Preface.  This is a book review of Rundell’s “Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads”. If this book is right, things have gotten a lot better in Saudi Arabia than when my other review on Saudi Arabia was written (here).  But King Salman’s reforms have made Saudi Arabia more unstable. This is where 20% of the remaining conventional oil reserves are, which will grow in importance if world oil production peaked in 2018, potentially triggering resource wars.

Rundel writes “10 years ago, there was no public entertainment in Riyadh. No theaters, no cinemas, no sporting events that women could attend, no restaurants where unmarried couples could dine together, and no music anywhere. All of this has changed. After having been closed for 35 years, cinemas have reopened and ground has been broken for a large theme park outside of Riyadh. Many restaurants now play music and no longer strictly enforce gender segregation. Religious policemen no longer shoot holes in satellite television dishes or smash mobile phones containing cameras. A new Entertainment Commission has introduced hundreds of events, including rock concerts, magic shows, opera performances, auto races, and even female wrestling matches.  A new Culture Commission openly promotes theater, music, figurative art, film, and literature—all but the last of which were once firmly opposed by the ulama. All of this was intended to give young Saudis something to do other than “drifting”.

He also writes about the incredible and difficult changes being made by King Salman, and a fascinating history of how this nation emerged and how today King Salman tries to please the many different stakeholders.  Saudi stability is important to the whole world, since they have the largest conventional oil reserves.  But King Salman is such a “key man” that if he stopped being King for any reason, Saudi stability would falter, there is no obvious replacement and many interests who would fight each other to get their favored candidate into power.

One of the ways that energy shortages may occur in the future is that as populations in Middle Eastern and other oil-rich nations grow, they will stop exporting as much of their oil.  Already in 2015, Saudis consumed 20% of their own oil production, and if current growth rates continue, Saudi Arabia will be burning 75% of its production by 2030.  

A few items from the book:

• Foreign workers fill 90% of non-oil, private-sector jobs in Saudi Arabia. Saudi employers like it that way because expatriates are usually less expensive, better qualified, and more easily dismissed than Saudis.
• In sharp contrast to most Middle Eastern militaries, the Saudi Armed Forces have never become an independent political actor. Unlike what occurred in Turkey, the Saudi officer corps has never formed the vanguard of a new, secular, modernizing elite. It has nothing like the independent economic resources enjoyed by the Egyptian military or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps both of which hold extensive business interests in their own names. Nor is Saudi Arabia like Pakistan, where the army, when not actually running the country, has ignored the political leadership on critical security matters.
• No criticism of the king or ruling family is allowed, and harsh attacks on the religious establishment can result in imprisonment
• When all the collateral branches of the family are added together, the Al Saud number well over 100,000. Far from being a small, isolated group like the Shah of Iran’s family, they comprise at least one half of one percent of the entire Saudi population and a much larger portion of the nation’s political, social, and economic elites.
• The Saudi people will no longer tolerate indefinitely hundreds of great-great-grandsons of King Abdulaziz illuminating their palaces and gardens for free while their own electricity bills triple. Gaining public support for painful economic reforms required fighting high-level corruption and downsizing the royal family. Royal bank accounts have been frozen and royal land grants revoked.
• The great irony is that in 2020, many Saudis have come to fear their own government more than al-Qaeda terrorists. Saudi Arabia was never an open society, but it was not a police state. Now the highly sophisticated technical apparatus installed to thwart al-Qaeda has been turned on peaceful citizens. Telephones and social media are closely monitored. Saudis no longer feel comfortable making even mild criticisms of their government. They switch off their cell phones or go into the garden to talk. The scope of acceptable debate has narrowed, with both conservative Muslim Brothers and liberal feminists being arrested. The anti-corruption campaign, however popular and even necessary, has cast doubt on the rule of law. Restrictions on travel and the seizing of assets have become more common. Allegations of torture have reappeared
• In the final analysis, the First Gulf War was about oil. After seizing Kuwait, Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, controlled 20% of the planet’s oil reserves. Had he moved south to Dhahran, he would have controlled 40%. If Kuwait had instead grown carrots, it is unlikely that the United States would have sent half a million men there. Iraq has gone from being the home of the Al Saud’s Hashemite rivals to a bulwark against Iran, to an invading army lobbing missiles at Riyadh. Iran, once a partner in promoting a pro-Western security structure in the Persian Gulf, has evolved into what most Saudis today consider their most significant foreign threat.
• Saudi Aramco is not only the world’s largest and most profitable oil company but is also a well-managed, technologically advanced firm operated on a commercial basis, which produces 10–12% of the world’s oil every day. Aramco is widely recognized as more efficient, technically competent, and meritocratic than most Saudi institutions. Nearly all its senior management and 80% of its 75,000 employees are Saudi nationals; 20% of its new hires are women. Even more significantly, the Saudi oil industry was not subsequently taken over by military officers, politicians, or trade unions
• Not only is there plenty of oil in Saudi Arabia, it is inexpensive to produce and easy to ship. Saudi Aramco is not drilling in the Arctic or North Sea. Most Saudi wells are not especially deep, and many flow from natural pressure. There are no mountains to cross or long pipelines to build in order to get Saudi crude into tankers. Instead, there are well-established production and processing networks that have taken sixty years to build. Most estimates put average Saudi production costs between US$ 3 and 5 a barrel. The average cost of production in the United States, including shale and offshore wells, is roughly $40 a barrel; and Canadian oil-sands production costs are closer to $100 a barrel. In short, Saudi Aramco is not simply the world’s largest oil company—it also produces some of the world’s least expensive and easiest-to-ship oil.
• Unlike many Arab oil producers, the Saudi government did not simply park its cash in US Treasury bonds or create a sovereign wealth fund that invested abroad. Until 2016, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund focused almost entirely on building domestic industries. One of the first revolved around desalinated water. In a land without a single river, water was once a very scarce resource—a commodity over which people fought. For generations in Central Arabia, the fear of water shortages was nearly as grave and persistent as the dread of Bedu raids. A nationwide network of more than 20 desalinization plants, pipelines, pumping stations, and storage facilities that brought fresh water not only to major cities but also to most towns in the arid Nejd and mountainous Asir. As a result, the Saudi people became dependent on inexpensive water sold to them at a fraction of its true cost.
• King Faisal’s decision to introduce girls’ education provoked a firestorm similar to desegregation in the American South. Angry fathers came from Al Qasim by the hundreds and camped outside the city for several weeks, waiting to see the king. Faisal listened, then he made it clear that no one would be required to send their daughter to school, but he would use force against anyone who tried to disrupt those wishing to attend. Today, there are more women in Saudi universities than men. As Saudi women became more educated, they gained social and economic independence—just as they had in the West, and just as social conservatives in the kingdom had feared.
• More liberating for many women, and much more complicated to enact legally, were the amendments to numerous guardianship regulations made in 2019. These changes removed restrictions on employment, travel, education, and healthcare. No longer was a male guardian’s permission needed to obtain a passport or travel abroad; no longer was a woman legally required to live with her guardian or face police detention for the crime of absenteeism.

Not included above are some of the most important factors that might destabilize Saudi Arabia, such as the troubled nations they’re surrounded by, the increasing autocracy and more. My kindle notes are also disjointed, leave a great deal out, so do buy the book.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Rundell D (2020) Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads. I.B. Taruis.

“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.” LEONARDO DA VINCI

In 1943, the future King Faisal travelled to Washington to meet President Franklin Roosevelt, who declared, “I hereby find that the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States.

Saudi Arabia remains, without any doubt, an unusual place. Riyadh is the only major world capital where a true king reigns from a palace accompanied by courtiers, falcons, poets, and jesters. Vast oil reserves have created an unconventional economy that is more distributive than productive, and provides the population with a living standard totally divorced from their actual productivity. Unlike many Muslim countries, there is no talk in Saudi Arabia of reintroducing Islamic law because it never disappeared.

Without a stable and cooperative government in Riyadh, confronting terrorism, managing the global economy, containing revolutionary Iran, or resolving the Arab–Israeli conflict would all be more difficult tasks.

Saudi Arabia is in the midst of a remarkable, difficult, and unsettling period of change. Vision 2030, the Crown Prince’s blueprint for the country’s future, is the most radical set of economic and social reforms seen there for half a century.

The Al Saud have very consciously based their rule on a coalition of powerful stakeholders. Each group has distinct and often competing interests, which the monarchy seeks to balance. Each group has its own leadership elite, which the Al Saud help to remain prominent. This section examines how balancing the interests of stakeholder groups and maintaining elite cohesion have been the keys to short-term stability in Saudi Arabia.

The stakeholders in the Al Saud’s coalition are the tribes, clerics, merchants, technocrats, and members of the royal family itself.

King Abdulaziz unified Saudi Arabia before Chevron ever drilled the kingdom’s first oil well. His sons’ economic policies, on the other hand, have revolved largely around managing the hydrocarbon bonanza that followed. The Saudis have not spent all of their oil wealth wisely, they have at times been handicapped by profligacy, corruption, and mismanagement. Yet by most measures of economic development, they have done considerably better than fellow oil producers in Iran, Iraq, Nigeria and Venezuela.

For more than 80 years, Saudi Arabia largely avoided foreign wars.

The Saudi people are conservative, but most are not reactionary. Few would now choose to close automobile showrooms, girls’ schools, or television stations

Limits to both the price and volume of oil exports have made the kingdom’s oil-funded, distributive economy unsustainable. At the same time, a badly broken labor market has led to productivity and labor force participation rates that will not support the standard of living that Saudis have come to expect.

Saudi Arabia sees itself surrounded by a hostile, revolutionary Iran determined to fundamentally change the political order of the Middle East. Riyadh’s costly military involvement in Yemen grew not from a fear of Houthi tribesmen, but from concern that Iran could establish a beachhead on the Arabian Peninsula.

The Saudi monarchy does face political challenges. The Saudi Shia have suffered from a century of systematic discrimination that has left 15% of the population outside of the kingdom’s political mainstream. Corruption remains an issue that angers Saudis because it adversely affects the income distribution network. Three generations of Saudis have become increasingly more prosperous and well educated; they are looking for more direct participation in their government, as well as greater levels of transparency and accountability. All of these issues carry the seeds of instability if they are not addressed.

In the early hours of November 4, 2017, Saudi Arabia changed forever. Across the country, princes, bureaucrats, and businessmen who had long believed themselves above the law discovered that their immunity had evaporated. Charged with corruption, some were pulled from their beds, while others were summoned to nonexistent meetings or detained as soon as their international flights touched down in the kingdom. Among them were air force generals, navy admirals, and three sons of former King Abdullah, including the commander of Saudi Arabia’s National Guard. A former minister of finance and a governor of the Central Bank found themselves confined together with former ministers of commerce, planning, and communications. Along with three brothers of Osama bin Laden, some 300 prominent individuals were taken to Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton Hotel, which was converted for the occasion into the world’s first five-star prison. These events marked the end of an order that had governed Saudi Arabia for 65 years.

Gone was a political structure in which MANY princes made collective decisions.

Gone, too, a military structure in which senior princes controlled independent armies.

King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud had been dealt a poor hand. Unlike his half-brother Abdullah, Salman had not inherited an oil boom. Instead, in 2015 oil prices were collapsing—and with them, Saudi Arabia’s economic growth and government revenues. The Saudi welfare state was fast becoming unsustainable. As one cabinet official told the author, “We were going to hit the wall – and in our own lifetime, not our children’s.” Unfortunately, in 2015, King Salman lacked the means to right his listing ship. What he had was a well-established but shambolic and somewhat medieval system of government. Thousands of princes believed that they were entitled to privileged social status, legal immunity, and generous state-funded incomes. The conservative Wahhabi religious establishment, upon whose support the monarchy’s legitimacy partially rested, controlled most of the country’s legal and educational institutions. Its religious scholars were determined to maintain their historical importance and to block social change, especially when it related to the role of women. The civil service, which employed 70% of working Saudis, was filled with sinecures, nepotism, and corruption.

This bureaucracy lacked both the motivation and administrative capacity to implement serious reform. Under the Obama Administration, Saudi Arabia’s strongest ally, the United States of America, had grown distant, while its greatest adversary, the Islamic Republic of Iran, had grown more menacing. The Saudi military remained loyal and firmly under civilian control, but after years of training and billions of dollars invested in advanced weaponry, it was still unable to defeat a militia of Yemeni tribesmen or protect vital oil installations from inexpensive drone attacks.

Although fate made Salman an unexpected king, he was not unprepared. He had been governor of Riyadh Province for 48 years. Intelligent, pragmatic, hardworking, well organized, and disciplined, he was also strict, demanding, and humorless. He made firm decisions and would become known locally as the “King of Decisiveness”. He read widely in Arabic and owned one of the largest private libraries of any Saudi prince. Salman was firmly dedicated to preserving the monarchy, but recognized that doing so would require political, economic, and social change.

But unsettling changes have made Saudi Arabia less stable than it was in 2015.

Since the Bronze Age, it had been a collection of wandering nomads and warring city states. Its local chieftains rose and fell. Their “states” were merely loose alliances of townspeople and nomads; the Hadhar and the Bedu, respectively. The nomads lived by animal husbandry and raiding; the townspeople engaged in farming, trade, and simple manufacture. These “states” provided only minimal administration and had no well-defined borders. Every town and tribe had its own independent, hereditary leadership.

Across the empty deserts of Arabia roamed the Bedu—nomads with no fixed location or political loyalty beyond those of their tribe, clan, and family. They lived off their camel herds. In summer, when temperatures reached 120 degrees F and grass withered, they could be found camped by deep, permanent wells or at trading centers where they exchanged livestock, wool, butter, and cheese for dates, grain, bullets, tobacco, and coffee. In winter, when the grass grew lush from the autumn rains, they could be anywhere.

In a Wahhabi state, religious scholars do not govern or wield executive authority, but they do control the legal system and furnish the principal check on absolute executive authority. They provide advice, consent, and legitimacy to a Muslim ruler who must govern according to God’s law as expressed through the principles of the sharia. Commanding what the law requires and banning what it prohibits make a ruler legitimate. Any ruler who flagrantly violates Islamic law or orders his people to do so is, by definition, illegitimate and subject to removal.

Because political stability is required for a functioning Islamic community, Abd al-Wahhab called for obedience to any established ruler who acted justly and defended Islam. This doctrine explicitly calls for obedience to a ruler unless he commands the violation of Islamic law. It puts Wahhabi religious scholars in the position of either defending a ruler or offering quiet, behind-the-scenes criticism.

Finance was as much a part of this new alliance as religion. Abd al-Wahhab declared payment of the Islamic alms tax (zakat) to be obligatory rather than voluntary, and thus transformed Al Saud revenue collection into an unchallengeable religious doctrine. Intolerance was also there from the outset. Any Muslim who heard the Wahhabis’ call or dawah and did not join them was an infidel whose property was forfeit. This conviction that any opponent was an infidel or kaffir united, inspired, and disciplined the Wahhabis. From the outset, military conquest was part of their ideology, as commonplace raiding for loot was transformed into a holy war for religious reform.

The First Saudi State ceased to exist, but the surviving Al Saud learned two important strategic lessons: first, you must obtain modern military equipment and second, you can lose everything if you quarrel with the superpower of the day. King Salman, the current ruler, has not forgotten either of those lessons.  From that bitter defeat, the Al Saud learned another strategic lesson: above all else, do not use force against each other; keep family disputes peaceful and private; and unite quickly and firmly against anyone who violates this rule. Modern-era Kings Faisal, Khalid, Fahd, and Abdullah all respected this stabilizing principle. King Salman and his ambitious Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, have not.

