Call it shock and awe. Call it a purge. Call it a clean sweep. However it’s characterized, the mass arrest of some of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent royals, administrators, and tycoons last weekend has completely upended both the structure of the Saudi elite and the country’s way of doing business. It’s not exactly the Night of the Long Knives, as the luxurious Ritz-Carlton hotel in which the detainees are being held is hardly a nightmarish gulag. But it is the latest installment in an astonishingly rapid series of upheavals whereby all power is being concentrated in the hands of elderly King Salman and his 32-year-old son and heir, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MbS. [...]
It is the third front that is likely to be most challenging: the assertion and defense of Saudi interests throughout the Middle East, particularly with regard to an ever-more-powerful Iran. It’s instructive that last weekend also saw a Yemeni Houthi missile, possibly supplied by their Iranian backers, launched at Riyadh’s international airport and the Saudi-inspired resignation of Lebanon’s prime minister, Saad Hariri. Both Yemen and Lebanon are key proxy battlegrounds between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Yemen intervention, which has been heavily associated with MbS, who was serving as defense minister when it was launched, appears to have become a politically damaging and militarily unproductive quagmire. There are reports that MbS is looking for a way out, but the missile attack has been characterized by Saudi officials as an Iranian “act of war” against the Kingdom. [...]
Some critics regard all of Saudi Arabia’s bold new foreign policy initiatives, particularly as directed by MbS, as a series of spectacular failures, including the campaign to pressure Qatar into changing its foreign policy and abandoning its support for Islamist groups. However, while the Yemen war has not gone well, the outcome remains to be determined. The Qatar project was always discussed as a long-term one rather than with any expectation of a quick resolution and there’s still every reason to suspect that, in the medium-term, Doha will find no alternative but to seek a resolution largely on Riyadh’s terms. The campaign to roll back Iranian influence in the Arab world is much more complicated, and depends on many factors beyond Riyadh’s control, not least of them the role of the United States. It is on this front that MbS appears most vulnerable to a widespread conclusion that he has consolidated power without achieving the minimum necessary results. At the very least, a sense that Saudi Arabia is putting up a spirited defense of its interests in the face of creeping Iranian hegemony would be required to avoid the perception of failure.
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