WorldAffairs: Saudi Arabia: Mecca is empty + Oil is Cheap

Now that the global economy is mostly on hold, the demand for oil has dropped dramatically, destroying the market and threatening countries whose economies depend on selling it. Saudi Arabia and Russia have been engaged in an oil-price war to keep the markets in their favor. Saudi Arabia saw another economic loss when the kingdom decided to limit access to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Meanwhile, violence in some of the most at risk countries rages on. In Yemen, preventable diseases like cholera already threaten people with limited access to healthcare and basic necessities. Would a global ceasefire help war-torn countries like Yemen manage their coronavirus outbreaks? On this week’s episode, we talk with experts from around the world about Yemen, oil and Saudi Arabia.

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Bloomberg: Liberated Saudi Youth Wonder Where All the Wahhabis Have Gone

Today the muttawa are nowhere in sight. What’s visible instead is a younger generation of tech-savvy Saudis fired up by a sense of national, rather than religious, identity. “Saudi identity is us. The Wahhabi identity is not us,” says Mashael al-Baoud, who’s in her 30s. She’s standing behind her display of green crocodile-skin charms in the shape of Saudi Arabia and mobile phone cases embossed with the image of the crown prince or the national emblem, two crossed swords and a palm tree. “They have vanished,” she says. “Since they’re not here, we’re showing who we really are.”

But the contrast with the religiously repressed old kingdom is still dramatic. From cinemas to the lively activity in Riyadh’s King Abdullah Park to a top-floor hookah lounge in Jeddah, businesses have sprung up to cash in on the new tolerance. There’s even talk among some Saudis of the alcohol ban being lifted, possibly before the nation hosts the Group of 20 next year. What comes next depends on whether the economy can make enough strides to meet the expectations of a country where three-quarters of the population, including the crown prince himself, is under the age of 35. While they’re excited by the new liberalization, most young Saudis have one nagging concern: Where have the Wahhabis gone, and what are the chances of them coming back? [...]

And among the young, there are a few who are outright against the changes or worry the kingdom is moving too fast. Saudi Arabia is potentially at the “gates of too far,” says Zaid, the man looking for funding for his sandboarding business. From the eastern city of Dammam, he spent seven years in the U.S. and graduated in chemical engineering before returning home in 2017. “The whole society has loosened up. Loosening up is good, but we don’t want to take it to an extreme. You have to keep your culture.”

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Independent: As Saudi Arabia grows desperate, this could be the beginning of the end of the war in Yemen

The Yemen war is about to come to an end. A Saudi official admitted this week that for the first time since 2016, Riyadh is in talks with the Houthi rebels. The talks have surfaced despite the Houthis being in charge of the capital Sanaa and the other most populous parts in Northern Yemen, which indicates that the Saudis are coming to terms with this status quo. The radical approach of effectively flushing the Houthis out of the north has been abandoned. The new approach of accepting the Houthis as part of the new post-war reality in Yemen, on the other hand, is much more sophisticated. [...]

Instead of the endless fighting, Saudi Arabia is trying to convince the Houthis to sever ties with its regional rival, Iran. After all, all the Houthis want is legitimacy of their new strategic posture in Yemen. This, in their view, must be cited in a similar power-sharing agreement that guarantees their share in a federation-like new system that includes president Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi’s government and separatists in the south. [...]

The attack on the Saudi Aramco oil installations in September, which knocked out half of the Kingdom’s production, was a tipping point. This week, Aramco launched an initial public offering (IPO) to be listed on the local stock market, abandoning Mohamed bin Salman’s original plan to list it on overseas markets. The escalation with Iran began to have a direct effect on the Saudi economy.

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VOX: John Bolton left because Trump wouldn’t let him start a war (Sept 10, 2019)

When Bolton joined the administration in April 2018, the worry was that the arch nationalist hawk would convince the war-averse Trump to see the world as he did. Here was a guy who for decades called for bombing North Korea and Iran, exercising unilateral American power around the world, and cutting tethers to international institutions.

Bolton actually had a thought-out worldview that in many ways mirrored Trump’s. The question was if the top aide could channel the president’s instincts into actions that he has long wanted an administration to embrace. [...]