The future King Abdulaziz was an eight-year-old boy the night his soon-to-be-homeless family fled Riyadh. For two years they lived with the nomadic Murra tribe in southern Arabia’s vast, trackless desert, the Rub al-Khali or Empty Quarter. During those years, Abdulaziz acquired a valuable understanding of the Bedu and desert warfare. The young Abdulaziz participated in these efforts, trying and failing to capture Riyadh in 1901. It was only the following year that he became a local legend by successfully recapturing his ancestral home. Against huge odds, Abdulaziz restored his family’s battered fortunes with little more than audacity, careful planning, stealth, and luck. Remember that formula; his grandson does. More than a century later, Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz is once more counting on audacity, planning, stealth, and luck to preserve his family’s fortunes.

That capture of Riyadh by the young Abdulaziz is the foundation myth of modern Saudi Arabia.

The Bedu of Central Arabia herded camels in empty deserts where there were no mosques or schools. They produced warriors, not scholars.  Abdulaziz wanted settled farmers whom he could tax rather than wandering nomads whom he could often not even locate. He wanted to replace the divisive tribalism that motivated the Bedu with a unifying Islamic identity, and, above of all, he wanted a dependable military.  Many Bedu did settle down and, at least temporarily, tried farming. They stopped smoking tobacco, renounced praying at tombs, and put on the dreaded white turban that signified Ikhwan membership. Eventually there were more than 100 Ikhwan settlements scattered across the Nejd. Never more than a day’s march apart, they created an extraordinary military network that provided Abdulaziz with some 60,000 men of fighting age.

These Ikhwan settlements created religious, agricultural, and military communities that were something of a cross between an American Indian reservation, religious revival meeting, and organized military camp. Despite their original goal of replacing tribalism with Islam, most remained tribally based.

Nevertheless, many Ikhwan retained their tribal values, prejudices, and loyalties such that, even today, the Al al-Sheikh and Al Saud strive to replace tribalism with Islam and, more recently, with Saudi nationalism.

When they joined their lives changed dramatically. They were strictly forbidden from raiding tribes under Abdulaziz’s protection, they were banned from collecting protection money from villages and weaker tribes, and they were prohibited from charging fees to travelers and merchants crossing their territory. Their once independent leaders now paid the religious tax (zakat) to Abdulaziz.

Attacking polytheists became the Ikhwan’s last chance for loot, and something they pursued with vigor.

Unlike the Sunnis, the Shia depend primarily on financial support from their congregation rather than the state, and have a well-organized hierarchy led by the ayatollahs and grand ayatollahs.  Despite these differences, most Sunnis and all Shia still regard each other as fellow Muslims. The Wahhabis do not. They refer to the Shia as rejectionists

The economy of the Hejaz was based on trade and religious tourism controlled by large merchant families and hereditary guilds. There were guilds for water carriers, butchers, jewelers, tour guides, and street sweepers. Like the Bedouin tribes, these guilds were organized, powerful, and politically independent. They had their own guild masters and ran their own courts. They legally exercised monopoly power to set prices, collect fees, share profits, and create barriers to entry. For centuries they had run the Hajj purely for their own profit. Those pilgrims who were not robbed by Bedu on their way to Mecca were often fleeced by the guilds once they arrived.  Unlike Sharif Hussein, Abdulaziz was determined to run a good Hajj. He brought the private guilds firmly under government control, breaking their independence just as he would eventually do with the nomadic tribes.

Partisan, independent religious interpretations were forbidden [here I stopped getting notes of Saudi history, which is quite interesting, but I’m mainly interested in Saudi oil production and stability now].

Salman maintained a private jail for princes and was well aware of which family members abused their royal status.  The new king possessed a detailed knowledge of his father’s career and had made a point of studying King Abdulaziz’s methods. Like his father, Salman was a committed autocrat who believed in the Al Saud family’s right to rule and feared that without them, Saudi Arabia would quickly and violently fragment into competing tribes and regions.

His stern demeanor notwithstanding, Salman was a popular governor and effective politician who regularly paid condolence calls upon the death of prominent citizens or attended the weddings of their children. He took his job seriously and arrived for work at 8 a.m. every morning for half a century. He  began to delegate much of the daily management of government to younger princes—especially his son, Mohammed bin Salman or MBS.

The system that they eventually created of 34 brothers sharing power, served the kingdom well for many years. The king was always first among equals with final authority and some kings were clearly more dominant than others, but all had sought to maintain family unity. This brotherly, consensus-oriented system had promoted stability, slowed change, and was rapidly running out of princes.

Because a power-sharing consortium of 500 cousins would produce a weak and unwieldy government, real political authority needed to remain concentrated in relatively few hands. This winnowing process would inevitably create resentment, anger, and potential instability. Hundreds of grandsons were theoretically eligible to become the next deputy crown prince.

King Salman appeared to resolve this difficult issue by appointing his nephew, the 55-year-old Prince Mohammed bin Naif or MBN to be the deputy crown prince and third in line of succession.

Mohammed bin Naif was minister of the interior and had served as the deputy minister for thirteen years. Trained by both Scotland Yard and the FBI—the foremost law-enforcement agencies in Britain and the United States, respectively—he is widely credited with defeating the al-Qaeda insurrection that raged across Saudi Arabia between 2003 and 2007. Experienced, popular at home, and well-regarded in foreign capitals,

The new king quickly moved to secure, some might say buy, both popular support and cooperation from the kingdom’s tribal, religious, and business leaders. The treasury was full and Salman authorized $32 billion-worth of new spending. Civil servants, military personnel, students, retirees, and handicapped persons were all given two months’ extra pay. Licensed charities, sports clubs, and literary clubs all received new grants.

No fewer than 2,500 prisoners were pardoned and $5 billion was committed to improve water and electrical services. State-controlled firms such as Saudi Aramco and the petrochemical giant SABIC followed the government’s lead on bonuses. Private firms were encouraged to do the same.

The former governor of Riyadh understood that to ignore the kingdom’s tribes was to court disaster. Accordingly, none of the agricultural subsidies that tribesmen enjoyed were reduced. Officially recognized tribal sheikhs received generous bonuses, and the number of official tribal sheikhs receiving regular payments was increased to include a number of minor chiefs. In a completely new outreach to the tribes, King Salman formalized payment to the muariffeen, the individuals who determine legal membership of a tribe. This can be important as membership in a Saudi tribe confers valuable state-funded benefits, but in border areas near Jordan, Iraq, or Yemen it may not be clear exactly who belongs to the Saudi branch of a tribe.

Religious conservatives had long boasted that when King Abdullah died, they would remove the liberal, religious-police chief that he had installed, restore the conservative ulama that he had fired, and shut down the co-educational university that he had founded. King Salman initially gave them much of what they wanted.  In the streets of Riyadh, religious policemen celebrated the sacking of their chief, Abd al-Latif Al al-Sheikh, who had sent them to English classes and sensitivity training. They joyfully slaughtered camels and goats in public

At age 29, MBS became head of the Royal Diwan—essentially, chief of staff for the king’s executive office—and minister of defense. In the latter capacity, MBS controlled the Saudi Army, Navy, and Air Force, along with a quarter of the government budget. As the Chairman of Council for Economic and Development Affairs (CEDA), Mohammed bin Salman assumed control not only of most civilian ministries but also of state-owned companies.

MBS took effective control of Saudi Aramco away from the Ministry of Petroleum. He moved the Public Investment Fund, which holds hundreds of billions of dollars of government assets, from the Ministry of Finance into his direct control.

Many Al Saud princes suddenly found their services no longer required. King Abdullah’s two sons, Turki and Mishal, lost their posts as governors of Riyadh and Mecca. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the long-serving former ambassador to Washington, was relieved of his role as secretary general of the National Security Council. Prince Khalid bin Bandar was removed from his post as head of the external intelligence agency. There were numerous other examples of princes being replaced by technocrats,

By late 2016, it had become clear that King Salman intended to make Mohammed bin Salman king. It was equally apparent that many in the royal family still opposed both the young prince and the quite radical economic reform program that he was proposing. Over the next six months, King Salman persuaded and co-opted many Al Saud family members to support his succession plans.  Gone, with the stroke of a pen, was the balance of military power that had ensured consensus government in Saudi Arabia. Gone, too, was the last serious threat to the ascension of Mohammed bin Salman. After November 4, 2017, only King Salman or MBS had direct control over any of the kingdom’s security forces.

Having been in government all his life, Salman was well aware of Saudi Arabia’s structural economic problems and administrative inefficiencies. He had watched Qatar and the United Arab Emirates develop more rapidly than Saudi Arabia. He saw talented, educated young Saudis moving to Dubai, New York, and London. Above all, he recognized that the long-running partnership of brothers managing the kingdom could not last much longer. Preserving the dynasty would require a powerful and determined king who could both engineer the transition to third-generation leadership and diversify the country’s economy. Intending to rule as a reforming autocrat, Salman was looking for ideas—and his younger son, Mohammed, seemed to have some. Mohammed bin Salman was the eldest of King Salman’s sons by his third wife. He had four children, including an eldest son named Salman. His own elder half-brothers had been prominent for many years and appeared more qualified than MBS. One was the Arab world’s first astronaut, who flew in the Space Shuttle Discovery; another was a respected deputy minister

The rise of Mohammed bin Salman was as remarkable as it was unexpected. In 2010 he was the unknown younger son of the governor of Riyadh; by 2019 he was arguably the single most prominent leader in the Arab world. In 2010 he had held no official position, spending his time trading stocks, developing real estate, and buying expensive cars—most notably, a multi-million-dollar fire-engine-red Bugatti.  Like his father, Mohammed bin Salman received a local education. He graduated from King Saud University’s law school where, unlike many other princes, he actually attended lectures and did the work. Again, like his father, MBS was a student of Arab and Islamic history who looked to successful historical figures in designing his own strategies.

He was personally pious but did not want a government dominated by obscurantist religious scholars. MBS believed that recent Saudi kings had ceded too much authority to the ulama, technocrats, and tribes. He intended to reassert centralized control. He also intended to maintain Saudi predominance in the Arabian Peninsula.

MBS saw himself as the anointed leader of Saudi Arabia’s youth, the 50% of the population younger than 25 years old. He understood that King Abdullah had sent thousands of young Saudis to study in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Many had been accompanied by wives, children, or siblings. Thus, tens of thousands of young Saudis had learned to speak English while experiencing religious tolerance in open societies. They created a strong, natural constituency for the change he sought to lead. Mohammed bin Salman intended to speak to young Saudis with a voice that was modern and pious, but not democratic.

Mohammed bin Salman embodied a striking combination of both great strengths and real weaknesses.

He believes that years of avoidable indolence, entitlement, and corruption created many of Saudi Arabia’s current problems—a situation that he is now determined to tackle. Within Saudi Arabia, the economic and social reforms that he has implemented are widely seen as bold, even courageous.

King Salman appears to have engineered a peaceful handover of power from the sons of King Abdulaziz to his grandsons. Third-generation princes now serve not only as crown prince but in nearly all provincial governor, deputy governor, and royal cabinet positions. Like the young team of brothers that King Faisal assembled in the 1960s, the grandsons of King Abdulaziz installed by King Salman and MBS expect to govern Saudi Arabia into the foreseeable future.

However, in making this shift, King Salman has torn up most of the policies that had long underpinned Saudi stability. He has ended the careers of many long-prominent or long-hopeful royal players. He has ended the collective rule of half-brothers that had characterized the Third Saudi State since the reign of King Faisal. He has diminished respect for age within the royal family and dispensed with the requirement for experience in holding senior government positions. He has dismantled the military balance of power among princes that had confirmed consensus rule. Finally, he has used physical force against some members of the royal family and allowed their disputes to become public.

So Saudi Arabia now suffers from what investors call “key man risk.” Too much is riding on one person. Should Mohammed bin Salman leave the scene for whatever reason, all bets would be off with regard to Saudi stability. There is no obvious replacement.

No deputy crown prince has been named, but many princes would like the job and believe that they are well qualified to do it. Dozens of would-be contenders and factions could emerge among King Abdulaziz’s hundreds of grandsons. This is precisely what King Salman strove to avoid by orchestrating the rise of MBS in the first place, but it is unclear whether the ageing king would have the physical and mental resilience to repeat that effort.

In a volatile region, the Al Saud have kept their realm surprisingly stable for nearly 90 years. They have benefited from massive oil revenues, Wahhabi doctrines that make political obedience a religious duty, and their own determined will to power. Their rule, while authoritarian, has never been based solely on fear.

Now, rapid social and economic reform take precedence over consultation and consensus building. There is more change, but less stability. Some stakeholders now feel threatened or ignored. The influence and cohesion of the stakeholder elites who long supported the regime has declined. Dissent is now repressed more forcefully, and fear of the government has become more prevalent.

Saudi Arabia is a large country without a unifying geography or homogeneous population. King Abdulaziz wove its political fabric together from two dozen tribes and a few hundred prominent urban families. When he combined Arabia’s geographic regions—the Nejd, the Hejaz, Asir, Al Hasa, and Al Jawf—he also unified tribes with different histories, customs, and traditions of hereditary leaderships. From pre-Islamic times until well into the twentieth century, these tribes were the fundamental social units of the Arabian Peninsula. Before the Al Saud, tribes fought each other for water and pasture. Even today a Shammar tribesman differs significantly from a Shahrani, and tribal quarrels can lead to fatalities as they did at the 2018 camel beauty contest, an annual month long festival held outside of Riyadh involving thousands of camels.

During the al-Qaeda terrorism campaign of 2003–2007, with law and order breaking down and police officers being killed on an almost weekly basis, tribal loyalties began to re-emerge.

Single-tribe camel beauty contests rekindled tribal identities to the point at which the Saudi government banned them and instituted state-sponsored, multi-tribe events judged not by a tribal sheikh but by an Al Saud prince.

Shammar tribesmen began to identify themselves by putting pictures of F-15 aircraft on their cars, and other tribes adopted similar logos until the traffic police stopped the practice.  Tribalism emerged again during the municipal elections of 2005, 2011, and 2015—making clear that the religious establishment and the tribes were by far the most organized political forces in Saudi Arabia and the ones most likely to sway elections. Conservative religious candidates polled best in urban areas, while tribal candidates won in rural communities. Electoral procedures sought to bar the establishment of political parties, but religious voters circulated informal lists of approved candidates. Tribesman needed no lists, they just looked at the candidate’s last name.

Tribes mobilize their members through shared ancestry and economic interests rather than religion or political ideology. Blood ties create an indissoluble moral bond so that members share mutual honor and a collective reputation.  For the Bedu of early twentieth-century Arabia, the tribe was everything: his job, his social club, and his life insurance policy. From the tribe he received economic welfare; social prestige; and, above all, physical protection. Group cohesion, not individual freedom or personal identity were what mattered, since, under the harsh conditions of Arabia, an individual could not survive long without the group.

If it rains, winter provides the best grazing. This is when the Bedu disperse into small family groups, taking their herds deep into the desert. In spring the grass begins to wither, and by summer it is dead. Then the Bedu must congregate at deep, permanent wells where their camels will live off the fat that they have stored in their humps during the winter.

If you are a tax collector or other government official, summer is when you know where to find the Bedu.  Before World War I, the economic life of the Bedu depended on the camel – that remarkable combination of a cow, sheep, horse, and dog that provides milk, meat, wool, transportation, and companionship. The camel’s ability to survive for long periods without drinking is primarily due not to an ability to store water but to a highly efficient cooling system that allows it to withstand high temperatures with a minimum of fluid loss. In the hot, dry Arabian summer, a camel needs to drink every four days. By comparison, in 115 degree F heat a horse cannot survive without water for more than twenty-four hours.

