and the decline of more moderate Islamic voices in places like Egypt and Syria — long home to independent groups of important Islamic scholars — as those countries succumbed to nationalist dictatorships, elevated the Saudi’s clerical establishment relative to other religious voices elsewhere in the region.
Now, much of this traditional tripod is threatened by internal inconsistencies. Saudi Arabia’s population is much bigger now than it was in the 1970s — the height of the old deal between Saudi Arabia’s constituent political estates. As a consequence, the country’s oil wealth is far less capable of covering Saudi Arabia’s economic needs and strains are starting to show as social welfare payments put increasing strain on the country’s budget. Thus, the country requires much more in the way of organic economic growth separate from the oil sector, but this is difficult for a number of reasons.
First, much as how the old French aristocracy monopolized economic opportunity in France in the decades leading up to the French Revolution, Saudi Arabia’s large royal family — the princes and near princes of which are scattered throughout the country — serves as a similar class of monopolistic rentiers who use corruption and political connections to get their way. Economic reforms might be able to make the system more competitive and less prone to capture by the royal family, but since the enactment of such reforms would destroy the economic base of much of this class of rentiers, it is mostly a non-option politically.
Second, much of the reforms required for growth will require fully liberating the country’s labor pool by opening up jobs to women — a group that is mostly excluded from the economy in all but a few rarified areas. In a normal country, this would be a self-evident need. After all, women have entered the labor market everywhere and keeping one half of the population permanently out of it not only keeps the country much poorer than it would otherwise be, it also hobbles growth and opportunity for Saudi men, too. The clerical establishment is deeply opposed to female empowerment in any form, however, and insofar that economic reform must pass its scrutiny, it, like the corruption of the royal family, keeps a boot heel on the country’s economy.
What all this adds up to in the domestic sphere is a slow unraveling of a status quo that has been in effect since the dawn of the kingdom. Reform needs to happen to keep the people happy and well off and to spark off higher rates of growth as future oil revenues fail to keep up with population growth, but large portions of the politically crucial royal family and religious establishment are — for self-interested reasons — deeply opposed to reform. The country can continue on as it has for the time being, but there is no guarantee that the tripod of stability that has served the country so well will continue to bear the weight of all three political estates over the next 20 years. Further, there is the very real prospect that one of the three — people, royal family or religious establishment — may have to go in order to preserve the continued well-being of the other two.
If problems at the heart of what has kept Saudi Arabia so stable for so long weren’t bad enough, the foreign affairs situation may be worse. Here, the Saudi monarchy is faced with a host of existential threats that could easily lead to not just the destruction of the House of Saud, but the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, too. The most obvious threat — and the one that likely keeps the elderly patriarchs of the House of Saud up at night — is the prospect of Iranian domination of the Persian Gulf and the greater Middle East.
For years, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been locked in a bitter cold war over who shall lead the region and which branch of Islam — Sunni or Shiite — best represents Muslim society. Combine that with the ethnic differences between Arab and Persian and the revolutionary outlook of the Iranian government since 1979, and one has all the makings of a violent confrontation between two ancient peoples who both see themselves as the only true representatives of their shared Islamic faith.
Always in the background, this latent tension between Riyadh and Tehran is finally heating up. That’s because the buffer of secular dictatorship and superpower domination that had long kept the two national branches of Islam separated from one another are gone or going. Saddam Hussein may have been a hateful dictator as bad as any the world has seen, but as a Sunni Arab who oppressed large numbers of Shiites, his rule was useful to Riyadh. Indeed, one might argue that it was Saudi policy to fight Iran to the last Iraqi — something that actually happened during the Iran-Iraq War — and without that buffer the frontline of the Middle East’s sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni is now on Saudi Arabia’s doorstep.
This might not be such a problem so long as the Americans were there to keep the kingdom safe and secure, as it was in 1990, when Saddam turned on the Gulf Arabs by invading Kuwait. But that was a quarter century and at least three wars ago, and America is tired. Though parts of official Washington may still see value in the Saudi alliance, average people and increasing numbers of those elected by them despise the Saudis and see little value in America’s continued efforts to protect them. The majority of the hijackers who flew planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 were Saudis, after all, and the kingdom’s corruption and religious extremism make it no friends among average Americans.
What’s more, while America’s view of Saudi Arabia has hardened, Washington’s ability to intervene in the region on behalf of its Saudi client has also diminished. Feckless wars and expensive occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan have sapped America’s will and strength even as China forces a reorientation away from the Middle East to East Asia and the Pacific. This has forced the Saudis to try their own hand at containing Iran — a complete disaster.
For all its expensive toys, the Saudi military is still not something one would want to trust in the field. At its best, it is a very expensive, heavily armed police force and no one — least of all the royals — wants to take the risk of using troops against Iran’s more capable forces like Hezbollah or Quds Force — the part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible for external special operations. As a result, the Saudis have decided to use informal troops and proxy forces to counter the Iranians as Tehran has made inroads into the heart of the Sunni Arab world.
The problem, of course, is that very often these informal troops are often uncontrollable. The fighters funded by Riyadh and sent to Afghanistan in the 1980s, for instance, radicalized and ultimately turned against the Saudi monarchy. Now it looks like the same is happening with the various anti-Iranian proxy forces that Saudi Arabia has funded and armed in places like Syria. Indeed, while the success of the Sunni ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq are indeed a thorn in Tehran’s side because they directly threaten Iran’s clients in Damascus and Baghdad, it’s clear they also pose a huge threat to the Saudi monarchy, as their revolutionary brand of Sunni Islam sees the conservative, ultra-corrupt monarchy as a hated enemy, too.
Indeed, so dire has the situation become that the man most responsible for creating this new monster in the heart of the Middle East — Prince Bandar bin Sultan — has been removed from his powerful position as chief of Saudi intelligence in charge of covert operations. It appears that Bandar — who, as ambassador to Washington, first got his chops in the world of secret, proxy war by funneling cash at the behest of Washington to the Afghans and the Contras — had been made responsible for heading up Saudi efforts to topple the Iranian-backed regime of Bashar Assad in Syria.
The problem isn’t that he’s failed, however, but that he’s succeeded too well in replicating earlier successes. Only instead of having created an uncontrollable Frankenstein in the jungles of Nicaragua or the mountains of Afghanistan, he’s created one just across the border in Syria and Iraq — clearly a disastrous proposition far worse than the problem the likes of ISIS was supposed to solve.
Indeed, the unravelling of state authority across a wide swathe of territory in both Syria and Iraq is something the geriatric leadership of Saudi Arabia clearly doesn’t need, and as bad as a pro-Iranian Damascus or Baghdad could be, they are likely no worse than having a revolutionary army espousing Sunni fundamentalist propaganda sitting astride Saudi Arabia’s porous northern border.
That’s because it will serve as a point of reference for all those seeking an alternative to the monarchy inside Saudi Arabia itself. Osama bin Laden, after all, became something of a cult hero in Saudi Arabia, despite official pronouncements to the contrary, and revolutionary Islam has been a challenge to the kingdom’s conservative establishment ever since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution inspired similar action inside Saudi Arabia itself. No wonder the old men who run the Kingdom have moved to ensure their continued rule — what better time than now to secure the future, as said future seems to be slipping ever quicker out of their grasp?