Franke: The Saudi Transformation
by MARK FRANKE
Saudi Arabia is a complex nation, containing a whole bunch of conquered Bedouin tribes content to live off the largess of the ruling house of al-Saud. Most of the nation’s workforce, which is limited by a general lack of work ethic among the aforesaid recipients of governmental transfer payments, is employed by the government and under rather relaxed work standards. What happens to this flow of benefits when the flow of oil revenues stops?
That is the question foremost on the mind of Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince and son of the current king. “MBS,” as he is universally known, who has big plans to modernize his nation by diversifying its economy. He also sees Saudi Arabia as a major player in world affairs and not merely an American dependency for aid and defense. He might just pull it off, as Wall Street Journal veteran Karen Elliott House suggests in the biography “The Man Who Would Be King: Mohammed bin Salman and the Transformation of Saudi Arabia” (Harper 2025, 250 pages plus notes, $24 hardcover at Amazon). House has covered Saudi Arabia since the 1970s so her take on this is worth noting.
It helps to understand how the government of Saudi Arabia works, or doesn’t as is often the case. The king is all-powerful, at least until he is overthrown. The present Saudi kingdom was established in 1932 by Abdul Aziz and has been ruled by his family ever since. Upon Abdul Aziz’s death in 1953, he was succeeded by first one son and then another in accord with tribal tradition. The current king, MBS’s father, is the last of Abdul Aziz’s sons so the throne will pass next to the grandsons’ generation. Grandson MBS has entrenched himself in power by hard line, often brutal, confrontations with other members of the al-Saud family who enjoyed a degree of power — and profit — sharing. That can get complicated when there are over 300 royal princes, all direct descendants of Abdul Aziz. MBS will be the next king . . . unless there is a coup, which isn’t likely given his control of most everything in Saudi Arabia.
House rehearses many of the sea changes ordered by an impatient, reform-minded MBS under his 2030 strategic plan. To achieve these goals, MBS had first to break the stranglehold of two important power centers, the royal princes and the Wahabi religious establishment. He achieved the first by imprisoning the princes in a luxury hotel until they signed over their wealth and resigned their governmental positions.
The Wahabi hierarchy was emasculated by MBS’s ordering the religious police off the streets where they served as a secret police force to enforce strict Muslim regulations. Societal rules were relaxed or abandoned, especially for women, a recurring theme of the book. Western-style entertainment offerings were opened for young Saudis.
That accomplished, MBS had to address fundamental societal and economic problems. As House describes it, Saudi Arabia operated like a first-class hotel with citizens checked in at birth and served by others (generally foreign workers) for life with the government picking up the tab. This sounds a lot like the woke agenda among American young people, doesn’t it? It wasn’t just the royal family who benefited, but all Saudis. The royals just benefited to a much higher level. In 2016, MBS removed these “benefits” from most of the al-Saud family.
House informs us of the extent of royal family largesse. There are more than 10,000 royal family members supported by a total family net worth of $1.4 trillion. At least there used to be. Much of that wealth has come under the control of King Salman, which means under the control of Mohammed bin Salman.
MBS had to address family political power in addition to the excessive benefits. There were three different military commands, each held by a prince from a different branch of the family to prevent coups. MBS removed each commander and consolidated everything military under his personal control.
Getting the economy under control has proven much more difficult. Saudis aren’t accustomed to doing real work or paying retail for staples like energy. MBS needs to walk a fine line between reform and his government’s accepted legitimacy.
House does an excellent job of walking readers through the dizzying maze of MBS projects and reforms, so many that it is nearly impossible to keep them all straight. She calls this his shotgun approach, trying to do everything at once. Perhaps a better analogy is throwing everything at the wall, hoping something will stick.
But the greatest threat to his success is the poor human rights record of his and his predecessors’ administrations. The religious police may have been defanged but Saudi Arabia is still a controlled society. No dissent is tolerated, and offenders have a tendency to simply disappear. High profile cases, such as the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, have made it difficult for MBS to maintain good relationships with western nations. The diplomatic gaffes with the Biden administration are parade examples of this.
All this global opprobrium has resulted in MBS’ courting of other powerful dictators in the world, particularly Russia and China. What this portends for the American-Saudi relationship, once a workable and practical friendship, is ominous. It isn’t just the oil, which the United States doesn’t really need anymore, but the loss of a friendly, rational state in a volatile Middle East that is the most unsettling.
House is partially sympathetic to MBS. She sees him as the best hope to moderate Islamic extremism, which of course is a good thing especially if he can keep the lid on the Middle East powder keg. The other side of the coin is Saudi Arabia’s movement away from its American dependency to an independent status, such independence based on close ties with America’s enemies. Will the strong arm rule of MBS, now crown prince but soon to be king, prove a stabilizing force for the geopolitical system or ultimately just one more point of escalation in a perilous world? Can the United States afford this ally to become an unreliable one?
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
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