In spring or autumn, a camel must drink roughly every 10 days—while in winter, if the grass is good, it will not need to drink at all. Camels can eat desert shrubs that sheep and goats will not touch, and drink alkaline water that is fatal to sheep.  Camels can use brackish water, which is unpotable for humans, and turn it into very drinkable milk. A migrating herd can cover 40 miles a day. Before motorized vehicles, camels were the primary source of transportation in the Middle East and breeding them was one of the Saudi Bedu’s principal occupations. The Bedu sold or traded camels, camel wool, cheese, and butter for the dates, barley, salt, coffee, cloth, and arms that they could not produce themselves

The second major source of Bedu income was raiding. This was an ancient and accepted means of acquiring livestock, arms, slaves, and chattel. Raiding was voluntary, but avoiding it was deemed cowardly. Successful raiders were celebrated and most Bedu married only after a few successful raids. By tradition, tribal leaders received one fifth of the loot. Speed, mobility, and surprise were the Bedu’s weapons. Like a tenth-century Viking longship appearing off the Northumbrian coast, they could travel long distances, appear unexpectedly in overwhelming numbers, strike hard, and quickly disappear before effective resistance could be mobilized.

Before motor transport and automatic weapons, camel-mounted tribesmen had no military rivals in the desert except other Bedu. They were at the top of the Arabian food chain. Semi-nomadic shepherds riding donkeys, travelers, pilgrims, and settled farmers were at their mercy. Raiding (ghazzuw) differed from war (harb), which was fought over water rights or pastureland. Like the North American Sioux or Cheyenne, the Bedu were usually after horses—or, in their case, camels—not scalps. Until the rise of the fanatical Ikhwan, there was an etiquette to raiding: women and children were seldom harmed, nor were men who did not resist. Even in the most heated battles, women were not dishonored and whatever happened to their menfolk they were entitled to a camel for milk and transport to reach their relatives.

The third pillar of the Bedu economy was khuwa. This was essentially tribute or protection money paid to strong tribes for security by weak tribes, travelers, and settled communities. Once you paid khuwa, you had a sponsor in the tribe who was obliged to protect you. Khuwa was generally paid collectively rather than by individuals—for example, the Rushaid tribe paid the Mutair, and the Awazim paid the Ajman.6 The Ottoman authorities paid numerous Hejazi tribes for the safe passage of pilgrim caravans to Mecca, but strong tribes paid no tribute or taxes to anyone and viewed this as a sign of their importance and independence.

Tribes provided, and still provide, social status — 100 years ago, there was a caste system in Arabia. The camel-breeding tribes looked down on the shepherd tribes, who looked down on settled farmers, who looked down on craftsmen, who looked down on slaves. Even today, a Saudi man’s social standing depends largely on his tribe or family and his occupation. Within the past decade, Saudi courts have annulled marriages made between women of “noble tribes” and men found to be of lesser status.

Wahhabi ulama have been unable to eliminate tribal prejudices that remain deeply rooted in Saudi society. The collective reputation of a tribe or family is important to the status of each individual member and is closely associated with the honor of the tribe’s women. Ird, as female honor is known, has a large sexual component. In the view of conservative Saudis, this honor can be lost not just by promiscuous sexual activity but also by flirting, mixing with men, or just going to a shopping mall unveiled. A woman must avoid not only evil but even the appearance of anything that could be construed as compromising the reputation of her tribe or family.  A woman’s father and brothers can be more upset about an adulterous affair than her husband because it is their family honor, not the husband’s, that she has tarnished. This essentially tribal value has had much to do with Saudi opposition to gender mixing.

Finally, the single most important function of the tribe was physical security. In the empty desert where there was no central government, much less a policeman to call, your safety depended on membership in a group. The understanding that your relatives would pursue those who had harmed you for the next several generations was once all that protected you and your family from violence. Westerners can identify with many Bedu values such as courage and generosity, but their glorification of vengeance often strikes Western observers as excessively harsh. Yet pursuing revenge was not an option, it was an obligation—and those who failed to seek it lost respect because they endangered the security of their entire tribe.

Membership in the tribe is transferred by the father. A tribal man can marry the girl he met in California and their children will still be part of the tribe; if his sister did the same, her children would lose their tribal status. More importantly, she could damage the chances of marriage of her sisters and even female cousins as some tribal men would not want a non-tribal brother-in-law. If a woman marries outside the tribe, the tribe will be diluted and its ability to provide economic welfare, social status, and physical security reduced. As a result, daughters of tribal families seldom marry non-tribal men.

There are roughly 25 major tribes in Saudi Arabia. Among the most important are the ‘Anizah, Dawasir, Ghamid, Harb, Mutair, Qahtan, Sbaie, Shahran, Shammar, and Utaibah.  Most tribes have, or at least had, their own geographic region, distinctive attire, songs, poetry, camel brand, customs, dialect, and hereditary leaders.

What would be called nepotism in the West is normal behavior for a tribesman in Arabia. If you belong to a tribe, you help your fellow tribesman and expect him to help you. When you get married, your fellow tribesmen will contribute funds to set up your household. In the workplace, some may disregard a supervisor who comes from a lowly tribe or listen to the son of their sheikh even though he is not the boss. Your actions will have consequences. If you do not hire the applicant from your tribe, perhaps no one will show up at your daughter’s wedding or your father’s funeral. The Arabian tribesman views the Western citizen, with his aggressive emphasis on personal freedom, as selfish to the point of being irresponsible. For him it is the communal group, not the individual, that counts.

A tribal sheikh makes important decisions only after consulting the leading men of his tribe. He has limited coercive power and leads not by fiat but by building a consensus. He represents his section to other parts of the tribe or, if he is the paramount sheikh, to other tribes. A sheikh thus rules by personal influence and persuasion, maintaining his leadership role by successfully resolving internal conflicts and effectively defending the tribe’s interests in the outside world.

A sheikh must entertain important guests with great hospitality that reflects well both on himself and the entire tribe. As “a father to his people,” he knows their problems and renders judgments in their personal disputes. As “a river to his people,” he sends food and clothes to the poor, runs an open house for coffee drinking, and frequently hosts tribesmen for meals. There are clear similarities between the behavior of a traditional Arabian sheikh, the behavior that Saudis expect from their national leaders, and, until recently, the actual behavior of senior members of the Al Saud family. One thing that a tribal sheikh never did was impose a VAT tax on his kinsmen.

Tribes have their own customary law, known as urf, which predates Islamic sharia law and resembles the notion of “convention” in Anglo-Saxon Common Law. One significant difference between urf and sharia concerns vengeance. Tribal law accepts the notion of collective revenge while Islamic law holds that a crime is the personal responsibility only of the criminal, not his entire family. Enforcing sharia law has been a central element of the Al Saud’s nation-building project, which has greatly expanded the organized sharia court system and the role of professional judges. Yet even today, tribes often prefer to settle disputes among themselves rather than involve the government.

The Saudi state and Wahhabi mission have both been profoundly anti-tribal and anti-Bedu enterprises.

King Abdulaziz was determined to eliminate the political independence of the peninsula’s tribes, and while uniting Saudi Arabia’s urban centers he systematically divided its tribes. Abdulaziz imposed the zakat alms tax on all tribes to make it clear that they were no longer sovereign or independent. He suppressed raiding and abolished khuwa, which continued in Syria until 1958. In 1953, Saudi land reform legislation effectively ended exclusive tribal use of any grazing areas.

King Abdulaziz was not affiliated with any large tribe. Instead, he assembled a multi-tribe coalition and promoted a state based on unifying Islamic beliefs rather than tribal allegiance. His missionaries, like Saudi schoolbooks today, constantly emphasized the Quran’s rejection of socially divisive tribal identities. This explicit avoidance of promoting one dominant tribe distinguishes modern Saudi Arabia from many postcolonial African and Middle Eastern states in which tribal or sectarian affiliations still dominate politics.  Unlike the Al Saud’s religiously based national ethos, the Sanusi movement promoted the tribal identities that contribute to Libya’s current chaos.

King Abdulaziz avoided not only a state dominated by one powerful tribe but also a loose confederation of many tribes, such as has often existed in Yemen or Afghanistan. He wanted a unified state, firmly controlled by the Al Saud family.

Through his multiple tribal marriages, that family eventually became a “super-tribe,” the one national institution to which many tribes belonged and to which all could eventually express loyalty without a complete loss of their own status. Thus, although King Abdulaziz broke the independence of the Arabian tribes, his sons have consciously made tribal structures a central feature of Saudi Arabia’s economic, political, and security architecture.

The traditional Bedu lived lives of extreme hardship, carrying all that they owned on their camels and praying for rain. Theirs was a world of poverty, illiteracy, and insecurity. They were often sick, ill-fed, and ill-clothed. There is nothing romantic about hunger, thirst, or sitting in a tent during the Arabian summer. As T. E. Lawrence wrote, “Bedu ways were harsh even for those born to them. For the stranger they were a death in life”. While you may still see traces of this life in Syria or the Sinai, in Saudi Arabia it is gone.

Under the Al Saud, life for the ordinary tribesman has greatly improved. There is no more killing for water or pasture. Government wells now provide water for all tribes, and government subsidies make imported barley affordable for every camelman. Mercedes trucks bring water and carry women and children to new grazing grounds. Hired Sudanese herd the camels, which are nowadays fitted with GPS locators and are often more a hobby than a livelihood. Bedu tents have generators for large-screen TVs. You can even see Bedu children riding their camels wearing a bicycle safety helmet. Things change, even on the lowest rungs of society, when oil revenues are bountiful.

It is the oil-funded Saudi state that provides housing, education, healthcare, security and jobs—not the tribe, and not some extra-governmental organization such as Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood. Still, tribal sensitivities have been carefully respected in the development process. If you examine the enrollment in Saudi elementary schools, you will find that nearly a third of them have less than 100 students. This is a highly inefficient concession to rural tribes, which each wants its own separate school. Unlike in pre-Islamic Republic Iran, where the Shah’s White Revolution forcibly consolidated villages in order to provide better public services, in Saudi Arabia tribal preferences took precedence over development efficiency. There is no National Union of Tribal Sheikhs, which collectively lobbies for tribal interests. Instead, there are roughly 3,000 officially recognized tribal chiefs who have specific political and economic responsibilities for which they are paid both directly and indirectly. Especially in rural areas, these sheikhs provide a valuable interface between the bureaucracy and the people.22 The northern province of Al Jawf provides a good example of the role played by tribal sheikhs in the political and economic system of rural Saudi Arabia. Although some regions have only one tribe, there are three major tribes in Al Jawf: the Shammar, Ruala, and Shararat.

Each sheikh tries to ensure that his tribe gets more than its fair share of roads, schools, clinics, and government jobs. Each sheikh knows where to find wanted criminals from his tribe, as well as which families are most needy. He distributes wheat, rice, dates, and cash. He needs to know who the divorced women are, because in Saudi Arabia the social security system covers divorced women as well as widows. Some of these women would be embarrassed to collect their stipend from a government bureaucrat, but they will accept it from their sheikh. A good sheikh is expected to be generous and spend heavily from his own purse. For this reason, some of those eligible actually do not want the job.

When the “customary ownership” laws underlying collective ownership of tribal lands ended in 1968, the tribal nobility often ended up among the largest private landowners—again, reinforcing their local status, interest in stability, and support for the Al Saud. Tribal leaders consequently remain loyal to a system that grants them prestige and access to political power, as well as both direct and indirect funding.

Meanwhile, the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG) has become the single most important economic institution in rural Saudi Arabia. This combination makes SANG the most dependable branch of the Saudi military.

The Ministry of the Interior also has a specifically tribal security force, known as the Mujahideen. The Mujahideen, who know their local territories intimately, constitute a civilian police force that patrols the thousands of miles of oil and water pipelines that wind though the Saudi desert. These jobs are valued for both income and prestige and are still passed down from father to son.

Rural, tribal people are the Saudi stakeholder group least affected by the dramatic social and economic reforms of Vision 2030. What the tribes want most from their government, in order of importance, are security, respect, and financial benefits—and, by and large, they are still receiving all three.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been very careful to show respect for the tribes, their sheikhs, and tribal culture. This is not what he talks about with The New York Times or CNN, but it is a standard part of his stump speech in Saudi Arabia.

The kingdom’s new Entertainment Commission, which is changing Saudi social life, sponsors falcon races as well as rock concerts—and the rock concerts are not being held in conservative, rural areas, at least not yet.

In 1950, roughly half the Saudi population lived in tents with no permanent mailing address while only 5% lived in urban centers. Today, 85% of Saudis live in towns or cities The nuclear family is becoming more important than the extended family, and personal choice more relevant than tribal unity. Education is becoming as significant as tribal status in selecting a marriage partner.

As the economy develops and society becomes more open, tribal solidarity is gradually eroding, and with it the ability of the sheikhs to deliver the support of their followers to the Al Saud. A very clear message was sent to the kingdom’s religious establishment that you were either with the crown prince and his agenda or you supported the Muslim Brotherhood, in which case you were a terrorist.

To appreciate why any of this matters to Saudi stability, it helps to understand that in Saudi Arabia public administration is a religious act. There is no separation between church and state. Government agencies administer religious activities, and most clerics are civil servants working in government offices or state-funded mosques. By law, shops and restaurants close several times a day for prayer. Judges are religious scholars who uphold canon law. The Quran is the Saudi constitution and enforcing sharia law is an important government function. The protection and promotion of Islam is a core value that provides part of the Saudi government’s legitimacy, much as the promotion of democracy and human rights does in the West.

I have followed the Western practice of calling them Wahhabis. Whatever you call them, they are evangelists. They practice what is known as the Dawah, meaning the Mission or Calling. In the Saudi Basic Law of Governance, “carrying out the duty to spread Islam,” as well as the duties of the religious police—“propagating virtue and preventing vice”—are both explicitly spelled out. The Wahhabis are on a mission: they have a gospel to preach, souls to save, heathen to convert, and erring Muslims to reform. They are both ideologically and politically motivated.

Ibn Taymiyyah’s “big idea” was that not everyone who claims to be a Muslim may be. He went on to argue that jihad was obligatory against all those who did not behave as true Muslims. Much as Ibn Taymiyyah deployed this doctrine rallying resistance to the Mongols, the Wahhabis would one day use it against the Ottoman Turks. The Wahhabi movement’s foundation text, Abd al-Wahhab’s The Unity of God, is a finely argued theological attack on Muslims who associate other deities with God by, for example, calling upon saints or praying at the shrines and graves of holy men. For Abd al-Wahhab these people were polytheists, and his attitude toward them was uncompromising: their lives and property were forfeit. Any person who had accepted Islam and still practiced polytheism should be denounced as an infidel and killed. Abd al-Wahhab taught that a true Muslim must swear and abide by a religious oath of allegiance to an established Muslim ruler if he is to expect salvation on the Day of Judgment. Breaking this oath or bay’ah constituted a serious sin. This concept is enshrined in Saudi Arabia’s Basic Law of Governance which states: “The citizens shall pledge allegiance to the King and obedience in times of hardship and ease, fortune and adversity. He forcefully discouraged public demonstrations as they could lead to civil disorder. He essentially instructed true believers to submit to the will of their rulers, respect their judgment and accept their policy choices without protest

These two core Wahhabi beliefs—a willingness to declare other Muslims nonbelievers and a deep, religiously based loyalty to the existing political order—were central to the creation of the Saudi state. They have been part of the kingdom’s school curriculum for decades and promoted a popular mind-set deeply deferential to political and religious authority.

