Mohammed bin Salman’s first geopolitical outing since becoming Saudi Arabia’s crown prince last summer looks, through one lens, like a triumphal royal progress. Received with honours due a head of state in the UK last week, the 32-year-old heir to the Saudi throne will next week travel to the US, where he will meet President Donald Trump at the White House.
Such fanfare, and an effusion of PR hype, invite the question of whether MbS, as he is known, is engaged in reforming or rebranding the kingdom willed to him by his 82-year-old father, King Salman. The answer is that he is doing a bit of both — albeit with some glaring gaps.
He has moved fast to start freeing Saudi society from the stifling watch of a reactionary and misogynistic clergy. He has set unimaginably ambitious goals to transform the kingdom’s oil-dependent economy into a hive of private investment-driven innovation. These policies are the basis for ubiquitous advertising claiming that MbS is “opening Saudi Arabia to the world”, holding out to a population, two-thirds of which is younger than he is, the possibility of fulfilling lives and decent livelihoods.
There are even signs the young prince is rethinking his foreign adventurism (he is defence minister as well as economy and energy overlord). He seems to be scaling back his war in Yemen after three years that have achieved little beyond mass civilian slaughter, famine and a cholera epidemic, at huge cost to both the kingdom’s reputation and its finances (a cost of $120bn so far, according to one Saudi defence expert).
The Saudi-led blockade of Qatar that began in June, and MbS’s de facto detention in Riyadh in November of Saad Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister, served mainly to push Qatar towards Iran. The crown prince has now received Mr Hariri with the courtesy he denied him last year and it looks as though the US is pushing for a solution to the rift with Qatar, a distraction from the regional contest with Iran.
But where is politics in all this? No one expects MbS to sprinkle pixie dust on an absolute monarchy that is rooted in a theocratically absolute brand of Islam and magic it into a Jeffersonian democracy. The point is that this young ruler, autocratic even by Saudi standards, has undermined each of the three pillars that hold the kingdom aloft — the ruling House of Saud, the Wahhabi clerical establishment, and the tribes. While that may eventually turn out to be a good thing, for now it is opening up an institutional vacuum in the country. It will take a lot more than expensive PR and consultants to fill that gap.
The sprawling, faction-ridden House of Saud will not easily tolerate MbS’s monopoly of power. The al-Saud, understanding that over-reach and family rivalries brought down the first two Saudi kingdoms in the 19th century, have learnt to respect caution and revere consensus. Now the family is riven again, and it is not just hidebound gerontocrats who fear the young crown prince may be out of his depth.
The way in which MbS, backed by King Salman, cleared his path to the throne last year has sown bitter seeds. Mohammed bin Nayef, the veteran interior minister and security tsar who was ousted as crown prince in the palace coup last summer, was branded a drug addict. Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, son of former King Abdullah, was removed as commander of the powerful National Guard under the cover of November’s arrest of princes and ministers, tycoons and media magnates. He was accused of embezzlement.
There are problems beyond MbS blackening the names of his cousins. His appropriation of wealth, said by the kingdom’s attorney-general to be worth $100bn so far, not only sidesteps the rule of law and gives investors pause, it is also another way of monopolising power. It appears there is now another instalment of the November seizure of assets in the works. Well-placed Saudi and Arab sources say there is a new “no-fly list” containing the names of hundreds of wealthy Saudis banned from leaving the kingdom — but who only discover this once they get to the airport.
Saudi Arabia needs change. It cannot survive on its depleting oil revenue. Its young citizens are restless; a fifth of them live below the poverty line. They are also potentially prey to the radical bigotry of the Wahhabis — the legacy of Ibn Abdul Wahhab that has cloaked and veiled the al-Saud with legitimacy from the 18th century. It is an unqualified good that MbS is striving to unpick this fusion of religious and political power. But building up institutions to underpin the new kingdom he aims to create will be vital — not an optional extra.
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