He has certainly threatened conflict before, going so far as to risk nuclear war with North Korea to persuade Kim Jong Un to come the negotiating table (remember “fire and fury?”). And he’s more willing to use military force than Obama, twice bombing Syria and escalating airstrikes on ISIS and other terrorists worldwide. He’s even continued and augmented US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.

Still, Trump has walked back every chance he’s had to escalate to the highest level tensions with adversaries. That was always going to put Trump’s “America First” in conflict with Bolton’s “America Everywhere.”

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Foreign Policy: Mohammed bin Salman Is Making Muslims Boycott Mecca

In late April, Libya’s most prominent Muslim Sunni cleric, Grand Mufti Sadiq al-Ghariani, called for all Muslims to boycott the hajj—the obligatory pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca.In late April, Libya’s most prominent Muslim Sunni cleric, Grand Mufti Sadiq al-Ghariani, called for all Muslims to boycott the hajj—the obligatory pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca. He went so far as to claim that anyone who embarked on a second pilgrimage was conducting “an act of sin rather than a good deed.” The reasoning behind the boycott is the suggestion that boosting Saudi Arabia’s economy through pilgrimage continues to fuel arms purchases and direct attacks on Yemen—and indirectly Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Sudan, and Algeria. Ghariani added that investment in the hajj would “help Saudi rulers to carry out crimes against our fellow Muslims.”

Ghariani is not the first prominent Muslim scholar to support a ban on the hajj. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, also a Sunni cleric and vocal critic of Saudi Arabia, announced a fatwa in August last year banning the pilgrimage, instead stating, “Seeing Muslims feeding the hungry, treating the sick, and sheltering the homeless are better viewed by Allah than spending money on the hajj.” [...]

Throughout the Middle East and in other Muslim-majority nations, there has been growing concern over the slaying of Khashoggi, as well as the rising death toll in Yemen, which is expected to reach 230,000 by 2020 through the often indiscriminate airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition—which has bombed hospitals, funerals, children’s school buses, and weddings—in what has been described as the “worst man-made humanitarian crisis of our time” by U.N. officials. Saudi Arabia’s truculent approach to the Yemen war has isolated itself within its own coalition; even the Emirati government has shown some discomfort toward the Saudi approach.

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The New York Review of Books: Reckless in Riyadh

America’s delicate treatment of the Saudis persisted: for example, while the two countries were targeting terrorists, Washington said little about the enormous Saudi NGOs that spread their ultraconservative Wahhabi Islam around the globe. As the scholar Will McCants remarked, when it comes to Islamist extremism, “the Saudis are both the arsonists and the firefighters.” Still, the burgeoning ties among spies produced real benefits. At least two plots that could have killed significant numbers of Americans during the Obama administration were disrupted because of Saudi tips. American officials murmured approval when the Saudis took small steps to alleviate the plight of the country’s Shia minority or to promote women’s education and participation in the workforce, but their criticism of human rights abuses—torture and other mistreatment of government critics, harsh punishment of migrant workers, and mass beheadings, whether of Shia “terrorists” or common criminals—remained muted at best. [...]

At first, Vision 2030 gave MBS a real sheen. Donald Trump broke with tradition and made the first overseas trip of his presidency to Riyadh instead of visiting democratic allies. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote, “I never thought I’d live long enough to write this sentence: The most significant reform process underway anywhere in the Middle East today is in Saudi Arabia.” He praised MBS for rolling back the power of the country’s clerical establishment and proclaimed, “Not a single Saudi I spoke to here over three days expressed anything other than effusive support for [his] anticorruption drive.” During a visit to the US in April 2018, MBS was feted by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and, at a dinner party hosted by Rupert Murdoch, entertained by the actors Michael Douglas and Morgan Freeman, before having an audience with Oprah Winfrey.

The sheen faded quickly, though, as it became clear that MBS’s notion of reform owed less to Western norms than to Xi Jinping and the Chinese policy of pushing for economic growth without permitting the expansion of political freedoms. There has been a degree of limited liberalization, but in MBS’s view, reforms must be granted by the crown, not elicited, let alone demanded, by his subjects. Hence the imprisonment of women who pressed for the right to drive and for a relaxation of the “guardianship laws” that give men control over the lives of the women in their families—the very measures that MBS had endorsed and, to some extent, enacted. Despite the reforms, there has also been an increase in the pace of executions. Several are now planned for well-known Sunni clerics who, though previously incarcerated for opposing royal policies, were viewed as too popular to be treated more harshly. [...]