The Al Saud’s alliance with the Wahhabis has always been controversial. For some Muslims, Mohammed Abd al-Wahhab remains a great scholar and theologian. The man who ended centuries of corruption and misguided innovation by restoring the true teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. For others, he was an ignorant eccentric who joined forces with an ambitious, local politician to create a deviant sect that persecuted fellow Sunni Muslims, destroyed historic shrines, and divided Islam with relentless attacks on the Shia and Sufis.

King Abdulaziz gave them very little say in foreign or economic policy. He introduced important innovations like automobiles, aircraft, the telegraph, and telephones over their protesting heads. He maintained good relations with the infidel British, and invited non-Muslim American oilmen to develop the kingdom’s natural resources.

The ulama accepted a subordinate position because their involvement in the daily affairs of politics would have violated the ancient division of labor between the imam and his religious scholars.

The foot soldiers of the religious establishment include not only the pious but also the poor, the blind, the non-tribal, and the less academic. Admissions standards in the kingdom’s religious schools and universities are lower than in their secular counterparts, and for most people it is easier to get a degree in Islamic history than chemical engineering. Like joining the military in the West, joining the Saudi religious establishment is a way out for those lacking connections or other avenues of advancement. All of these people, from the grand mufti to the muezzin at the neighborhood mosque, form an organized, unified interest group. Because modern secularism threatens their livelihoods, social status, and political influence, they have a strong vested interest in maintaining the importance of Islam in Saudi society.

Sharia law is a principal feature of Islamic civilization that records God’s commandments and governs all aspects of life. With ordinances regulating everything from religious rituals, politics, and criminal justice to table manners, divorce, and sickroom conversation, it is the “core and kernel of Islam itself. Thus, defending sharia law is one of the religious establishment’s most effective means of maintaining its own influence. The sharia is based on the Quran, which is the revealed word of God; the Sunna, which is a collection of traditions about the life of the Prophet whose example should be followed; and the Hadith, which records his sayings and judgments. Saudi judges rely on these texts to determine God’s will. For them, attorneys, elected legislatures, codified laws, and recorded precedents are at best unnecessary and at worst a dangerous threat to their independence, influence, and status. It should come as no surprise to learn that Saudi religious scholars have firmly and consistently opposed the introduction of any written constitution other than the Quran, for this would undermine their authority as the sole interpreters of the kingdom’s basic legal document. For the same reason, they have opposed the creation of commercial, labor, or criminal legal codes, as well as the establishment of appeal courts that could question the independent interpretations of the sharia that each judge feels entitled to make.53 They prefer sharia law with its un-codified body of doctrines, opinions, rituals, and values, which they alone interpret and need not always interpret the same way.

Education is the second pillar of the ulama’s influence, and they have fought hard to maintain control of it. Traditional Wahhabi education was designed to transmit eternal truths, not to promote critical thinking. The curriculum focused on memorizing the Quran, sharia law, Arabic grammar, and enough arithmetic to calculate religious taxes. It was taught by scholars in their homes or in mosques. The role of the state in “promoting virtue and preventing vice” comes directly from the Quran. Members of the committee are charged with enforcing public morals such as those associated with prayer, fasting, gender segregation, and modest dress. As with its courts, schools, and universities, Saudi Arabia has essentially developed two police forces—one secular and one religious.

Under King Saud they had the authority to arrest, flog, and detain prisoners in their own jails. King Faisal reduced their power and independence. He limited their right to make arrests, incorporated them into the civil service, curtailed their recruitment, and ended the policy of hereditary membership. This elimination of an independent police force that did not report to the king was a major step in the political evolution of Saudi Arabia.

Kings Khalid, Fahd, and, for the most part, Abdullah, did more waiting than reforming as Saudi Arabia’s cultural norms slid increasingly out of line with the rest of the world. King Salman, on the other hand, did not wait. He recognized that times had changed, and with them the demographics, opinions, and aspirations of most Saudis.

By 2015, most Saudis were under 30 years of age, and very few thought the Earth was flat. Most thought that women should be allowed to drive. Traditional cultural values, which had provided a valuable stabilizing force during the social upheaval of oil booms, were becoming a liability for an economy that needed to improve its productivity and labor force participation rates. Mohammed bin Salman was very clear about the need for change.  He stated that “the post 1979 era” was over, adding, “We do not want to end up like North Korea.” He spoke about restoring the true, more tolerant and more open Islam: the “Islam of love not fear.”

Any future opposition movement to the government—regardless of whether its complaints are political, social, or economic—will probably mobilize support with calls for the restoration of religious orthodoxy, not demands for Jeffersonian democracy. The most highly organized opposition to the Saudi monarchy today comes from the Muslim Brotherhood. This is an organization that some regard as a terrorist operation and others see as a pro-democracy opposition movement. It has, in fact, at various times and in different places, been both.  The Muslim Brotherhood, which is outlawed in Saudi Arabia, is potentially a more destabilizing force than the traditional Wahhabi religious scholars.

Unlike most postcolonial governments in the Arab world, the Al Saud were not socialists or revolutionaries. They never sought to destroy an existing class of landowners and capitalists. On the contrary, they supported the merchant class, relied on them for funding, used their managerial skills, and eventually went into business themselves. Nevertheless, in November 2017, several dozen prominent merchants found themselves detained in Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton Hotel on charges of corruption. Others found their bank accounts frozen or their travel restricted. Some are still detained or wearing GPS tracking devices. Some have lost control of their businesses. Many now regard the ongoing economic reforms initiated by the crown prince as part of Vision 2030 to be a direct threat to their business models. Some have begun to question their place in the Al Saud’s coalition. How did this come about and how much does it matter for Saudi stability?

Along with government employment and state-funded foreign education, government support for the private sector economy has been the greatest source of social mobility in Saudi Arabia over the past 40 years. It has provided opportunities that allowed countless Saudis to move up the economic ladder. Becoming an Al Saud prince, a tribal chief, or a senior religious figure is not something to which the average Saudi can realistically aspire. Access to these elite positions is still largely hereditary.

Then there was agriculture. During the 1980s and 1990s, farming became a recognized method of supporting rural populations and rewarding loyal government service. the early 1980s, government grain silos were paying local farmers ten times the world wheat price. In the first years of the program, it became profitable to buy wheat in Rotterdam, ship it to Yemen, smuggle it across the border, and deliver it to the unsuspecting Saudi grain silos. Unfortunately, by 2000 it was clear that in some regions of the country groundwater was being badly depleted.

Whether in trade, industry, construction, or agriculture, the Saudi government supported the private sector with contracts, loans, subsidies, and protective tariffs, all in a deliberate effort to rapidly transfer oil revenue to the public. As Professor Mordechai Abir noted, “[u]nlike the Shah’s Iran where only a small, self-indulgent upper middle class monopolized the country’s oil wealth, the Saudi regime prudently channeled it, however unevenly, to all Saudis. This created an economy that, although nominally based on market principles, was badly distorted, more distributive than productive, and could seldom compete globally in anything other than hydrocarbon-based products.

When the first oil boom arrived in 1974, Jeddah was the unquestioned commercial capital of Saudi Arabia. In 2020, Riyadh, with over seven million people, is the most populous city in the Arabian Peninsula.  Today, places like Ha’il and Unayzah are provincial market towns, peripheral to the national economy. The last camel caravan left Unayzah in 1945. Local merchants no longer import or export directly. Nearly everything available in their shops is manufactured abroad.

These towns benefited from joining a large, integrated, national economy but—like the tribes, clerics, and large merchant houses—the kingdom’s provincial economies became increasingly dependent on the oil-funded, centralized Saudi state.

Unlike the Al Rasheed of Ha’il, the Al Saud had not traditionally engaged in commerce. Abdulaziz sought to promote the merchants’ prosperity because he relied on them for taxes, customs duties, and loans. He did not compete with them and instructed his sons to stay out of business. There are now thousands of Al Saud family members, both men and women, engaged in commerce. Some are silent partners in private firms in which they have contributed influence and government connections more than capital or effort. Some have certainly used their political status to advance their business interests. Others have diligently built their own businesses, though they too have benefited from government contracts, low-cost loans, and subsidies. What the Saudi business community has wanted most is political stability—followed by government-funded economic growth, abundant subsidies, limited regulation, and no taxes. It has generally supported trade liberalization, intellectual property rights protection, and privatizations, while resisting pressure to employ Saudi nationals or provide health insurance to foreign workers.

What the Saudi government has sought most urgently from the business community has been well-paid jobs for Saudi nationals. Foreign workers fill 90% of non-oil, private-sector jobs in Saudi Arabia. Saudi employers like it that way because expatriates are usually less expensive, better qualified, and more easily dismissed than Saudis.

The public sector can no longer absorb the majority of Saudi jobseekers. Although this problem has been recognized for many years, the collapse of oil prices in 2014 made finding a solution urgent.  Nearly two million expatriates left the kingdom between 2017 and 2020—taking with them demand for everything from apartments to groceries. As skilled foreign workers departed, labor productivity declined and labor costs rose; by the end of 2017 the kingdom was in recession. All of these difficulties fell most heavily on the owners of small and medium-sized businesses, who had come to rely heavily on cheap expatriate labor and who lacked the economies of scale or access to capital needed to compensate for their loss. Thousands of these businesses failed.

In November 2017, the anti-corruption campaign saw major business figures, both royal and non-royal, detained for two months and forced to repay large sums of money. Members of long-prominent merchant families, who had once considered themselves nearly as untouchable as princes, were jailed and stripped of their property holdings. It is impossible to know how much private money left Saudi Arabia after the Ritz Carlton round-up because capital flow data includes government as well as private funds. Some private money certainly left and, although there are still no formal capital controls in Saudi Arabia, capital flight reached a point at which informal restrictions had to be implemented. Large transfers abroad are now likely to require an explanation about where you got the money in the first place.

The Saudi government needs private-sector investment in order to solve its most pressing problems—job creation, affordable housing, power generation, and economic diversification—but in 2020, members of the country’s business community may no longer be interested in helping. They are unlikely to take their protests to the streets, but they may well take their cash to Geneva—leaving Saudi Arabia poorer and less stable.

The Al Saud’s relationship with a new technocratic elite based on merit and a secular higher education that was often acquired abroad. The kingdom’s technocrats do not have large, easily mobilized followings like the sheikhs or the ulama, nor are they characterized by their ownership of land and capital like the aiyan. They are bureaucrats in development-oriented ministries that provide healthcare, communications and transportation. They are chemical engineers at petrochemical giant, SABIC; pilots at the national airline, Saudia; petroleum engineers at Saudi Aramco; mining geologists at Ma’aden; and electrical engineers at the Saudi Electric Company. They are professors, research scientists, bankers, journalists, and newspaper editors; some serve as military officers. Many are pious, tribal, or from established merchant families. What makes them a distinct group is their technical education and expertise in various secular fields. They constitute the newest, fastest-growing and least-organized stakeholder group in Saudi Arabia.

When Abdulaziz died in 1953, schools and hospitals did not exist outside of major cities and no paved roads connected those cities. Except in the oil sector, salaried employment was rare; rural electricity was unheard of; and, outside of Jeddah, desalinated drinking water was unknown. Within 50 years, all of this had dramatically changed. By 2000, most Saudis lived in cities, drove imported cars on paved roads, read newspapers, watched television, carried mobile phones, drank desalinated water, and worked for the government. Government-provided medical care, education, and electricity were available in even the most remote village. The technocrats who administered them, along with foreign experts and expatriate labor, built the roads, railroads, power lines, pipelines, and a domestic airline service that bound together an area the size of Western Europe, excluding Scandinavia. In a parched desert, they provided wells, dams, irrigation systems, and desalination plants that assured both access to water and dependence on the state for it.

Many of these new ministries had ill-defined or overlapping responsibilities. Their bloated, inefficient staffs sometimes obstructed free enterprise. Yet at the same time, they distributed government contracts, business loans, agricultural subsidies, healthcare, education, social services, and virtually free utilities.

Princes held 60% of the seats in King Saud’s first cabinet. Since then the number of technocrats in the cabinet has risen steadily. Kings Faisal and Fahd replaced princes with non-royal technocrats as ministers of education, finance, communications, and agriculture. By 2020, princes held only 15% of cabinet posts in the security-related ministries of defense, the interior, foreign affairs, and the National Guard. The non-royal technocratic ministers now have more influence on the day-to-day management of government than tribal leaders, urban notables, or even the clergy.

Thirty-five years later, King Salman and Mohammed bin Salman are attempting to rapidly implement major social and economic reforms. To succeed, they will need a much better, coordinated bureaucracy than any of their predecessors ever enjoyed, and they are trying hard to create one. King Salman has, for instance, replaced all of the ministers and many of the deputy ministers who served under King Abdullah.

In sharp contrast to most Middle Eastern militaries, the Saudi Armed Forces have never become an independent political actor. Unlike what occurred in Turkey, the Saudi officer corps has never formed the vanguard of a new, secular, modernizing elite. It has nothing like the independent economic resources enjoyed by the Egyptian military or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps both of which hold extensive business interests in their own names. Nor is Saudi Arabia like Pakistan, where the army, when not actually running the country, has ignored the political leadership on critical security matters.

The military has always been firmly under civilian control. Unlike the Shah of Iran, who had no close relatives in government, there are hundreds of Al Saud princes serving in the military as both junior and senior officers. Although princes do not command all major military units, they are found in leadership positions in nearly every unit down to brigade level. Senior commanders are rotated every four or five years, and never remain in place long enough to develop an independent power base. They are often retired with very little advance notice.

In 2020, the Saudi media is even more firmly controlled than it was then. Although Saudi newspapers are privately owned, they are all controlled by members of the royal family or their loyal lieutenants. Some, such as Sharq al-Awsat and the Arab News, are controlled by the king’s immediate family.

Government control of the media thus operates not through direct censorship but through well-understood authority which leads to self-censorship. No criticism of the king or ruling family is allowed, and harsh attacks on the religious establishment can result in imprisonment. No criticism of Mohammed bin Salman is tolerated. Ministers may be criticized and government policies debated, but unpleasant domestic news is usually reported only if it promotes the government’s agenda.

Economic and social reform is happening in Saudi Arabia—but its direction, pace, and means of implementation are not open for debate.  Punishments have become harsher. For example, when journalist Saleh al-Shehi suggested that the Royal Diwan distributed land based on personal connections, he was sentenced to five years in prison.  His most serious offense was posting a video in which he claimed that the 2 trillion dollar valuation the Crown Prince had placed on Saudi Aramco would require including the firm’s oil reserves in the IPO. Those reserves al-Zamil argued belong to the people and were not Mohammad bin Salman’s to sell.

In 2013, King Abdullah appointed the first female Majlis members and decreed that in the future women should hold no less than 20% of Majlis seats. Again, these appointments were strongly opposed by religious conservatives and the king’s method for dealing with their concerns was classic Al Saud.

King Abdullah argued with his religious opponents in religious terms by using the story of the Prophet Mohammed’s wife, Umm Salamah. All Saudis know that during the early years of Islam, the Prophet Mohammed faced open revolt among some of his followers. It was the sound advice of his wife, Umm Salamah, that helped him to defuse the crisis. King Abdullah argued that if a woman had given such excellent advice to Mohammed, why should he be denied their counsel. Then, as always, the king compromised in a way that gave religious conservatives something without detracting from his primary objective. He agreed that the new women Majlis members would have to enter through a separate ladies’ entrance and sit in a separate ladies’ section of the council chamber.

