Visions of Mohammed bin Salman: reality and fantasy

Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, established two things shortly after his father, Salman, became king in 2015 and began handing him the keys to the kingdom.

The aspiring child prodigy, now 35, quickly blazed his way to the throne and ended the House of Saud’s consensual model of an absolute monarchy without an absolute monarch, taking all the reins of power. Second, it advanced social and economic reform in a state hitherto under theocratic tutelage, where change has traditionally been driven at speeds between slow and stationary.

Prince Mohammed set a hectic pace for a ruling family that would slowly coalesce around low common denominators, with caution and consensus as slogans, so, reluctant to change, he did not ban slavery until 1962.

MBS, the colloquial shorthand in which he soon abbreviated amid effusions of hyperbole, appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Hardly any foreign ministry or security service had a file on him. After it launched an air war against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen in March 2015, Washington sent Tony Blinken, one of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s top advisers, to Riyadh. The person he met was Mohammed bin Nayef, a long-trusted American ally who MBS would remove as crown prince in 2017.

In the blink of an eye, the headstrong and inexperienced young prince became arguably the ultimate leader in the Arab world, seeking a new source of legitimacy by embodying the repressed aspirations of a young population, roughly two-thirds of them under the age of 30. years. The wings of the Wahhabi clerical establishment that have traditionally legitimized the House of Saud, are slowly dismantling gender segregation and the cloistering of women, promoting mixed entertainment, including hitherto banned concerts and movies, and claiming to offer young people a life full and decent. livelihoods.

This is an impressive gamble, and your understanding will greatly help with the arrival of two excellent books: Blood and oil by financial journalists Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck (the source of the Blinken story); Y Vision or mirage by veteran American diplomat David Rundell.

Hope and Scheck have written a book full of revealing details. Described by their editors as covering “finance and embezzlement” and “white collar crime” respectively for the Wall Street Journal, they have come, so to speak, to the right place.

Before Jamal Khashoggi, an outspoken Saudi columnist, was dismembered by a back-to-back squad at the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul in 2018, Mohammed bin Salman was probably best known to the world as the hasty young prince behind Vision 2030. to transform your country. economy, and letting Saudi women drive for the first time.

In 2015, when MBS took over as economic czar and foreign and defense policy chief, the collapse in oil prices meant that state spending, on a vast public payroll and an inflated stable of stipend premiums, it exceeded oil revenues. His radical attempt to ignite the economy with private investment and remove it from what he called “an addiction to oil” electrified the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia’s position in the Middle East, in the Arab world and in Islam, makes it a bit like three systemic power banks that could bring down the financial system. It’s too big to fail, but it could. The princely vision was bold, designed to identify the engines of growth from tourism to technology and carry the kingdom into the post-oil era. As Hope and Scheck make clear, Vision 2030 was also full of fantasy, sold to an autocrat by mercenary consultants who might as well have been screenwriters for Walt Disney. He predicted that non-oil revenues would quadruple by 2020 (it hasn’t) before doubling again by 2030 (it won’t).

Nor, for example, is the world’s third-largest arms buyer likely to increase production of locally sourced weapons from virtually nothing to 50% by 2030. Global investors and salivating bankers are also making their way to Riyadh in search of a large chunk of Saudi money. , don’t invest yours.

Blood and oil he’s particularly good at the connection between the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, in whose over-the-top, underperforming Vision Fund MBS invested $ 45 billion, now dwindling.

Son, with a lousy investment record, wanted a fund “big enough to disrupt the entire tech world” rather than seed new Saudi investments. His megalomania matches that of MBS, whose project for a futuristic $ 500 billion robot-powered city in northwestern Arabia Son called “a work of art.” The prince’s consultants could hardly object, confirming that he would hand over lives unknown in today’s world and a crime-free environment under full surveillance.

Hope and Scheck, and Rundell, are good at the so-called “sheikdown” at the Ritz-Carlton in November 2017: More than 300 members of the Saudi elite being held in a gilded cage and forced to hand over a $ 100 billion claim in allegedly illegally acquired property. About 11 princes were arrested. The main target was the politician, Miteb bin Abdullah, son of the former king and head of the National Guard, a nexus between the al-Saud and the great Arab tribes. After getting rid of Mohammed bin Nayef (and his army from the interior ministry), Miteb was the last obstacle for MBS to succeed his own father.

