For a man of 32, Mohammed bin Salman has taken on an awful lot of responsibility. The Saudi Crown Prince’s official title is Minister of Defense, but his portfolio includes Saudi Arabia’s expansive Vision 2030 economic reform package, prosecuting the war in Yemen, and negotiating the crisis with Qatar. In what ought to have been a sufficiently large task for a lifetime, just two weeks ago Mohammed bin Salman called for Saudi Arabia to return to “moderate Islam,” a turn he apparently intended to lead. If that wasn’t enough, over the weekend the young Crown Prince added an unprecedented anti-corruption crusade (well, jihad) to the mix, as Reuters reports:
A campaign of mass arrests of Saudi Arabian royals, ministers and businessmen widened on Monday after a top entrepreneur was reportedly held in the biggest anti-corruption purge of the kingdom’s affluent elite in its modern history. [….]
A no-fly list has been drawn up and security forces in some Saudi airports were barring owners of private jets from taking off without a permit, pan-Arab daily Al-Asharq Al-Awsat said.
Among those detained are 11 princes, four ministers and tens of former ministers, according to Saudi officials.
The allegations against the men include money laundering, bribery, extortion and taking advantage of public office for personal gain, a Saudi official told Reuters. Those accusations could not be independently verified and family members of those detained could not be reached.
The most prominent figure now under arrest is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a politically outspoken billionaire whose Kingdom Holding Group owns large stakes in companies like Twitter and Lyft. For Saudi watchers, the arrests include a number of other key figures. Alwaleed bin Ibrahim is the owner of the Middle East Broadcasting Center, one of the region’s largest news and entertainment groups. Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah was, until the day of his arrest, the head of Saudi Arabia’s national guard, which is charged with the internal security of the Saudi family and government.
At face value, the notion that these men are guilty of corruption is hardly shocking. Rather, what’s shocking is that Saudi Arabia would charge them at all. The Saudi government has facilitated grand corruption since its inception. Kickbacks from Aramco, ticket grants from the state airline, private fiefdoms from state monopolies, and general graft and largesse have been the means of political control in a country where proximity to the rulingfamily is the surest path to wealth. Like Captain Renault collecting his winnings while shutting down gambling at Rick’s, it takes a certain kind of chutzpah to accuse others of corruption when your father spends $100 million on a Moroccan holiday palace.
That raises obvious questions about the extent to which the arrests are politically motivated. Anti-corruption purges with political characteristics are a familiar feature of Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China. In countries where some degree of money laundering, corruption, or other illegal activity is practically unavoidable, selective prosecution can be a powerful tool of political control.
Saudis supportive of the arrests are already accusing Western observers of cynical hypocrisy for pointing these facts out. Before the purges many of those same observers complained about corrupt Saudi elites; now that something is being done about corruption they complain about a political purge.
But while the twin complaints about corruption and political purges might seem hypocritical, the fact is they really aren’t mutually exclusive. The root complaint is not merely that Saudi Arabia is corrupt; it’s that its legal system lacks anything like the kind of transparency that would give the impression that the current moves are a correct application of the rule of law.
No analyst of Saudi Arabia saw this coming, and don’t believe anyone who says they did. Saudi politics is a black box
The same can be said of Saudi Arabia’s political system as a whole. No analyst of Saudi Arabia saw this coming, and don’t believe anyone who says they did. Saudi politics is a black box.No analyst of Saudi Arabia saw this coming, and don’t believe anyone who says they did. Saudi politics is a black box. As one of the world’s last absolute monarchies, and an especially clannish one at that, the study of Saudi internal politics makes Kremlinology seem like an exact science.
What one can discern, however, is that Saudi Arabia is at a pivotal, precarious moment in its history. Mohammed bin Salman’s economic reforms are proceeding apace and achieving some clear successes. In just the past year, the IMF reckons that Saudi Arabia successfully cut its budgetary break-even oil price from almost $100 per barrel to just $70. With Brent trading at about $62, a balanced Saudi budget looks surprisingly attainable. on the other hand, concerns about an embarrassing market valuation have prompted the Saudis to consider halting the Aramco IPO. Despite President Trump’s encouragment to go ahead with the listing on the New York Stock Exchange, that decision seems to be very much in the air. The Saudis seem to have grasped that economic reform will also require serious cultural reform. Despite the announcement that women will finally be allowed to drive, Saudi Arabia remains far more repressive than even conservative neighbors like Kuwait.
And none of this is to consider Saudi Arabia’s regional position, which this weekend seemed to be undergoing several simultaneous crises. Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced from Saudi Arabia that he was resigning over fears of an assassination plot against him, as well as Iran’s nefarious role in his country. Yemen’s Houthi rebels launched a missile that was intercepted dangerously close to Riyadh’s airport. While the Houthis have fired dozens of such missiles before, this was the longest-range strike they have carried out, suggesting a greater degree of Iranian involvement. While the extent of Iran’s support for the Houthis is an open question (Iranian expertise in modifying existing missile stocks seems more likely than out-and-out proliferation), the Saudis have said that the attack might constitute an act of war by Iran and promised retaliation against the Houthis.
The regional rivalry with Iran may not have any direct bearing on Saudi Arabia’s domestic political moves, but it does make the stakes clear. If he’s taken at his word, Mohammed bin Salman is engaged in a project that will revive Saudi Arabia’s ability to compete for regional hegemony by fundamentally altering its economy, culture, religion, and politics. A serious anti-corruption drive would be a significant part of that. But, as I’ve written before, as positive as some of these developments may be, there’s every reason to be skeptical about whether or not Mohammed bin Salman can pull it off.
Viewed more cynically, there doesn’t seem to be much point in handwringing about a political purge in a country that’s already part absolute monarchy, part fundamentalist theocracy. This is not like the Turkish purges, in which a country has painfully retreated from liberal democratic norms. If Mohammed bin Salman is consolidating power ahead of his accession to the throne, he would merely be following the example of every monarch in history. And as far as purges go, the suspects can’t complain too much. They’ve apparently been imprisoned in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. North Korea on the Persian Gulf this is not.
No one knows how this will pan out—no doubt including Mohammed bin Salman. If he pulls off even a fraction of his goals, he can look forward to a half century of rule that might well include a reputation as a populist reformer who re-founded his country—a kind of Saudi Atatürk. Should he fail, the least bad scenario might be a palace coup. After that, the costs of failure rapidly get worse—war with Iran, civil strife, economic collapse, or a retreat into cultural and religious conservatism that has done so much to destabilize the region.
It’s not yet clear just how risky a bet Mohammed bin Salman might be. For now though, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to bet against him.