 

Without their support he cannot succeed, but their support is not guaranteed. Like the kingdom’s religious scholars and merchants, many technocrats and bureaucrats are uncertain about the social and economic changes unleashed by Vision 2030. Saudi civil servants have been accustomed to a great deal of autonomy and independence from either royal or public oversight. Now they are being held accountable by an activist crown prince with a long list of key performance indicators and a task force of monitors. Some feel threatened; others simply resent having their routines challenged by 25-year-old foreign consultants. Many bureaucrats now worry about job security for themselves and their children.

 

It had been nearly impossible to fire government employees for poor job performance. Now, for the first time, they are facing serious performance evaluations that include potential penalties, as well as rewards for high achievers. Many bureaucrats also benefited from established patterns of corruption, overstaffing, and nepotism. Now, the anti-corruption campaign and the installation of anti-corruption watchmen in most ministries has reduced the opportunities to misuse public funds that some had considered a normal part of their income.

 

The Al Saud have ruled Central Arabia for most of the past 280 years, since well before the founding of the American Republic or the French Revolution. In 2020, monarchy remains the principal institution holding Saudi Arabia together, and the preeminent branch of its royal family is largely the creation of one man. For many years, Abdulaziz pursued an active policy of serial polygamy and was quite open about what he was trying to do in bed. He said that he created his kingdom with “a sword of steel and a sword of flesh.” He had dozens of wives during his lifetime—though, in accordance with Islamic law, never more than four at any one time. King Abdulaziz had 43 sons, only 34 of whom survived into adulthood, and even more daughters. Five of his sons remain alive, though his last daughter, Madawi, passed away in 2017. Like the Hapsburgs or Queen Victoria’s children, King Abdulaziz’s sons and grandsons continued this policy of weaving marriage alliances throughout the kingdom’s prominent tribes and families. Over time these marriages transformed the Al Saud family into a unifying super-tribe. Rival tribes and regions that would never agree to be governed by one another accept the unifying role of the Al Saud monarchy.

 

Of all the constituencies with which King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman must deal, their own family is the most diverse. There are liberal princes and conservative princes, playboys, and pious Muslims. Some have doctorates from Oxford, while others lack even a high school education; some are fantastically wealthy, while others work at middle-class jobs. Most believe that change is inevitable, but some do not. The Al Saud are in effect a hereditary political party in a one-party system with thousands of members, different wings promoting different agendas, and various individuals competing for leadership positions.

 

When all the collateral branches of the family are added together, the Al Saud number well over 100,000. Far from being a small, isolated group like the Shah of Iran’s family, they comprise at least one half of one percent of the entire Saudi population and a much larger portion of the nation’s political, social, and economic elites.

 

Above all, without primogeniture it becomes less and less obvious who should lead the firm or the kingdom. In business, only a third of family firms make the transition to a second generation; less than ten percent survive into the third generation.

 

Almost within living memory, it was as fragmented and violent as its southern neighbor, Yemen, is today. Maintaining national unity is a difficult task and, after maintaining their own privileged position and wealth, this remains the House of Saud’s foremost priority. This mission furnishes them with a practical task. Combined with the global mission of defending Islam, preserving Saudi Arabia’s national unity gives the Al Saud a deeply felt moral purpose greater than simply holding on to power. It also gives them, at least in their own minds, an unquestioned right to rule. A Saudi king’s most direct means of controlling his family is the allocation or denial of government positions and financial benefits. He may consult with family members on senior appointments, but the final decision is his alone and is usually made by Royal Order without reference to the Council of Ministers.

 

The Al Saud operate something like baseball’s farm team system, in which ambitious young princes start off with relatively junior minor league positions and, if they are talented and fortunate, advance to more senior major league posts. King Abdulaziz and his long-time finance minister, Abdullah Suleiman, made no distinction between the king’s personal wealth and the state treasury. Payments vary greatly based on lineage and age, with each generation receiving significantly less than the one before it. In each category a princess receives half of what a prince does, the difference being based on the view that women have husbands and are not the principal breadwinner of their household.

In general a grandson of King Abdulaziz receives roughly $200,000 a year and a great grandson $100,000. There are very few of Abdulaziz’s nephews still alive; their sons, however, receive roughly $50,000 a year. The descendants of King Abdulaziz’s cousins receive less. Distant branches of the family, such as the Farhan or Thunayyan, may receive nothing at all. Although these payments are not particularly large, they are coveted status symbols that have done a great deal to promote elite cohesion, and thus stability, in Saudi Arabia.

 

Land grants are far more important to many princes than their modest monthly stipend. Some princes were awarded huge tracts, which they in turn often sold to property developers. Even more profitable was to sell land that the government gave you for free back to the government for a greatly inflated price. This was sometimes repeated several times with the same piece of property, and such shenanigans were by no means uncommon before King Salman came to power. All large government construction contracts in Saudi Arabia are, on some level, royal favors—and princes, or firms associated with them, have received many of them. Allocating important jobs, land grants, and government contracts have long represented the king’s most effective levers of control over his family.

 

Although the Al Saud created their kingdom largely by force of arms, they have maintained it largely through the principles of consultation and consensus building, shura and ijma; concepts strongly enjoined in the Quran. This is no desert democracy; it is a client–patron relationship, in which the client has little to say about the final outcome. Nevertheless, the concepts of consultation and consensus building have been as fundamental to Saudi politics as campaigns and elections are to Western democracies.

 

The Al Saud have developed a range of structures to facilitate consultation. The king meets formally with the Cabinet every Monday, the religious scholars every Tuesday, and royal family members on Friday. As noted earlier, the king’s executive office complex, or Royal Diwan, has a specific department for tribal matters; the business community is heard through the Chambers of Commerce; and the middle-class technocrats through the Majlis al-Shura. Current events are always informally discussed and junior princes feed what they learn of the public mood to more senior princes. In rural areas, it is usually the tribal sheikh who gathers public sentiment and relays it to the local Al Saud governor. It has made many junior princes with no official position feel that they are part of the governing system.

 

Charitable distributions are designed to instill in the public a sense of gratitude and obligation towards the royal family. Making such paternalistic gestures is an important part of a prince’s job, and his monthly stipend will depend in part on how much of it he is seen to be giving away.

 

King Salman knew very well that his father had been in his mid-twenties when he captured Riyadh. Age and experience were not the qualities that had led to this success. What King Abdulaziz had, and what King Salman was looking for, was fire in the belly. These were not qualities easily found among King Abdulaziz’s grandsons. Brought up in privilege, many third generation Al Saud princes had spent more time on French beaches or in American universities than in the Saudi desert. As a result, King Salman very deliberately replaced age and experience as the criteria for the throne with ambition, determination, and a capacity for hard work.

 

King Salman systematically dismantled the institutional power bases that other senior princes had enjoyed for decades as ministers of defense, the interior, the National Guard, municipal affairs, and foreign affairs. All of these positions had provided the minister-prince with opportunities for patronage and personal financial gain; this arrangement had been part of the royal family’s internal revenue-sharing system. Now these positions have been handed over to technocrats or politically impotent junior princes, and new anti-corruption watchdogs have been installed to monitor spending. The new defense, interior and National Guard ministers are all King Salman’s men, not his brothers or rivals.

 

King Salman further recognized that the monarchy could not survive with thousands of princes all demanding deference. The Saudi people will accept paying homage to, or being bumped off airline flights by, a few dozen senior royals. They will not tolerate indefinitely hundreds of great-great-grandsons of King Abdulaziz illuminating their palaces and gardens for free while their own electricity bills tripled. Gaining public support for painful economic reforms required fighting high-level corruption and downsizing the royal family.

 

Royal bank accounts have been frozen and royal land grants revoked. Most princes must now go through customs at the airport, some have had their right to travel limited, and others have left the country altogether. With royal electricity and phone bills no longer being paid by the Royal Diwan, princes have begun turning off their garden lights or at least putting them on timers. Most princes no longer receive cost-plus contracts, free airline tickets, or large blocks of work visas that they can profitably resell.  Cabinet ministers no longer feel obliged to come to their ministry door to greet any random prince who turns up without an appointment. Every prince no longer has easy access to the king and royal middlemen are being cut out of government contracts.

 

Another factor in Al Saud cohesiveness has been the fact that aged kings never stayed in power too long. That incentive to cooperate is no longer present as Mohammed bin Salman could easily be king for the next 50 years. These are potentially destabilizing developments for Saudi Arabia. Neither stakeholder elites nor their constituents will indefinitely support an incompetent monarch.

 

Just what competent government means in Saudi Arabia is the subject of the current part of this volume. It includes providing domestic and international security, promoting economic development, and encouraging social change at a pace that the majority of the population finds acceptable.

 

Older Saudis remember from their own experience or their parents’ stories just how violent and unstable Arabia used to be. Every town had a wall and a watchtower; gates were closed at night. Watchtowers were manned in case Bedu appeared from the desert to steal crops and livestock; if you resisted them, you might well be killed. There were no policemen. Travelers paid for protection. Tribes fought for water and pastures. Banditry was common, even for pilgrims on the Hajj.

 

When the Saudi people consider what the Al Saud brought them and what they continue to deliver today, internal security is at the top of the list—particularly, when they reflect upon current conditions in many neighboring countries. Al-Qaeda intended to overthrow the House of Saud. Its well-planned campaign began in Riyadh with simultaneous attacks on three residential compounds the night before the American Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was due to arrive, and 36x people died in those attacks and more than 100 were badly injured. During the next four years, dozens of people died and hundreds were injured in a seemingly endless series of attacks and shoot-outs that cost the lives of many Saudi police officers. The Ministry of the Interior headquarters in Riyadh and Aramco’s vital gas processing facility at Abqaiq were attacked. The beginning of the end for AQAP came in April 2005, when the government’s massive public awareness campaign and policy of paying large rewards for information paid off. Young men with long beards and short robes who came and went at odd hours from newly rented apartments were no longer being ignored; now they were reported to the police.

 

The organization never recovered from this blow; leaderless, finding new recruits scarce, and clearly lacking broad public support, the remnants of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula began fleeing to Yemen. Saudi Arabia thus contained and then largely eliminated an organization that had proven extremely resilient in other parts of the world. The Saudi counterterrorism program certainly sought to kill or capture active terrorists, but it placed much more emphasis on preventing young men from joining al-Qaeda in the first place or convincing them to quit if they had already signed up. It offered the repentant a well-defined path back into society.

 

In its effort to counter the secular, anti-monarchical Arab Nationalism preached by Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Saudi government had since the 1960s encouraged the idea of Pan-Islamic Solidarity. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 dramatically amplified this Pan-Islamic sentiment in the kingdom and across the Muslim world. With the full support of the United States, the Saudi government and the kingdom’s religious leadership had mobilized young men and private funding to fight the godless Soviets in Afghanistan. When Soviet forces withdrew in 1989, most of these Saudi mujahideen returned home to resume normal lives; some even joined the kingdom’s police force. These original mujahideen were all middle-aged men by 2003.

 

Although the original Saudi mujahideen did not return home to start a terror campaign against their own government, a few, like Abdulaziz al-Muqrin, did become hardened “lifestyle jihadists” who went on to fight in, among other places, Bosnia and Chechnya. It was these conflicts—and, later, the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq—that kept a new generation of young Saudis coming to al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan long after the Saudi government had stopped encouraging such behavior and stripped Osama bin Laden of his Saudi citizenship and bank accounts.

 

Whatever their motivation, the Saudi Ministry of the Interior made slow but steady progress in arresting or killing those who had made the transition from moral outrage to outright violence. The resources of the Saudi state greatly exceed those of al-Qaeda. The Ministry of the Interior’s overall budget rose sharply, reaching $8.5 billion in 2005 and $12 billion in 2007—with most of the increase going to fighting terrorism. A great deal of new equipment was purchased, five new prisons were built, and more than 800 retired prison guards returned to duty. Highly sophisticated electronic and physical surveillance systems were installed across the kingdom. Cooperation with Western intelligence services expanded.

 

Eventually, more than 150 terrorists were killed by the police and several thousand suspects arrested. However, the Saudi campaign against al-Qaeda was noticeably less vicious and more targeted than the brutal, widespread repression of the Islamists in Syria, Algeria, and Egypt. This was another clear policy choice: Prince Mohammed bin Naif—who, as deputy minister of the interior, directed government counterterrorism efforts—emphasized again and again that although it was important to eliminate existing terrorists, it was much more important not to create new ones with heavy-handed police tactics.

 

Islam requires Muslims to give 2.5 percent of their liquid net worth to charity each year. This zakat tax constitutes one of the five “pillars of Islam,” and Saudis, who pay no income tax, have long been mindful of this charitable dictum. Many Saudis contributed to the kingdom’s 200 plus charities—which in 2001 were, indeed, largely unregulated. The Benevolence International Foundation, the entire operation was nothing but a front for al-Qaeda. What appears more likely is that lax administration, rather than any official plan, allowed some branches of essentially reputable charities to be misused. Thousands of unsupervised collection boxes that had hung in mosques and supermarkets for years were removed; all contributions were subsequently to be made only to the specific bank accounts of registered charities.

 

Since 2015, King Salman has very deliberately and effectively further centralized control of charities. He founded the King Salman Humanitarian and Aid Center, which, by mid-2017, had become the only Saudi charity sending funds abroad.  These actions reduced the resources available to al-Qaeda. The battle against terrorism extended into Saudi schools, where a great deal of the day was taken up with religious studies. In 2003, the Saudi government began a full-scale review of school textbooks. These books clearly and repeatedly proclaimed the superiority of Islam over all other religious, social, or political systems. The books explicitly promoted intolerance more than violence, but they created an atmosphere in which violence was more easily accepted. The goal of the Ministry of Education’s fourteen-man review committee was to remove passages that “directly or indirectly promote enmity, hostility and hatred.

 

Deputy Minister of the Interior Mohammed bin Naif realized that keeping thousands of young men in prison indefinitely would eventually cause a public backlash. Not all prisoners were eligible for the program and not all participants were eventually released. The program included sports; vocational training; psychological counseling; art therapy; and, most importantly, anger management classes.

The program sought to get beneficiaries out of the al-Qaeda cult and back into society with changed views and changed behavior. Counselors worked to defuse the humiliation rage that drove many beneficiaries and helped prepare them to deal with the stigma of having been in prison. If necessary, the families of beneficiaries were supported financially because the ministry understood that if it did not help to support an inmate’s family, al-Qaeda would shove cash under their door at night.

 

Once released, the ministry tried hard to make sure that the former prisoner had something to lose; they had noticed that not many suicide bombers had a wife, three children, a good job, and a mortgage to pay. The state helped with dowries, car loans, and mortgages as well as employment. Some prisoners were released on the recognizance of their families or tribes, who would face a humiliating loss of face, financial, and even legal consequences if they reverted to terrorism. Some released beneficiaries did rejoin al-Qaeda. Official reports cite recidivism rates of between 10 and 20%. In the Saudi leadership’s view, it did not matter if some of the rehabilitated terrorists returned to al-Qaeda. They could be recaptured and might not be given a second chance to surrender. What mattered was that the Saudi public saw how the police had trusted these young men and tried to help them, only to be repaid with lies and more criminal behavior. No one would feel sorry for them the second time they were arrested for terrorism.  For Mohammed bin Naif, losing a few dozen prisoners was less important than keeping millions of Saudi citizens on his side.

