Mohammed
bin Salman’s elevation as Saudi
heir
also has international ramifications.
By Marc Champion and Donna
Abu-Nasr
June 21, 2017, 10:49 PM GMT+8 June 22, 2017, 5:47 AM GMT+8
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. PHOTOGRAPHER:
FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP
With the anointment
of Prince
Mohammed bin Salman
as heir to the
Saudi throne, any
doubts over the
continuation of
policies that have shaken
up the Middle East
have gone.
Western diplomats
already referred to the
his control over
most aspects of domestic,
foreign and defense
affairs. His elevation
ends a
behind-the-scenes struggle for power
and answers the
question of what would
happen to his plans
for Saudi Arabia when
King Salman, now
81, dies or steps aside.
The most ambitious
of these, Vision 2030,
seeks to
recalibrate the economy to end the
country’s
near-total dependence on oil
revenue. But
internationally, there are also
ramifications.
Saudi Arabia's Shake-Up
Last month, the
prince again raised the
stakes in the
regional rivalry with Iran,
saying that dialog
was “impossible" as they
fight a proxy war
in Yemen. He also led a
multi-nation effort
to isolate neighboring
Qatar, causing a
rift among fellow
members of the Gulf
Cooperation Council.
That also looks set
to turn into another long
and potentially
fruitless test of wills as Iran
and Turkey come to
Qatar's aid.
“The switch offers
him the legitimacy and
consensus of
becoming the next king and
that will validate
his vision, his plans and his
policies,” said
Sami Nader, head of the
Beirut-based Levant
Institute for Strategic
Affairs. “There
were a lot of question marks
about the future of
Saudi Arabia and the
transition. Now
this debate has ended.”
Widely known as
MBS, he was made
crown prince just
after dawn in Riyadh,
displacing his
older cousin, Mohammed
bin Nayef, who was
also stripped of his
post as interior
minister in charge of
domestic security
forces and
counter-terrorism
policy.
The move was
neither a shock nor a coup,
and it means he
could be running the
kingdom for decades
to come. What's
more, his tough
approach to the
intractable
problems of the Middle East
would appear to
mesh well with U.S.
President Donald
Trump, who visited
Saudi Arabia last
month.
Trump called the
new crown prince
Wednesday to offer
congratulations on
his elevation, the
White House said in a
statement. Trump
and the prince
“committed to close
cooperation to
advance our shared
goals of security,
stability, and
prosperity across the Middle
East and beyond,”
according to the
statement.
Prince Mohammed
also has come to
know Trump's
daughter Ivanka and her
husband Jared
Kushner, having dined
together twice, once in Washington and
once in
Riyadh.
What Next?
The problem is what
comes next. On
Tuesday, the U.S.
Department of State
questioned Saudi
Arabia's justification at
striking out at
Qatar by cutting it off from
diplomatic and
transport links.
The bombing
campaign in Yemen aimed
at destroying the
rebel Houthi forces that
Saudi Arabia sees
as proxies for Iran,
meanwhile, appears
to have no end in sight.
Two years later, it
has become bogged down,
bloody and
increasingly unpopular.
“On the foreign
policy side he's also
embroiled Saudi
Arabia in Yemen and Qatar
without an exit
strategy,” said James Dorsey,
senior fellow for
the Middle East and North
Africa at
Singapore’s Nanyang Technological
University. These
aren’t changes of direction
for Saudi Arabia,
but “what he has done is
to stretch up a
notch and put some very sharp
edges on it, and at
this point those are
backfiring.”
Why King Salman
chose this time to change
the line of
succession remains unclear. There
have been rumors
about his health and
alleged plans to
abdicate almost from the
moment he became
king, in January 2015. The
amount of power he
placed in the hands of his
relatively
inexperienced son had rankled older
members of the
royal family. And religious
conservatives were
always going to resist efforts
at gradual
liberalization in one of the world's
most repressive
societies.
MBS’s plans require
tearing up the social
contract that's
kept the family in power since
his grandfather,
Ibn Saud, founded the kingdom
in 1932. It was one
of state largesse in exchange
for obedience to an
austere autocracy.
That said, there's
a strong desire for change
among many Saudis.
Official statistics show
that half
the population is under 25. He
remains popular
among the young, even though
some Saudis are
becoming unhappy as subsidies
and public sector
jobs are withdrawn, according
to Dorsey.
That means his
controversial plans for selling off
parts of the state
energy behemoth Saudi Aramco
and other aspects
of Vision 2030 are also likely
to move forward,
according to Ayham Kamel,
director for the
Middle East and North Africa at
the Eurasia Group,
in London.
“Investors had doubts that Vision 2030 is real
or that the man behind it would actually be the
ruler of Saudi Arabia. Those doubts will largely
evaporate after this,” he said. Still, with
power
will come the responsibility for what goes wrong,
said Kamel, and “that part is going to be
fundamentally different.”
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