Equally astonishing has been the kingdom’s open embrace of Israel. In 2015 a retired Saudi general, Anwar Eshki, participated in a discussion of Israeli and Saudi mutual interests with Dore Gold, a right-wing Israeli former diplomat, at the Council on Foreign Relations’ office in Washington; in 2017 Saudi media broadcast a lengthy interview with then Israeli chief of staff Gadi Eizenkot. In November 2018 Israeli media leaked a diplomatic cable from the country’s foreign ministry instructing its embassies worldwide to advocate for Saudi foreign policy objectives, especially vis-à-vis Iran. And Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has defended MBS for his involvement in Khashoggi’s murder—in which the Saudi go-between with Israel, General Ahmed Asiri, was implicated. It has also been widely reported that the Trump administration expects the Saudis to fund an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement; according to MBS, the Palestinians should either accept it or “shut up.”

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In These Times: Here’s Exactly Who’s Profiting from the War on Yemen

Under President Barack Obama’s administration and, now, President Donald Trump’s, the United States has put its military might behind the Saudi-led coalition, waging a war without congressional authorization. That war has devastated Yemen’s infrastructure, destroyed or damaged more than half of Yemen’s health facilities, killed more than 8,350 civilians, injured another 9,500 civilians, displaced 3.3 million people, and created a humanitarian disaster that threatens the lives of millions as cholera and famine spread through the country. [...]

The war in Yemen has been particularly lucrative for General Dynamics, Boeing and Raytheon, which have received hundreds of millions of dollars in Saudi weapons deals. All three corporations have highlighted business with Saudi Arabia in their reports to shareholders. Since the war began in March 2015, General Dynamics’ stock price has risen from about $135 to $169 per share, Raytheon’s from about $108 to more than $180, and Boeing’s from about $150 to $360. [...]

According to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, the United States may not authorize arms exports to governments that consistently engage in “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” The Arms Export Control Act of 1976 stipulates that exported weapons may only be used for a country’s defense.[...]

Over the past decade, Saudi Arabia has ordered U.S.-made offensive weapons, surveillance equipment, transportation, parts and training valued at $109.3 billion, according to an In These Times analysis of Pentagon announcements, contracts announced on defense industry websites and arms transfers documented by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. That arsenal is now being deployed against Yemen.

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Vox: Congress passes historic resolution to end US support for Saudi-led war in Yemen

The war in Yemen, directed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (or MBS, as he’s commonly referred to in Washington), has killed more than 50,000 people and left more than 20 million Yemenis in need of humanitarian assistance. [...]

That means the US is partially culpable for the death and destruction of Saudi’s enemies in the war — the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels — and the thousands of civilians who have been killed. In one particularly egregious incident, a coalition warplane bombed a school bus full of children last August with an American-made bomb, killing at least 40 of them.

The Yemen resolution invokes the War Powers Resolution of 1973 (WPR), which gives Congress the power to direct a president to remove troops involved in “hostilities” abroad if there has been no formal “declaration of war or specific statutory authorization” from Congress.

Not only does it serve as a censure of Saudi’s conduct in the war, it’s also a clear check on executive power; if the US wants to be involved in a war in Yemen, Congress has to declare it. The Republican-led Senate passed the resolution in March, and it now heads to Trump’s desk. The White House says the president plans to veto it.

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Vox: Pope Francis’s mass in the United Arab Emirates was historic — and complicated

UAE officials say that Francis’s public mass at Zayed Sports City Stadium in the capital city of Abu Dhabi drew about 4,000 Muslims and about 135,000 people total — many of them Catholic migrants from places such as the Philippines and South America. They’re part of a large migrant community in the oil-rich country that works building gleaming new towers or as domestic help, often under harsh or discriminatory conditions.[...]

The UAE is more tolerant of different religions than some of its neighbors in the Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia. Though the UAE’s constitution establishes Islam as the country’s official religion, it also “guarantees freedom of worship as long as it does not conflict with public policy or morals,” according to a 2017 State Department report. Christian churches as well as Hindu and Sikh temples operate on land donated by the ruling family, the State Department report notes.