 

On the night that the Ministry of the Interior was bombed, the then Deputy Minister Mohammed bin Naif called the parents of the dead suicide bombers so that they would not first learn of their sons’ deaths on TV. He did not delegate the task to a clerk or a minor official, he telephoned the parents himself. He described the young men who had just tried to kill him as victims and apologized for not having been able to stop them before they began their bombing run. He asked for help in stopping other young men from joining al-Qaeda, and he got the help he asked for. The fathers of dead or incarcerated terrorists began appearing on TV warning parents to avoid a similar fate for their sons.

 

Soon after the first bombings, checkpoints went up all over Saudi Arabia. They became a part of life, and in many places still are. It soon became clear that some al-Qaeda operatives were moving about dressed as heavily veiled women. The Ministry of the Interior nevertheless made a conscious decision not to start lifting women’s veils to look for terrorists. Better by far to let them pass than antagonize hundreds of conservative husbands or innocent women.

 

Inside Saudi Arabia, people are well aware of what the Al Saud have achieved. Internal security remains a primary reason why the Saudi people did not opt for the violent, dramatic political change that al-Qaeda offered them in 2003, and why they largely ignored the Arab Spring protests of 2011 or their 2019 aftershocks in Algeria, Lebanon, and Sudan.

 

The great irony is that in 2020, many Saudis have come to fear their own government more than al-Qaeda terrorists. Saudi Arabia was never an open society, but it was not a police state. Now the highly sophisticated technical apparatus installed to thwart al-Qaeda has been turned on peaceful citizens. Telephones and social media are closely monitored. Saudis no longer feel comfortable making even mild criticisms of their government. They switch off their cell phones or go into the garden to talk. The scope of acceptable debate has narrowed, with both conservative Muslim Brothers and liberal feminists being arrested. The anti-corruption campaign, however popular and even necessary, has cast doubt on the rule of law. Restrictions on travel and the seizing of assets have become more common. Allegations of torture have reappeared, and the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed by government agents.

 

Saudi life expectancy in 1950 was only 39 years. By 1960 the majority of Saudis still lived at no more than subsistence level, and their nutrition was poor even by developing-world standards. Safe drinking water was unavailable in many places; cholera, malaria, and bilharzia were common; and a majority of the population suffered from trachoma. Life expectancy was 75 in 2019. Cholera, malaria, and malnutrition are mostly now a memory. A system of subsidies introduced in the 1970s has kept prices low for water, electricity, gasoline, and basic foodstuffs such as bread, sugar, and rice.

 

OIL & NATURAL GAS PRODUCTION, PETROCHEMICALS

 

Saudi Aramco is different. It is not only the world’s largest and most profitable oil company but is also a well-managed, technologically advanced firm operated on a commercial basis, which produces 10–12% of the world’s oil every day. Aramco is widely recognized as more efficient, technically competent, and meritocratic than most Saudi institutions. Nearly all its senior management and 80% of its 75,000 employees are Saudi nationals; 20% of its new hires are women. Even more significantly, the Saudi oil industry was not subsequently taken over by military officers, politicians, or trade unions. The foreign management structure and American culture of Aramco was left largely in place, and Saudi Aramco maintained technical cooperation agreements with its former foreign owners until 2010.

 

All ten of Saudi Arabia’s development plans have called for economic diversification, which initially meant utilizing natural gas to produce petrochemicals. Saudi Aramco operates hundreds of oil wells that also produce gas—which until the mid-1970s was simply flared. For those flying into Dhahran at night, this flared gas produced a memorable sight of tall flames streaking across the sky in all directions. It was spectacular, but also a huge waste of energy and an environmental disaster. Collecting and distributing all this gas was neither easy nor inexpensive. Aramco’s American owners were not eager to spend the $40 billion (at today’s values) that this required. Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia’s political leadership went ahead with the Master Gas System, which captured methane to fuel the kingdom’s desalination and power plants as well as ethane feedstock for its emerging petrochemical industry. The system proved a great success. Today, while Iraq and Iran still flare most of their gas, the Saudis have been utilizing theirs productively for more than 40 years while also developing non-associated gas reserves.

 

Building a petrochemical industry was the crucial next step. In 1974, King Faisal approved his technocrats’ plan to build new industrial cities at Jubail on the Persian Gulf and Yanbu on the Red Sea. Both were to be connected to the Master Gas System.

 

All ten of Saudi Arabia’s development plans have called for economic diversification, which initially meant utilizing natural gas to produce petrochemicals. Saudi Aramco operates hundreds of oil wells that also produce gas—which until the mid-1970s was simply flared. For those flying into Dhahran at night, this flared gas produced a memorable sight of tall flames streaking across the sky in all directions. It was spectacular, but also a huge waste of energy and an environmental disaster. Collecting and distributing all this gas was neither easy nor inexpensive. Aramco’s American owners were not eager to spend the $40 billion (at today’s values) that this required.30 Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia’s political leadership went ahead with the Master Gas System, which captured methane to fuel the kingdom’s desalination and power plants as well as ethane feedstock for its emerging petrochemical industry. The system proved a great success. Today, while Iraq and Iran still flare most of their gas, the Saudis have been utilizing theirs productively for more than forty years while also developing non-associated gas reserves.

 

Building a petrochemical industry was the crucial next step. In 1974, King Faisal approved his technocrats’ plan to build new industrial cities at Jubail on the Persian Gulf and Yanbu on the Red Sea. Both were to be connected to the Master Gas System.

 

Dozens of refineries and petrochemical plants have now been built at Jubail and Yanbu. In 2018, these facilities produced 12% of Saudi Arabia’s total GDP.

 

WATER

 

Unlike many Arab oil producers, the Saudi government did not simply park its cash in US Treasury bonds or create a sovereign wealth fund that invested abroad. Until 2016, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund focused almost entirely on building domestic industries. One of the first revolved around desalinated water. In a land without a single river, water was once a very scarce resource—a commodity over which people fought. For generations in Central Arabia, the fear of water shortages was nearly as grave and persistent as the dread of Bedu raids.  A nationwide network of more than 20 desalinization plants, pipelines, pumping stations, and storage facilities that brought fresh water not only to major cities but also to most towns in the arid Nejd and mountainous Asir. As a result, the Saudi people became dependent on inexpensive water sold to them at a fraction of its true cost.

 

Perhaps the most extraordinary is that the volume of process water that Jubail’s pumping stations and canals provide is greater than the combined flows of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers at their mouths.

 

ENTITLEMENTS expected by The People

 

[ And water above ]. New and very costly government institutions provided utilities, housing, education, healthcare, and employment—all of which came to be regarded as entitlements. Like their compromise with the ulama over education, the Al Saud’s oil-funded economic bargain with the public laid the foundation for potential stability problems.

 

By 2015, Saudi Arabia’s generous, distributive economic system was beginning to unravel, and a failure to deliver material benefits was becoming the monarchy’s most immediate problem. Young Saudis were growing increasingly concerned about the very issues mentioned above: affordable housing, healthcare, education, and employment. They began to wonder if they would ever be as well-off as their parents. Tensions grew between the entitlements they had come to expect and the productivity improvements needed to maintain their standard of living.

 

IRAQ WAR

 

In the final analysis, the First Gulf War was about oil. After seizing Kuwait, Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, controlled 20% of the planet’s oil reserves. Had he moved south to Dhahran, he would have controlled 40%. If Kuwait had instead grown carrots, it is unlikely that the United States would have sent half a million men there (as many as it had deployed at the height of the Vietnam War) in order to restore an Arab monarch.

 

Despite the exodus of some 300,000 Kuwaiti “refugees” speeding south in their BMWs and calling ahead for reservations at the Riyadh Hilton, King Fahd and his brothers were not convinced that they faced a threat until Secretary Cheney and General Schwarzkopf briefed them on the situation. Deputy National Security Advisor, Robert Gates, and Ambassador Chas Freeman were the only other Americans in the room. The author was sitting outside with a group of majors and colonels, so our only detailed accounts of the meeting are to be found in General Norman Schwartzkopf’s It Doesn’t Take a Hero and Bob Woodward’s The Commanders.

 

Operation Desert Storm was a massive undertaking. In preparation for the assault, millions of gallons of fuel were stored in inflatable bladders and offshore tankers. The Hajj terminal became a B-52 base, so the war had to be over before the pilgrimage began. Jeddah’s civilian airport hosted the largest aerial-refueling operation in history. The dozens of refueling tankers were from Air National Guard units and flown by peacetime commercial airline pilots.

 

Unfortunately, the war’s aftermath also made records when retreating Iraqi forces set fire to 600 Kuwait oil wells and then deliberately created a 4-million-barrel oil spill in the Persian Gulf intended to shut down Saudi Arabia’s desalinization plants. For comparison’s sake, the Exxon Valdez spilled 250,000 barrels of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

 

WARS

 

Since the official founding of the kingdom in 1932, very few Saudis have lost their lives in foreign wars. Until 2015, modern Saudi Arabia had seldom been attacked by foreign enemies. They have a large area to defend, but only a small population with limited technical skills.

 

Nor can their achievement be attributed to the routine maintenance of long-standing, stable security relationships with trusted neighbors. On the contrary, the Saudis live in a very dangerous and volatile part of the world where their relations with neighbors have been anything but stable.

 

Iraq has gone from being the home of the Al Saud’s Hashemite rivals to a bulwark against Iran, to an invading army lobbing missiles at Riyadh. Iran, once a partner in promoting a pro-Western security structure in the Persian Gulf, has evolved into what most Saudis today consider their most significant foreign threat.

 

Strategically, the Al Saud have relied on three foreign policy tools in order to protect their interests. Cooperation with the regional superpower, which, for the past 50 years, has been the United States; the calculated use of oil production and oil revenue; and a leadership position in the Islamic world. Saudi independence was the result not of a struggle against Western powers but, in part, because of an alliance with them.

 

HISTORY

 

Abdulaziz provided order in a vast, inhospitable desert that the British government had neither the desire nor the resources to police but which bordered on important British interests in Egypt, Transjordan, and Iraq. He protected the flanks of those interests by preventing Central Arabia from becoming an unstable, dangerous place like today’s Somalia or Afghanistan, and the British government paid him for his efforts. It was American, not German, involvement that slowly began to displace British assistance to Saudi Arabia. Rather than send food to Arabia, the United States sent an agricultural mission to help the Saudis grow their own vegetables Between 1940 and 1947, the United States provided Saudi Arabia with $100 million in foreign aid. Beginning in 1942, Saudi Arabia provided Allied air forces with military access to air routes across the Arabian Peninsula, which remain important to this day.

 

Saudi oil was fundamental to the relationship long before the United States became an oil importer. Between 1944 and 1950, Saudi oil production rose from 20,000 to 550,000 barrels a day, with most of this increase going to fuel Western Europe’s postwar recovery. Inexpensive energy, much of it from Saudi oil, was as important to post-war European reconstruction and the containment of communism as the Marshall Plan package of financial aid. Saudi Arabia has often sought to compensate its allies for the costs of protecting the kingdom by purchasing weapons—particularly, from Britain and the United States.

 

MAINTAINING STABILITY

 

Saudi Arabia has a very clear interest in maintaining regional stability because like the United States, it has a lot to lose. Anything that disrupts the political and economic status quo—be it Nasser’s brand of Arab Nationalism, Bin Laden’s brand of Islam, or an unresolved Arab–Israeli conflict—is a threat to Saudi security and prosperity. Widespread Arab sympathy for the Palestinians and a belief that the United States is not an honest broker in the peace process is a domestic issue that complicates Riyadh’s relationship with its most important ally.

 

One unclassified cable prepared by the embassy was particularly persuasive. It showed that 50% of the members of Saudi Arabia’s fledgling parliament, the Majlis al-Shura, had American university degrees—as did 70% of the Council of Ministers and 100 percent of Saudi Aramco’s Board of Directors. It seemed doubtful that outside of Washington there was another country in the world in which half the parliament was American-educated. As the cable pointed out, this source of influence was not likely to continue if Washington kept turning Saudi students away.

 

Incoming President Barak Obama quickly grasped the importance of Saudi Arabia to global economic growth, counterterrorism efforts, and resolving the Arab–Israeli conflict. While he made his 2009 address to the Muslim world from Cairo, he stopped to confer with King Abdullah on his way to Egypt and visited Saudi Arabia more often than any other president. The Obama Administration authorized a dramatic increase in arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which approached $100 billion in total. In 2015, the president broke off important meetings in India to attend King Abdullah’s funeral. Yet President Obama never warmed to the Saudis, and bilateral relations remained strained over many issues.

 

Since World War II, the United States’ relationship with Saudi Arabia has often been more volatile and more strained than with other major allies. This ambivalent partnership between a conservative, theocratic monarchy and a liberal, secular republic has always been about common interests rather than shared values. It has never been popular with the public in either country.

 

Few factors affect the global economy more than energy costs and no nation exerts greater influence over oil prices than Saudi Arabia. Moreover, because of its large oil income and absolute monarchy, the kingdom can distribute large amounts of cash more quickly and quietly than most other nations. Oil has allowed a militarily weak state to maintain a global network of dependent customers and appreciative clients.

 

Saudi Arabia remains the world’s largest oil exporter and, by any estimation, one of the great reservoirs of global energy. It boasts the world’s largest onshore oilfield at Ghawar, in the Eastern Province, and the largest offshore oilfield at Safaniya, in the Persian Gulf. Total Saudi reserves are estimated at 267 bbls (billion barrels) compared with 26.5 bbls for the United States and 20.4 bbls for China.

 

Not only is there plenty of oil in Saudi Arabia, it is inexpensive to produce and easy to ship. Saudi Aramco is not drilling in the Arctic or North Sea. Most Saudi wells are not especially deep, and many flow from natural pressure. There are no mountains to cross or long pipelines to build in order to get Saudi crude into tankers. Instead, there are well-established production and processing networks that have taken sixty years to build. Most estimates put average Saudi production costs between US$ 3 and 5 a barrel. The average cost of production in the United States, including shale and offshore wells, is roughly $40 a barrel; and Canadian oil-sands production costs are closer to $100 a barrel. In short, Saudi Aramco is not simply the world’s largest oil company—it also produces some of the world’s least expensive and easiest-to-ship oil.

 

What gives Saudi Arabia its importance in global energy markets—and thus, a geopolitical influence disproportionate to its economic size or military strength—is the role that it plays as the producer of last resort. For decades, Saudi Aramco has maintained significant spare production capacity that allows it to rapidly put large volumes of oil into the market. Many countries could reduce their oil production if they chose to; only Saudi Arabia can significantly increase production very quickly by government fiat.

 

Saudi Aramco usually keeps at least 2 million barrels a day of spare capacity on hand. This is neither easy nor inexpensive; it is a calculated political policy, not an efficiency-driven commercial choice. If the President of Exxon Mobil spent $50 billion drilling new oil wells and then simply shut them for a rainy day, he would probably be looking for new employment. Yet that is precisely what Saudi Aramco did in the early 1990s, and again between 2005 and 2010 when it increased production capacity from 10 to 12.5 mbd (million barrels a day).

 

The United States’ ability to sanction oil producers such as Venezuela or Iran without experiencing a sharp increase in its own energy costs and inflation rate has usually depended on Saudi cooperation—cooperation that other major oil exporters are usually unwilling or unable to provide.

 

More economic pain was caused by the Saudi production cuts from 8 to 6 million barrels a day than the actual embargo, because the production cuts reduced total global supply. Saudi Arabia had been supplying the United States with less than 4% of its daily oil consumption, but the impact of the production cuts was both immediate and long-lasting. Gasoline lines became a new feature of American life as oil prices exploded from $3 to $12 a barrel. US oil imports soared from $4 billion in 1972 to $24 billion in 1974, and for many years remained the single largest element in the United States’ trade deficit. Between 1972 – 1974, the US inflation rate soared from 3 to 11%, unemployment from 5 to 7%

 

The 1973 Saudi-led oil embargo initiated years of economic “stagflation,” lost jobs, and lost economic growth that could never be recovered. It left deep, permanent scars on the American and British economies as well as on the attitude of their peoples towards Saudi Arabia.