There is much more to Hope and Scheck’s splendid book. The way MBS appropriated confiscated property and spent fortunes on palaces, paintings, yachts and parties, and a pastiche castle of Versailles. His dispossession of the elites was popular and populist. However, he seems to believe that the Salman family, unjustly dispossessed by the Abdullah clan, has the exclusive right to al-Saud’s wealth.

Saudi Arabia was never an open society, but it was not a police state

We know that MBS, unlike his older half-brothers, was educated solely in Saudi Arabia. Less well known is how carefully he studied the workings of power. From very early on, he developed his own intelligence capacity that would become a terrible weapon, as Tragically discovered by Jamal Khashoggi.

Fear is something that David Rundell’s epic story of the House of Saud finds ubiquitous in Prince Mohammed’s reign. “Saudi Arabia was never an open society, but it was not a police state,” he writes in Vision or mirage. I should know it. He spent 15 years in various positions at the US embassy in Riyadh. On his first assignment he was told to “spend 10 days a month for nearly two years traveling the roads of rural Saudi Arabia to see what he could learn.” The answer is a lot. His account, which encompasses the rise and fall of two earlier Saudi kingdoms in the 18th and 19th centuries, is unlikely to be improved.

King Abdulaziz ibn Saud, known in the West as Ibn Saud, forcibly unified the kingdom that bears his name in a 30-year war of conquest. The hegemonic myth of the al-Sauds is that they brought stability where there was chaos, and most Saudis probably subscribe to it. As with previous kingdoms, the House of Saud’s legitimacy rested on its pact with the House of Ibn Abdul Wahhab, an 18th-century preacher whom Rundell describes as an Arab Martin Luther with a John Calvin touch, charitable to the light of the radical fanaticism of Wahhabism that has survived to the present era.

However, Ibn Saud eventually turned against his attacking force of rebel ikhwan warriors, Wahhabi fanatics that he crushed with the help of British machine guns and bombers. He destroyed the independence of the tribes, marrying most of them to turn al-Saud into a super tribe.

He learned the dangers of outreach, the vital importance of family unity, and alignment with the superpower of the day, inaugurated by his famous 1945 meeting with President Roosevelt aboard an American warship in the Suez Canal. Rundell’s entire book is excellent and analytically rigorous, but Part III, with its chapters on tribes, clerics, merchants, and technocrats who, under the royal family, were the foundations of the Saudi government after Ibn Saud, is exceptional.

MBS, whom Hope and Scheck say is in awe of Alexander the Great and Machiavelli, consciously models himself after his illustrious grandfather; “Websites that show Abdulaziz’s face transforming into MBS’s echo the point,” Rundell writes. The question is whether he is rejecting the example of Ibn Saud.

Prince Mohammed prefers a “Salman Arabia” model to Saudi Arabia; some of his followers speak of a “fourth kingdom”. It has undermined three pillars of al-Saud’s rule: the royal family, Wahhabi clerics, and perhaps tribal loyalty by taking control of the National Guard. The first member of the third generation to ascend the throne, he has decisively broken with the post-Ibn Saud model, essentially of his 34 sons sharing power. This may have been “a hereditary political party in a one-party state,” as Rundell puts it, but it reminds us that more than 100 princes and “several dozen” religious leaders met a generation ago to replace the inept King Saud with the King Faisal. .

That order is over. The young prince has destroyed the old balance of power. “The crown prince is betting on demography”, but in his arrogant despotism he seems not to see institutions that organize a waste of youthful energy. “Support from the crowd based on entertainment may be less reliable than support based on the interests of the old established elites,” says Rundell. That is what can decide whether MBS becomes a vision or a mirage.

Blood and oil: Mohammed bin Salman’s Relentless Quest for Global Power, by Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck, John Murray, RRP £ 20, 346 pages

Vision or mirage: Saudi Arabia at the crossroadsby David Rundell, Bloomsbury, RRP £ 20, 304 pages

David Gardner is the FT’s international affairs editor.

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