There were many decades when the visit of a crown prince of Saudi Arabia to the United States didn’t cause much stir in world affairs. But these are different days for the Middle East and for the globe. The three-week visit of Mohammed bin Salman, in which he met with the president and an array of congressional leaders, journalists, and CEOs, may well prove one of the crucial events of this era.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been a U.S. ally since its founding in 1932. Its rulers relied on American arms and commerce, and the United States relied on Saudi oil. That this alliance hasn’t been more useful to American interests in the region stems from two problems. First, the kingdom didn’t have much of an economy outside of its oil wells. Iran and Iraq, both intermittent enemies of the United States, were the dominant economic powers. Second, Saudi rulers understood that radical Islamic forces wanted badly to overthrow them—from the Muslim Brotherhood to al Qaeda to ISIS—and they chose to buy off their enemies, funding radical madrassas from North Africa to India and Pakistan. For decades, international Islamic terrorism was to a large extent a Saudi-sponsored enterprise.
With the collapse of Iraq and an emboldened and expansionist Iran, these arrangements no longer worked. The hopelessly naïve Obama administration turned a blind eye to Iranian imperialism and knowingly strengthened a rogue regime. As the price of oil continued its long descent, the Saudis were forced to think creatively about their country’s future.
When the 79-year-old Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud became king in 2015, his 29-year-old son Mohammed bin Salman became defense minister. MbS, as he’s widely known, showed himself to be a ruthlessly efficient administrator. He had no illusions about Iranian meddling. He launched a military campaign to save the Yemeni government from Tehran-funded Houthi rebels (an effort that has so far not been successful) and strengthened the Saudi military against the threat from across the Persian Gulf.
In June of last year, King Salman shocked his country and the world by removing the crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef, and replacing him with the much younger MbS. The new crown prince is charming, highly intelligent, ferociously determined, and—unlike many of his Western-educated siblings and cousins—deeply attached to Saudi Arabia. The kingdom is under the nominal rule of the ailing King Salman, but his son makes the decisions. On his U.S. visit, MbS outlined a complex and ambitious plan for Saudi Arabia—he calls it “Vision 2030″—but it’s not unfair to characterize his aims as a cultural and economic revolution.
MbS realizes, first and most importantly, that if the House of Saud is to survive in power, it must develop a robust economy that has more to offer the world than oil. Saudi Arabia provides its citizens with a welfare state that’s impressive even by European standards: free education, free health care, subsidized prices in food and energy. The decline of oil revenue makes reform all the more pressing.
To develop a domestic economy, MbS will have to liberalize Saudi culture without provoking the nation’s traditionalists to reaction. So far he has done so with skill and success. Already this year, the kingdom has allowed women to attend soccer matches, to drive automobiles, and to apply for positions in the military. He’s also moving toward the abrogation of Saudi Arabia’s “guardianship” laws that forbid women to travel without male chaperones.
American journalists have been pressing MbS on Saudi Arabia’s repressive policies—its many remaining restrictions on women, its denial of religious freedom, and of course its absolute monarchy and vast internal security apparatus. These are fair questions, but they overlook the fact that what MbS has already done is astounding. And effective. As Elliott Abrams noted in these pages in January, while both Saudi Arabia and Iran are repressive regimes in many respects, Saudi citizens are relatively content with their government and Iranians are ready to topple theirs. Western commentators interpreted MbS’s anti-corruption moves as mainly a power-grab—11 princes, 4 government ministers, and a number of tycoons were arrested. But it is also true that the crown prince’s economic reforms are doomed if the kingdom’s culture of corruption is allowed to continue undisturbed.
We applaud MbS’s program. Yet any sober assessment would not give him a high chance of success. Developing a functional economy would be a colossal task on its own, but the young prince has enemies inside and outside Saudi Arabia. There are scores of Ibn Saud’s grandsons who may feel equally entitled to the throne, and reactionaries and traditionalists are deeply opposed to the crown prince’s liberalizing policies. So are adherents of the Middle East’s Islamist parties, especially the Muslim Brotherhood. MbS’s predecessor as crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef, lived through four assassination attempts.
Further inflaming Islamists against MbS—and making his success all the more necessary to U.S. hopes for the region—he has gone beyond his predecessors in acknowledging Israel’s existence. “I believe the Palestinians and the Israelis have the right to have their own land,” he said in an interview published on April 2. Here, at last, is an Arab leader willing to locate the Middle East’s most intransigent problems where they originate: not in the existence of the state of Israel but in what MbS calls, with refreshing candor, the “triangle of evil”: Iran and its Shia terrorist proxies, including Syria; the Muslim Brotherhood; and Sunni terrorist groups.
What’s as yet unclear is whether the Saudi regime under Mohammed bin Salman’s leadership can afford to stop buying off the Islamists and otherwise funding radicalism abroad. When questioned on the extent to which the House of Saud is prepared to move away from the radical Wahhabist ideology it has quietly promoted around the world for decades, MbS is sometimes evasive and sometimes direct. At an event in Riyadh last year, he made the savvy argument that he wasn’t liberalizing anything, but going back—back to an interpretation of Islam that (in his telling) prevailed before the late 1970s when radicals overthrew Iran and nearly did the same in Saudi Arabia. “All we are doing is going back to what we were,” he said: “moderate Islam that is open to all religions and open to the world. . . . We will not waste 30 years of our lives in dealing with extremist ideas. We will destroy them today.”
If MbS means what he says, and if he manages to stay alive and in power long enough to test his ambitions, he’ll need both luck and unwavering American support—not just military aid but our taking steps to contain Iran’s regional ambitions. If MbS succeeds, both the United States and the Middle East’s only democracy, Israel, will finally have a partner at the center of Islam.
Our hopes and prayers go with him back to Riyadh.