 

Surprisingly, the Arab oil embargo, which caused so much economic havoc, did not permanently damage Saudi American relations. On the contrary, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Secretary of the Treasury William Simon recognized the need to recycle petrodollars back into the US economy and avoid this sort of economic disruption in the future. They set out very deliberately to create incentives for Saudi Arabia to become a stakeholder in US economic prosperity, and they succeeded. A treasury attaché arrived in Riyadh, and Saudi Arabia became one of the largest purchasers of US Treasury bonds; the kingdom still is. Military sales, which had totaled only $300 million in 1972, climbed to $5 billion in 1975 as Saudi Arabia became one of the largest purchasers of American weapons; it still is. The US Army Corp of Engineers began a massive $14 billion military infrastructure building program for the Saudis—a program that would prove invaluable during Operation Desert Storm (the combat phase of the First Gulf War: 1990–1991) when arriving US forces found everything from showers to aircraft maintenance facilities, all built to familiar American specifications. The Joint Economic Commission Office Riyadh (JECOR) opened, and over the next quarter of a century it funneled billions of petrodollars back to the US government through a wide variety of development programs funded by the Saudis.

 

Some large American refineries were built to operate specifically on heavy Saudi crude, and in 2020 Saudi Aramco still owns the largest refinery in the United States at Port Arthur, Texas.

 

Unprecedented oil revenue gave Riyadh another foreign policy tool—one that it would subsequently use to promote its own interests in regional stability by funding pro-Western Arab governments. A prime example of the latter approach is furnished by the Arab Republic of Egypt, whose political stability has long been important to the United States, Europe, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. In 2014, King Salman provided the new Egyptian government of Abdul Fattah Sisi with loans, fuel, and grants worth more than US$20 billion—twice what the IMF eventually provided, and more than ten times the annual value of US aid to Egypt. This Saudi support for its neighbor had implications well beyond the Middle East. Had Egypt, with its 70 million-strong population, collapsed into Arab Spring chaos like Libya, Syria, or Yemen, the wave of refugees flooding into Europe would have swelled into a tsunami of unknown consequences for European unity and security.

 

In 2015, Saudi aid to Egypt was nearly as important to Europe’s political future as Saudi oil had been to rebuilding post-war European economies in 1945.

Other recipients of Western foreign aid—such as Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, Bahrain, and Oman—are also substantial beneficiaries of Saudi financial support. Riyadh provides them with economic development funding, military assistance, and subsidized fuel. For example, Saudi Arabia has purchased hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of American weapons for Pakistan, and long provided that country with fuel on concessionary terms. For many years, the kingdom sought to stabilize Yemen with payments handled informally by Crown Prince Sultan through tribal networks.

 

In 2018, it joined Kuwait and the UAE in placing a billion dollars in Jordan’s central bank to help stabilize that country’s tottering economy.

 

Sermons preached in Mecca are broadcast daily to tens of millions of devout, attentive Muslims around the world. This is Islam’s “bully pulpit,” a highly effective platform from which to advocate an agenda globally. In recent years these sermons have been decidedly moderate—regularly condemning terrorism, suicide bombing, unsupervised charitable giving, and going abroad for jihad. However, with a less-stable or less Western-aligned government in Riyadh, the threat of radical sermons emanating from Mecca could rapidly re-emerge.

 

Each year more than two million pilgrims arrive in Mecca for the Hajj. They gather on an empty desert plain to pray; listen to sermons; and sacrifice thousands of goats, sheep, and camels. This immense, multinational congregation provides Saudi leaders with a rich opportunity to promote their views, demonstrate their special role in Islam, and host important Muslim leaders at a spiritually significant moment in their lives. The Saudi government attempts to keep the Hajj apolitical by allocating visas through a national quota system and banning political demonstrations. Providing security, shelter, sanitation, transportation, water, and healthcare for this throng is a major logistical undertaking that preoccupies much of the Saudi government for months beforehand. What was once a major source of income for King Abdulaziz has become a huge government expenditure for his sons, but managing a successful Hajj remains a source of pride for the Saudi people and of legitimacy for the House of Saud.

 

With his secular, Pan-Arab, anti-imperialist broadcasts on Cairo’s Voice of the Arabs radio service, President Nasser captured the imagination of people across the Middle East. He preached vehemently against the twin evils of imperialism and reactionary rulers; overthrowing conservative Arab monarchs aligned with the West was an essential part of his program.

 

The Al Saud recognized long ago that they must either lead social change or eventually be overtaken by it. Thus, for more than half a century they have supported gradual social evolution—not to satisfy their many Western critics but because it was in their self-interest to do so. They hoped that by cautiously delivering social change they could satisfy demands for liberalization from an increasingly urban, young and well-educated population, while avoiding a backlash from the religious conservatives who remained numerous, well-organized, firmly committed to the past, and potentially violent.

 

When King Abdullah opened his University for Science and Technology in 2009, senior clerics denounced it as a godless institution. For most of Saudi history, reforms that increased religious tolerance or gender equality have been controversial—and in some quarters, they still are. To an extent seldom recognized outside of Saudi Arabia, the monarchy has not been a reactionary force holding back a progressive society. Quite the opposite. The Al Saud have usually moved in step with the majority of public opinion, and at times dictated liberalization in the face of outright opposition.  The ulama fought back because they viewed modern, secular education as a Western ploy to invade the Islamic world, spread ideas antagonistic to religion, and, ultimately, undermine their own status.

 

King Faisal’s decision to introduce girls’ education provoked a firestorm similar to desegregation in the American South. Angry fathers came from Al Qasim by the hundreds and camped outside the city for several weeks, waiting to see the king. Faisal listened, then he made it clear that no one would be required to send their daughter to school, but he would use force against anyone who tried to disrupt those wishing to attend. Today, there are more women in Saudi universities than men. As Saudi women became more educated, they gained social and economic independence—just as they had in the West, and just as social conservatives in the kingdom had feared.

 

Unlike the Western syllabus, rooted in the values of the Enlightenment, the religiously based Saudi school curriculum has not tolerated the questioning of received wisdom. It has relied heavily on rote memorization and seldom encouraged curiosity or innovation. The result of this has been a labor force poorly prepared for a modern economy.

 

KAUST was an even more ambitious and expensive project than Princess Noura University. Built by Saudi Aramco, which the king rightly judged to be the most competent engineering organization in the country, it is an entirely postgraduate, research university with no tuition fees. The university uses one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers for research into areas directly relevant to Saudi Arabia such as solar energy, water desalinization, clean combustion, and desert agriculture. Unlike other Saudi universities, KAUST operates under its own authority, fully independent of the Ministry of Education. English is the language of instruction for the university’s nearly 1,000 male and female students who come from more than 60 countries.

 

With some 6,500 applicants each year for 250 places, its masters and doctoral programs have one of the lowest acceptance rates of any university in the world. The KAUST endowment of more than $20 billion is the world’s third largest, falling behind only Harvard and Yale.

 

Dismantling KAUST became, and remains, a priority for Saudi Arabia’s religious conservatives.

 

The ulama are not alone in opposing women’s rights. Some Saudi men see their personal honor tied directly to conservative behavior on the part of their female family members. They agree with Sheikh Abd al-Rahman bin Nasir al-Barrak, who wrote in a religious ruling, “anyone who accepts his daughter, sister or wife working with men or attending mixed-gender schools cares little about his honor as this is simply a form of pimping.” Some tribal leaders view women’s independence to live and work wherever they please, and ultimately to marry whomever they choose, as a direct threat to tribal cohesion—and thus, their own political futures.

 

For those who did not know Saudi Arabia in 2000 or even 2010, it is difficult to appreciate the scope and pace of social change that this father-and-son team have introduced. The examples are numerous and dramatic. Tolerance is actively promoted, entertainment opportunities have increased exponentially, and overt gender discrimination has noticeably declined. Those who say that these changes were long overdue have a point, those who argue that they are superficial are either ignorant or malicious. Ten years ago, there was no public entertainment in Riyadh. No theaters, no cinemas, no sporting events that women could attend, no restaurants where unmarried couples could dine together, and no music anywhere. All of this has changed. After having been closed for 35 years, cinemas have reopened and ground has been broken for a large theme park outside of Riyadh. Many restaurants now play music and no longer strictly enforce gender segregation. Religious policemen, who once shot holes in satellite television dishes and publicly smashed mobile phones containing cameras, now limit themselves to complaining about tinted contact lenses. A new Entertainment Commission has introduced hundreds of events, including rock concerts, magic shows, opera performances, auto races, and even female wrestling matches. The commission now pays young musicians to perform in public places, and Saudi parents bring talented children to audition for these places. Each month the Entertainment Commission offers something new, such as free ice skating lessons for any Saudi who wants to learn. A new Culture Commission openly promotes theater, music, figurative art, film, and literature—all but the last of which were once firmly opposed by the ulama. All of this was intended to give young Saudis something to do other than “drifting. By the spring of 2018 there were designated parks where young people of both genders could meet for coffee, but to get in they sometimes needed a key. These keys were hidden around the city, with clues on where to find them given out on social media. While many young Saudis engaged in this state-sponsored treasure hunt, the police cracked down hard on the few remaining drifters.

 

More liberating for many women, and much more complicated to enact legally, were the amendments to numerous guardianship regulations made in 2019. These changes removed restrictions on employment, travel, education, and healthcare. No longer was a male guardian’s permission needed to obtain a passport or travel abroad; no longer was a woman legally required to live with her guardian or face police detention for the crime of absenteeism. The long-established practice of child marriage was nominally abolished in 2020, but it remains to be seen whether or not sharia judges will enforce the new regulations. Women still need their guardian’s permission to marry or to study abroad.

 

The Crown Prince is betting on demographics. Most Saudis are under 30 and half of them are female. His strategy has been to win the support of the majority in the center by giving them what they want, while firmly suppressing outliers at both ends of the political spectrum. In September 2017, dozens of activists, ranging from hardline clerics opposing any social change to liberal intellectuals demanding much more, were arrested. The Crown Prince made it clear that he sets the pace of social change, and that loud, public dissent—either for or against it—will not be tolerated.

 

EXPORT LAND MODEL

 

On average, oil revenue has accounted for 80% of the government’s budget and 40% of Saudi Arabia’s GDP, though in fact much of non-oil GDP remains dependent on the government’s spending of oil revenue.

 

Commentary about the “break even” oil price for the Saudi budget is largely meaningless because revenue depends on the volume of oil exported as much as its price. Here, too, Saudi Arabia’s oil habit has left the country dangerously exposed. OPEC quotas do sometimes reduce Saudi oil export volumes, but it is growing domestic consumption encouraged by very low local prices that has emerged as the principal long-term constraint to Saudi export volume. Take for example refined diesel fuel, a mainstay of Saudi truckers and farmers. At times, it has been sold domestically at well below the global price of unrefined crude oil. Saudi Arabia also uses crude oil to produce electricity. For many years the average Saudi household paid just 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity—as compared with 13 cents per kilowatt hour in the United States and 45 cents in Germany.

 

Desalinated water, most of it produced by boiling sea water with crude oil, has been so cheap that desert-dwelling Saudis have become used to consuming nearly as much water per capita as water-rich Canadians and three times as much as the average European.

 

Saudi industry has also been an inefficient consumer of energy. In 2016 non-oil industry provided roughly 15% of Saudi GDP but consumed 40% of the country’s heavily subsidized energy production. As a result, Saudi Arabia used more energy to produce a dollar’s worth of GDP than any other G20 nation—and that ratio had been moving in the wrong direction.

 

As a result of generous subsidies for gasoline, as well as oil-generated water and electricity, by 2015, Saudis consumed roughly 20% of their own oil production.

 

Petroleum Minister, Khalid al-Falih (in office 2016–2019), warned that if current growth rates for domestic oil consumption continued, Saudi Arabia would be burning 75% of its production by 2030. Then, domestic oil consumption could crowd out oil exports—just as happened in the United States during the 1960s.

The annual population growth rate, which had reached 6.4% in 1982, had fallen to 2.0% by 2017.

 

Expatriates, who accounted for only 10% of the kingdom’s population in 1970, comprised nearly a third of the total population by 2015 and filled more than 85% of non-oil private sector jobs. Housekeeping was left almost entirely to Indonesian and Filipino maids. Meanwhile, as their traditional sources of employment dried up, Saudi women were barred by law and custom from pursuing new opportunities in the modern economy. Many important stakeholders in the Al Saud’s historic coalition have strong vested interests in maintaining these labor market distortions.

 

Saudi businessmen have become dependent on a steady flow of semi-skilled, well-disciplined, and inexpensive foreign workers. The religious and judicial communities consider it their moral duty to keep women out of the workplace. Yet by 2015, the direction of necessary change was clear. Saudi workers needed to return to the private sector, many foreign workers needed to go home, and Saudi women needed to rejoin the workforce.

 

Balancing the budget has been the most pressing. In 2015, the government’s budget deficit reached an unsustainable 16% of GDP. For comparison, the US and UK budget deficits in the same year were 4.5% and 4% of GDP, respectively.  Subsidy cuts or tax hikes have triggered violent protests in many other Arab countries. Saudi Arabia avoided that outcome in part because a significant effort was made to shield the most vulnerable members of its society.

 

The proportion of private-sector jobs taken by Saudis rose from 20 to 22% —in part, because more than 2 million expatriate workers left Saudi Arabia between 2017 and 2020. More will certainly follow as steep annual increases in the levies placed on foreign workers and their dependents continues to rise.

 

No Saudi king ever came to power facing greater regional instability than Salman bin Abdulaziz. In January 2015, the very existence of Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen was in question. The Islamic State, or ISIS, had become the first terrorist organization with its own capital city and oil production. Iran was supporting the Houthi insurgents in Yemen, who had just taken the capital, Sanaa, and were on the verge of capturing the entire country. Not since the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century had the Arab world seen such widespread chaos—and all of it threatened Saudi security. The Arab Spring was a series of anti-government protests and armed uprisings that began in Tunisia and rapidly spread to Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen.

 

From Iran’s historical perspective, driving Western influence from the Middle East and confronting America’s regional allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel, are necessary, defensive measures. More recently, exporting its revolutionary values also became a legitimizing exercise for the Islamic Republic.

 

Saudis nervously watched Tehran’s influence grow as it funded pro-Iranian governments and armed Shia militia. Riyadh felt increasingly beleaguered, and by 2015 most Saudis regarded it as self-evident that Iran’s long-term ambitions were to acquire nuclear weapons; become the region’s dominant military power; take Saudi market share in global oil markets; challenge Saudi Arabia’s role in the Muslim world; and, if possible, topple the House of Saud. These were not unfounded fears.

 

The truly historic event that spring was the rise to power of Prime Minister Najib Mikati in Beirut, with the backing of the Iranian-supported Lebanese Shia political party and militia, Hezbollah. In 2011, Iran became a major player in Lebanese politics and, following the lead of their patrons in Tehran, Hezbollah’s media outlets became relentless in their attacks on the House of Saud. It was not lost on the Saudis—or, for that matter, the Israelis—that this was the first time in 1,000 years that a Persian-based regime had allies and significant influence on the shores of the Mediterranean. Neighboring Syria is a predominantly Sunni nation ruled by a regime drawn largely from the semi-Shia Alawite sect. Iran and its Hezbollah allies have long supported the Assad regime in Damascus for both religious and geopolitical reasons. Syria physically connects Iran’s allies in Baghdad and Beirut while also providing another front from which to challenge Israel. During the Syrian Civil War, Hezbollah sent thousands of fighters to support the Assad government, and often occupied areas in which the latter had lost control.

