To
understand the upheaval that is taking place in Saudi Arabia today, you
have to start with the most important political fact about that
country: The dominant shaping political force there for the past four
decades has not been Islamism, fundamentalism, liberalism, capitalism or
ISISism.
It has been Alzheimer’s.
The
country’s current king is 81 years old. He replaced a king who died at
90, who replaced a king who died at 84. It’s not that none of them
introduced reforms. It’s that at a time when the world has been
experiencing so much high-speed change in technology, education and
globalization, these successive Saudi monarchs thought that reforming
their country at 10 miles an hour was fast enough — and high oil prices
covered for that slow pace.
It
doesn’t work anymore. Some 70 percent of Saudi Arabia is under age 30,
and roughly 25 percent of them are unemployed. In addition, 200,000 more
are studying abroad, and about 35,000 of them — men and women – are
coming home every year with degrees, looking for meaningful work, not to
mention something fun to do other than going to the mosque or the mall.
The system desperately needs to create more jobs outside the oil
sector, where Saudi income is no longer what it once was, and the
government can’t keep eating its savings to buy stability.
That’s
the backdrop for this week’s daring, but reckless, power play by the
32-year-old son of King Salman — Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known
by his initials M.B.S. I’ve interviewed M.B.S. twice. He is a young man
in a hurry. I’ve found his passion for reform authentic, his support
from the youth in his country significant and his case for making
radical change in Saudi Arabia compelling.
Indeed,
there are two things I can say for sure about him: He is much more
McKinsey than Wahhabi — much more a numbers cruncher than a Quran
thumper. And if he did not exist, the Saudi system would have had to
invent him. Somebody had to shake up the place.
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But
here is what I don’t know for sure: Where does his impulse for rapid
reform stop and his autocratic impulse to seize all power begin? After
M.B.S. arrested a slew of Saudi princes, media owners and billionaire
businessmen on “corruption” charges, President Trump tweeted his
applause, saying, “Some of those they are harshly treating have been
‘milking’ their country for years!”
I
could only laugh reading that tweet. Hearing that Saudi princes were
arrested for “corruption” is like reading that Donald Trump fired seven
cabinet secretaries “for lying.” You know it has to be something else.
Trump obviously missed the story last year that M.B.S. impulsively
bought a yacht while on vacation in the south of France — it just caught
his fancy in the harbor — from its Russian owner for $550 million. Did
that money come out of his piggy bank? Savings from his Riyadh lemonade
stand? From his Saudi government 401(k)?
I
raise this point because when you’re making as many radical changes at
once, and making as many enemies at once, as M.B.S. is, your robes need
to be very clean. People have to believe that you mean what you say and
that you have no hidden agendas, because change is going to be painful.
Look at what M.B.S. is doing all at once:
To
speed up decision-making, he is reshaping the Saudi state — from a
broad family coalition where power is shared and alternated among seven
major families and decisions taken by consensus — to a state governed by
a single family line. This is no longer “Saudi Arabia.” It is becoming
“Salman Arabia.” In the latest series of arrests, M.B.S. basically
eliminated the “young old guard” — the key sons and his natural rivals
from the other main Saudi royal lines. He also arrested the owners of
the three main quasi-independent private television networks, MBC, ART
and Rotana.
At
the same time, M.B.S. is shifting the basis of legitimacy of the
regime, ending “the 1979 era.” In 1979, in the wake of the takeover of
Islam’s most holy site in Mecca by an ultra-fundamentalist Saudi
preacher who claimed that the al-Saud family was not Islamic enough, the
Saudi ruling family — to shore up its religious legitimacy — made a
sharp religious turn at home and began exporting its puritanical Wahhabi
Sunni Islam abroad, building mosques and schools from London to
Indonesia.
It
has been a disaster for the Arab/Muslim world, spawning offshoots like
Al Qaeda and ISIS and retarding Arab education and women’s advancement.
M.B.S.
has vowed to give birth to a more moderate Saudi Islam, starting by
curbing his religious police and permitting women to drive. This is hugely important.
He is daring people to judge his government not on piety but on
performance, not on Quran but on KPIs — key performance indicators on
unemployment, economic growth, housing and health care.
But
he is replacing Wahhabism as a source of solidarity with a more secular
Saudi nationalism, one that has a strong anti-Iran/Persian/Shiite
tenor. And that is taking him to some dangerous places. To confront
Iran, M.B.S. got the Sunni Prime Minister of Lebanon, Saad al-Hariri, to
quit his office on Saturday while on a visit to Riyadh, and blamed Iran
and its Shiite allies for making Lebanon ungovernable — and for a
missile attack from Yemen. Lebanon, which had forged a relatively stable
balance among Sunnis, Christians and Shiites, is now shaking. M.B.S.
also led a Gulf effort to isolate Qatar for being too close to Iran and
to crush Iran’s influence in Yemen — and crush Yemen in the process.
It’s overreach, and there seems to be no one around to tell him that.
As
a veteran Saudi journalist remarked to me of M.B.S.: “This guy saved
Saudi Arabia from a slow death, but he needs to broaden his base. It is
good that he is freeing the house of Saud of the influence of the
clergy, but he is also not allowing any second opinion of his political
and economic decisions.”
I
worry that those urging M.B.S. to be more aggressive in confronting
Iran (whose malign regional influence does need counterbalancing) — like
the U.A.E., Trump, Jared Kushner and Bibi Netanyahu — will push M.B.S.
into a war abroad and at home at the same time, and we could see Saudi Arabia and the whole region spin out of control at the same time. As I said, I’m worried.
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