But the country is still far from a bastion of religious freedom. There are strict laws against proselytizing by non-Muslims; blasphemy and converting from Islam are strictly prohibited and those who do so face harsh punishments, potentially including the death penalty. Anti-Semitic literature and sentiment is prevalent, particularly on social media, and discrimination against followers of the minority Shi’a sect of Islam is not unheard of.[...]

Pope Francis did speak out against conflict in the region, including the war in Yemen. On Monday, in front of an audience of Emirati and other religious leaders, Pope Francis signed a statement on “human fraternity,” promoting peace among nations, races, and religions, with Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Egypt’s Al-Azhar mosque, who hosted Pope Francis in 2017.

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Politico: EU’s Iran fight is not about Iran (or Trump)

Infuriated by Italy's induction into an expanded version of the so-called E3 club — the trio of France, Germany and the United Kingdom that helped negotiate the nuclear deal along with the European External Action Service — Spain has blocked proposed language on Iran intended for approval by EU governments. [...]

The Council conclusions aim to walk a diplomatic tightrope, by not raising any doubts about the EU's commitment to the nuclear deal despite the withdrawal of the U.S., but also holding Iran to account for a continuing pattern of military meddling in the Middle East and at least two recent assassination plots in Denmark and the Netherlands. [...]

The spat stems from an effort by the EU last year to address other concerns about Iran, including its role in wars in Yemen and Syria, without creating the perception that the discussions were taking place in the same format that led to development of the nuclear accord. The nuclear deal was brokered by the E3+3 — the EU, France, Germany and the U.K. plus Russia, China and the United States.

For the new framework, the EU established the E4 — adding Italy. But that move was seen by some EU countries, including Spain, as a bit of home-country favoritism by Mogherini, a former Italian foreign minister. Others saw it as an effort to appease Rome, which was annoyed at being excluded from the E3 while Berlin was included.

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Foreign Policy: Defenders of Human Rights Are Making a Comeback

Yet there was also considerable pushback against authoritarianism. Malaysian voters ousted their corrupt prime minister, Najib Razak, the latest representative of a ruling coalition that had been in power for almost six decades, in favor of a coalition running on an agenda of human rights reform. In the Maldives, voters rejected their autocratic president, Abdulla Yameen. In Armenia, whose government was mired in corruption, Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan had to step down amid massive protests. Ethiopia, under popular pressure, replaced a long-abusive government with a new one led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who has embarked on an impressive reform agenda. And, of course, U.S. voters in the midterm elections for the House of Representatives seemed to rebuke Trump’s divisive policies.

In many cases, particularly in Central Europe, the public led the resistance in the streets. protested Orban’s moves to shut Central European University, an academic bastion of liberal inquiry and thought, and to impose a “slave law” to compensate for workers fleeing Large crowds in Budapest Orban’s “illiberal democracy” by authorizing extended overtime with pay delayed up to three years. Tens of thousands of Poles repeatedly took to the streets to defend their courts from the ruling party’s attempts to undermine their independence. Czech and Romanian leaders also faced large anti-corruption protests. [...]

The Human Rights Council made some major advances. For example, the possibility of a Chinese, Russian, or even American veto at the U.N. Security Council appeared to doom any effort to refer Myanmar to the International Criminal Court for its army’s crimes against humanity that sent 700,000 Rohingya fleeing for their lives to Bangladesh. In response, the Human Rights Council, where there is no veto, stepped in to create an investigative mechanism to preserve evidence, identify those responsible, and build cases for prosecution once a tribunal becomes available. That effort won overwhelmingly, with 35 countries in favor and only three against (seven abstained), sending the signal that these atrocities cannot be committed with impunity.[...]

For the first time, the Human Rights Council condemned the severe repression in Venezuela under President Nicolás Maduro. A resolution led by a group of Latin American nations won by a vote of 23 to seven with 17 abstentions. The U.S. government’s departure from the council made it easier for resolution sponsors to show they were addressing Venezuela as a matter of principle rather than as a tool of Washington’s ideology. A group of Latin American governments led by Argentina also organized in the context of the Human Rights Council the first joint statement, signed by 47 countries, on the worsening repression in Nicaragua, as President Daniel Ortega responded with violence to growing protests against his repressive rule.

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The Guardian: Senate vote on Yemen rebukes Trump administration's pro-Saudi stance

The Republican-majority chamber voted 63-37 to allow the measure, which invokes the War Powers Resolution, stopping all involvement of US armed forces in the Yemen war, to proceed to the floor of the Senate for a vote, expected next week.