 

In addition to this insecurity on their northern border, the Saudis were facing instability to the south in Yemen, an impoverished country with a local population larger than Saudi Arabia’s. Every day, Saudi border police detain and immediately deport hundreds of economic migrants attempting to cross the kingdom’s long, porous border with Yemen. For the United States, it would be as if Mexico had a population of 400 million with an annual per-capita income of $1,500 instead of 125 million people with annual incomes of nearly $10,000. This large, poor, often ungovernable country is Saudi Arabia’s soft underbelly.

 

As the new King Salman faced this worrying array of security threats, he found all of Saudi Arabia’s traditional foreign policy tools in poor repair. Falling oil prices and large budget deficits placed limits on Saudi checkbook diplomacy. Iran was challenging Saudi Arabia’s role in the Muslim world, including its right to govern Mecca and administer the Hajj.

 

Saudi Arabia could not easily replace its security relationship with the United States. In 2015, the US had two fleets and 54,000 troops deployed in the Near East and South Asia, far more than any other outside power. Almost all of Saudi Arabia’s major defense platforms—from F-15 fighter aircraft and Apache attack helicopters to Abrams tanks and Patriot air-defense systems—are American. Any shift away from US equipment would take decades and cost billions of dollars. The Saudi Public Investment Fund committed $20 billion to an infrastructure development fund being launched by the American private equity giant, Blackstone.

 

The bottom line was clear. Saudi Arabia had the capacity to make a significant contribution to American economic growth and employment.

 

Saudi Arabia had become India’s fourth-largest trading partner and was home to 2.5 million Indian workers who sent home $11 billion in remittances each year.

 

As China’s share of global oil consumption rose from 4% in 1993 to 12% in 2016, Saudi Arabia sought to make it clear that Saudi Aramco, not the Iranian National Oil Company, was the most dependable supplier for China’s energy needs. These Saudi efforts to gain market share were successful, and by 2018 the People’s Republic had become the kingdom’s largest trading partner as well as the largest customer for both Saudi Aramco and SABIC. By August 2019, Saudi Arabia was China’s most important source of imported oil, while Iran was supplying it with less oil than Oman.

 

Finally, Saudi Arabia established a robust alliance with the United Arab Emirates (UAE). These two neighbors created a very powerful bloc, producing between them nearly half the Arab world’s GDP and 40% of OPEC’s oil. Their crown princes, Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed, were close personally and professionally. Although their interests were not completely aligned, from 2015 onward the two neighbors fought together against the Iranian-supported Houthis in Yemen.

 

The dominant theme in Saudi efforts to improve relations with China, Iraq, Israel, Russia, the UAE, and the United States has been containing Iran.

 

More recently, Saudi Arabia has accused Qatar of terrorism because of its support for the sometime-terrorist, always anti-monarchist Muslim Brotherhood and of interfering in Saudi domestic politics through sponsorship of the routinely anti-Saudi Al Jazeera television news channel. With the two countries supporting different factions in Egypt, Syria, and Libya, the possibility of boycotting Qatar had been openly discussed in Riyadh during King Abdullah’s reign.

 

In June 2017, these simmering tensions boiled over when Saudi Arabia—along with Bahrain, Egypt, and the UAE—imposed an economic and transportation boycott on Qatar until it met a list of 13 demands, including closing Al Jazeera. Qatar refused to meet the Saudi demands. In 2020 the boycott continues, costing Riyadh much less than Doha but appearing to many observers as an unreasonable overreaction—one that has needlessly undermined the Gulf Cooperation Council and pushed Qatar closer to Iran and Turkey.

 

Even more controversial has been the Saudi air campaign against the Houthis in northern Yemen. Although this conflict developed international implications, its roots lay in long-standing local, tribal, and regional issues. The multinational naval blockade led to great suffering in a country that imported most of its food, fuel, and medicine. The destruction of infrastructure—most notably, bridges—as well as rampant corruption at Houthi-controlled ports, made it difficult to distribute any aid that did arrive. In what became a multi-party civil war, thousands of Yemeni civilians died not only from air strikes but also from widespread ground fighting, starvation, and disease. Millions more were put at risk of starvation or made homeless. Despite numerous efforts at negotiation and more than $14 billion of recent Saudi aid to Yemen, the war has dragged on for five years

 

The war has also exposed the kingdom to damaging physical attacks. The Houthi have fired more than 200 ballistic missiles into Saudi Arabia; oil tankers and oil pipelines have been targeted; and civilian airports in the southern cities of Abha, Jizan, and Najran have been closed. On at least two occasions, Tehran launched highly effective cyber-attacks against Saudi Arabia, one of which destroyed thousands of Saudi Aramco computers. In September 2019, Iranian cruise missiles and drones attacked the kingdom’s Abqaiq oil processing facility and succeeded in taking nearly half of Saudi oil production offline for several weeks.

 

Ordinary Saudis now worry that Iranian attacks may shift from economic to civilian targets. Should that happen, Iran’s extensive array of short- and medium-range missiles could devastate the desalination plants on which Riyadh depends for drinking water. An even greater fear is that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons.

 

Most worryingly, as the former head of Israel’s National Security Council Yaakov Amidor warned—a nuclear armed Iran would not only surround Israel with a “ring of fire,” it would very likely drive Turkey and Saudi Arabia to seek their own nuclear weapons.

 

Vision 2030 is a paradox. It introduced disruptive social and economic reform in order to preserve a traditional monarchy. Yet, replacing state-dependent subjects with self-sufficient citizens will eventually alter the relationship between a people and their government. Bringing rock concerts and unmarried, female tourists to the Land of the Two Holy Mosques will anger religious conservatives. Eliminating long-established entitlements will cause widespread resentment. There are now many points of political friction in this rapidly changing society, but three merit particular attention: discrimination against the Shia population, elite corruption, and rising authoritarianism.

 

The Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia sits on both the world’s largest oil field and a cultural fault line between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Very few Shia live in the remainder of Saudi Arabia. Over time, more and more restrictions were placed on the Saudi Shia. Limits were placed on the authority of Shia courts, the building of Shia mosques, and the holding of Shia religious processions, although the rigor with which these controls were enforced varied over time. As restrictions grew, the Shia aiyan found themselves in an increasingly difficult position; the Al Saud expected them to maintain order, but never made them fully part of the Sunni-dominated stakeholder elite. Unable to end economic and social discrimination against their clients, the traditional Shia leading families slowly lost influence to more assertive local leaders, who were more often political activists than religious scholars.

 

The 1979 Iranian Revolution emboldened the Shirazis and triggered the Muharram Intifada. These comprised the largest street riots ever seen in Saudi Arabia. In the Eastern Province towns of Al Qatif and Safwa, banks and government offices were ransacked by crowds carrying posters of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The revolutionary government in Tehran encouraged the rioting with radio broadcasts, leaflets, and cassette tapes calling for Shia solidarity with Tehran and the overthrow of the corrupt, hypocritical Al Saud. The traditional Shia notables were powerless to stop the violence and some twenty protesters died when the National Guard used force to restore order. Hundreds were arrested and the leaders of the Shirazi Movement fled into exile.

 

While his brothers were simultaneously busy dealing with the mosque seizure in Mecca, Deputy Minister of the Interior Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz traveled to the Eastern Province to meet Shia notables and moderate clerics. He promised infrastructure improvements, and the government soon launched a large-scale program to upgrade electricity connections, roads, schools, hospitals, street lighting, and sewage systems. In 1993, King Fahd offered a general amnesty to Shia leaders in exile, and lifted travel bans on those who had remained in the kingdom.

Many prominent Shia activists including Hasan al-Saffar and Jaffar al-Talib accepted King Fahd’s olive branch and sought to improve conditions for the Shia by working with the government. As the Shia notables had done previously, the leaders of the Shirazi Movement reaffirmed their allegiance to the Saudi state while continuing to call for an end to discrimination against its Shia citizens. And like the notables before them, they faced a long, uphill battle against Wahhabi preachers

 

The only Arab Spring-related protest in Saudi Arabia occurred in the Eastern Province, where Saudi Shia held large demonstrations in support of ongoing protests by Bahrain’s predominantly Shia population. The Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr emerged as the leader of these Saudi protests. His arrest in July 2012 sparked further demonstrations leading to several deaths. More demonstrations erupted in 2014 when Sheikh Nimr was sentenced to death. He was executed in January 2016. Although most of those executed were Sunnis, al-Nimr’s death set off demonstrations across the Shia world and the burning of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran. In response, the Saudis broke off diplomatic relations with Iran. They have yet to be restored.

 

Some Saudi Shia have spoken openly of seceding from the kingdom or disrupting oil production in the Eastern Province. That will not happen. Large detachments of the National Guard based in the Eastern Province give the Saudi state the ability to deploy overwhelming force; which it would use if seriously threatened. To date, however, the security forces have preferred to use minimal force, avoiding the use of live ammunition, downplaying police casualties, and generally allowing protests within Shia villages.

 

A second threat to Al Saud legitimacy, and their kingdom’s stability, is corruption. Politically sanctioned profiteering has been an endemic problem in Saudi Arabia, at least since the first oil boom when King Fahd tacitly accepted it as part of the oil income redistribution processes. Powerful sons of King Abdulaziz who controlled bureaucratic fiefdoms siphoned off large sums for their own use and provided an umbrella of protection for select subordinates to do the same. Contractors were paid for flood controls that they never built. Firms were paid to treat sewage that they actually dumped into the sea.

Public land was given away and then sold back to the government at exorbitant prices. Senior military officers owned companies that imported munitions or repaired aircraft. It could have been worse. Unlike many oil-fueled kleptocracies, Saudi roads, schools, and hospitals actually got built; the water is drinkable; and the electricity works—but, of course, it all could have worked much better with less corruption.

 

When he came to the throne, King Salman understood that royal entitlements and high-level corruption were the most serious complaints that most Saudis had against the monarchy. In fact, he shared that view. As governor of Riyadh, Salman had often limited the abuses of junior princes, but had been frustrated by his inability to control his elder brothers or their sons. When Salman became king, he employed both international accounting firms and the Ministry of the Interior to secretly investigate many dubious government contracts and land transactions.

 

Only when they controlled all the levers of power and faced little effective resistance, did the king and his son strike out at corruption. The SCCC wasted no time making its presence felt. Within hours of its creation, General al-Howairini efficiently conducted a wide-scale series of detentions unprecedented in Saudi history. Those taken to Riyadh’s five-star Ritz Carlton Hotel included eleven princes, four serving ministers, dozens of former ministers, deputy ministers, and prominent businessmen.

 

The anti-corruption decree stipulated that assets gained illicitly could be seized by the state. All the assets of the detainees were frozen, along with those of an additional 1,700 of their associates and family members. Private jets were grounded and a no-fly list for “persons of interest” distributed at airports. Just over $100 billion were ultimately recovered. Assets seized included cash, stock portfolios, and real estate. One prince lost his collection of 185 antique cars and more than one royal stable was dismantled. Some assets were located abroad; a hotel in Los Angeles, office towers in Istanbul—even a shopping mall in Boulder, Colorado. A new government agency was created to collect and dispose of the confiscated assets.

 

Because of high land prices, not construction costs, urban housing in Saudi Arabia is very expensive. In the United States the value of residential real estate is roughly 25% land and 75% the actual building.

In Saudi Arabia, these ratios are reversed, with the lot often being worth much more than the house itself. This anomaly is the result of very large tracks of undeveloped land being held by a few princes and speculators who, expecting land prices to rise over time and paying no real estate taxes, choose to hold raw land as a long-term investment rather than develop it.  Seizing the property of corrupt princes and business barons was a calculated move to win public support for painful austerity measures and subsidy cuts.

 

The third, and most worrying source of potential instability in Saudi Arabia, is increasing autocracy. King Abdulaziz ruled as an absolute monarch; King Faisal brooked no dissent from Arab nationalists, and imprisoned many of them. Yet their kingdom differed from many of the Arab World’s post-colonial military dictatorships insofar as it was not a police state governed solely by fear. Comparisons with Saddam’s Iraq, Stalin’s Russia, or even Sadat’s Egypt are misleading. Instead, the Al Saud practiced their own brand of autocratic paternalism combining generous economic cooption with authoritarian political control, and generally placing more emphasis on the former.

 

This distinctive balance of fear and favor has now shifted. Under King Salman, Saudi Arabia has become more autocratic. Civil liberties, which were never prominent, have become even more restricted. The sophisticated electronic surveillance systems developed to monitor violent terrorists have been used to detect nonviolent political dissent. Saudis who once spoke freely have become hesitant to criticize their government. Opponents of Mohammed bin Salman have been intimidated or eliminated. Accusations of torture have resurfaced. According to the crown prince himself, some 1,500 political activists ranging from conservative Salafi preachers to women’s rights activists have been arrested in a process that has become more arbitrary and opaque. Fear has become noticeably more prevalent.

 

As royal authority becomes more concentrated, the number of princes who can actually help the average citizen has sharply declined. People have begun to feel less personally connected to their leaders.

 

Travel and satellite TV have exposed Saudis to the outside world. Students returning from study abroad have experienced societies far less respectful of princes and priests than their own. As a result, submission to the male-dominated, hierarchical, tribal, and family structures upon which the Saudi political order rests is slowly fading.

 

Like the village priest in parts of Europe 100 years ago, members of the Wahhabi religious establishment were once the best educated people in many Saudi communities—often, the only ones who could read. This gave them a social and political influence outside the mosque. Such influence has faded in a society where even the remotest village has a school and tuition-free university education is widely available.

 

There is clearly a tension between Mohammad bin Salman’s modernizing agenda and his authoritarian means of achieving it. In the short run, that may be unavoidable; in the long run it is likely to be unsustainable.

 

Reform is creating new winners and losers. It is overturning established relationships, institutions and expectations thus making Saudi Arabia less stable in 2020 than it was in 2015. Saudi Arabia is not Egypt with the unifying geography of the Nile, a homogeneous population, and 4,000 years of centralized government. It is a recent creation—still a collection of regions and tribes unified by a monarchy, with separatist sentiments lingering in the Hejaz and Eastern Province. Although Saudis over 65 years of age can remember an impoverished past of hunger, illiteracy, and high infant mortality, those under thirty now take security for granted—along with roads, schools, Starbucks, and iPhones.

 

All of the stakeholders in the Al Saud’s traditional coalition, tribal leaders, religious scholars, leading merchants, and senior technocrats have felt the unsettling effects of rapid change. Across Saudi society, the reshaping of social and economic norms has weakened elite cohesion as well as the patronage networks that the Al Saud relied on to monitor and alleviate dissent.

 

Tribal leaders have watched their authority ebb as their followers become economically more dependent on the state than the tribe, and as rural people move to cities The sheikhs understand that ongoing changes can only undermine their social status, local political influence, and, ultimately, their importance to the monarchy. They have already been abandoned by some of their constituents and, over time, may become no more politically significant than Scottish clan chiefs are in modern Britain.

 

It is quite possible that Saudi Aramco’s commercial orientation and efficient production procedures would not survive the collapse of the Saudi monarchy. Then, a dozen tribes fighting over the world’s largest oilfields could affect global energy prices far more than any OPEC meeting.