The bipartisan measure was introduced by the independent senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Republican senator Mike Lee and Democrat Chris Murphy. It may yet be significantly amended, it would not stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, and would face an uphill challenge to be passed by the House of Representatives.

But the moment represented a highly symbolic act of defiance, coming a few hours after the administration had wheeled out two of its biggest guns, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and defence secretary, James Mattis, to brief the entire Senate on the essential importance to US national security of US support for the Saudi-led coalition.

It also marked an assertion of Congress’s constitutional prerogative to decide whether the country goes to war – and an expression of alarm over the actions of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. [...]

However, the Democratic senator Dick Durbin emerged from the morning briefing in the Senate’s secure chamber, used for classified discussions, saying that Mattis and Pompeo had told the senators that the White House had blocked the CIA director’s attendance.  

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The Atlantic: Watching Britain’s Influence Shrink in Real Time

Some within Britain’s diplomatic corps, however, have warned that the U.K.’s global role is already not what it used to be, and stands to deteriorate even further after it leaves the EU on March 29, 2019. “We’re not the same country we were in 1945,” Harriet O’Brien, a British diplomat based in New York, says in the BBC series. “In some ways, we don’t have as much influence in the world. So we do, I think, punch above our weight.” [...]

And when it comes to present and future world crises, British leaders have publicly grappled with not being able to command the same foreign-policy authority it once had. “We have to be careful not to overestimate our influence,” Hunt told the House of Commons last week when asked about Britain’s draft resolution calling for a cease-fire in the ongoing war in Yemen.

The last time Britain seemed so unsure of its place in the world, it had lost its empire after World War II. Then the American statesman Dean Acheson warned London against overestimating its power alone. “Britain’s attempt to play a separate power role … apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being the head of a Commonwealth which has no political structure or unity or strength and enjoys a fragile and precarious economic relationship,” Acheson said in 1962. “This role is about played out.”

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The Atlantic: The Arab Winter Is Coming

To go back in time, as it were, the counter-revolutionary bloc—Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, and their allies in Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere—believes the future must be more authoritarian than ever. Based on extensive conversations with senior Arab officials, I’ve found that the dominant outlook could be summed up as follows: a heavy-handed domestic and regional approach may well carry risks, but the alternative is worse.

If the autocrats lost control over the masses in 2011, the thinking goes, that was because they did not go far enough in their repression. Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak gave some space to the Muslim Brotherhood, political activists, and critical media. Look what happened to him.[...]

Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, for example, declared in 2017: “We will not waste 30 years trying to deal with extremist ideas; we will eradicate them here and now.” In defense of moderation, he proposed simply stomping out religious radicals. (In American terms: Shock and awe rather than hearts and minds.) And MbS was probably using the term “extremist” conveniently; the Saudis have since designated as terrorist organizations certain religious groups, such as the International Union of Muslim Scholars, broadly perceived as mainstream.[...]

For counter-revolutionary regimes, the top priority is to prevent a repeat of the 2011 uprisings, and they believe the best way to do that is to stay the repressive course. Which is why recent talk that MbS was doomed, or that he could be replaced after the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was out of touch with the broad reality of the region. MbS is seen as a key member of the pack of new leaders remaking the Middle East, and the pack will stand by him. This dynamic also informs the continuing blockade of Qatar as well as the war in Yemen; humanitarian concerns simply don’t matter next to the perceived efficacy of aggression.

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Bloomberg: Murder Puts Brake on Saudi Prince’s Meteoric Rise

One Arab diplomat said Prince Mohammed is beginning to look “dangerous” for western leaders who are now rethinking doing business with a 33-year-old ruler whose loose-cannon foreign policy has surprised allies and enemies alike.

Even his supporters say privately there will now have to be a period of change as Saudi Arabia tries to rebuild the confidence of allies burned by the kind of unpredictability that had been alien to its foreign policy. And, as one senior Arab official put it, the only pressure that counts is American pressure.[...]

“Khashoggi’s murder has given the U.S. greater leverage over Saudi Arabia,” said Kamran Bokhari, senior lecturer on Middle Eastern geopolitics at the University of Ottawa’s Professional Development Institute. “Therefore they are now more receptive than ever before to outside influence over their policies. To what extent the Trump administration will use this opportunity to shape behavioral change remains to be seen.”[...]

“After the Khashoggi case, the task of selling Vision 2030 has become even harder,” Soltvedt said. For investors, the balance between risks and rewards has shifted, he said. “In other words, the risk of reputational damage and negative PR now weighs more heavily.”

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The New Yorker: In the Wake of Khashoggi’s Disappearance, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Is Pushed to the Brink

Indeed, if there is any lesson to be learned from this terrible affair, it’s how blind so much of official Washington and the American press were to M.B.S.’s true nature. When the crown prince visited the United States earlier this year, he was fêted in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and, of course, by the Trump White House, as a messiah—in the mold of Gorbachev or Gandhi. “Historic night it was,’’ Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson, the actor, wrote, on Instagram, of a dinner with M.B.S. hosted by Rupert Murdoch at his vineyard in Bel Air.

It was the Trump White House that went the furthest, basing its entire Middle East strategy on the vision and maturity of the thirty-three-year-old monarch. As I detailed in my profile of M.B.S., earlier this year, Jared Kushner, sitting down with aides in the White House, unfurled a map of the Middle East shortly after Inauguration Day and wrung his hands at the dire state of the region. He dubbed M.B.S., still the deputy crown prince at the time, “the change agent,” the man who would save Saudi Arabia from otherwise certain doom. Kushner threw the Administration’s support behind him. Not long after, and not least because of the White House’s boost, M.B.S.’s chief rivals, including his cousin, the crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef, were dispatched. It was ugly, but no one seemed to mind. President Trump’s visit to the Saudi kingdom—his first trip abroad—was an orgy of mutual admiration and monarchical excess. [...]

M.B.S. told his countrymen that, in cracking down on corruption, he was doing the dirty work on their behalf. But there was no luxury that he denied himself. In 2015, while vacationing in the South of France, he bought a yacht, the Serene, from a Russian vodka tycoon, for five hundred and fifty million dollars. He bought a château west of Paris, with a cinema and a moat with a submerged glass chamber for viewing carp. And, in 2017, he reportedly spent four hundred and fifty million dollars on “Salvator Mundi,’’ the Leonardo da Vinci portrait of Jesus Christ, which he donated to the new branch of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, the fiefdom of his fellow-prince M.B.Z. [...]

The question now confronting Saudi leaders—and American ones—is whether M.B.S. can and should become king. At a glance, it seems unlikely that King Salman would part with M.B.S., long his favorite son. The humiliation for the House of Saud might be too much to endure. Even if Salman were inclined to remove M.B.S. from the line of succession, who could replace him? Nearly all of M.B.S.’s rivals have been imprisoned or humiliated.

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Haaretz: Will the Khashoggi 'Murder' Bring Down Saudi’s Crown Prince?

The 33-year-old Mohammed bin Salman has gotten away with quite a lot since his elevation just 16 months ago to the role of heir-apparent to the throne. While praised as the reformist behind measures like allowing women to drive, he detained dozens of members of the royal family and top business leaders at the Ritz Carlton until they agreed to pay financial settlements for unspecified “violations;” has arrested and imprisoned scores of human rights and women’s rights activists; pursued a war in neighboring Yemen where routine flouting of human rights and international battlefield rules have led to the death of at least 10,000 civilians and displaced an estimated 2 million; blockaded and isolated the neighboring sultanate of Qatar, and is yet to complete contracts binding him to a commitment to $110 billion in defense purchasesfrom the United States. [...]

Riyadh certainly has never been known for its respect for human rights. But even Saudi Arabia hasn’t typically operated in such an unrestrained way. What’s changed? Part of it is a new generation of leaders trying to muscle their way into power. Still, it may be too early to predict with certainty whether this new-look leadership will revert to the royals’ more trusted old style of slow, evolutionary progress toward goals designed to preserve rather than shatter the status quo. MbS, it would seem, may simply be unready to assume the reins of power. [...]

Already, MbS has lost some key allies or supporters who should be central to his aims. His vaunted Davos in the Desert conference this month was supposed to play a key role in launching his Vision 2030 development plan. But in the days since the disappearance of Khashoggi and continued Saudi foot-dragging in uncovering the source and methods of the attack, the withdrawal of major sponsors and leading executives have left the entire enterprise in limbo.

Whether MbS is actually the individual able to take up the challenge of reforming Saudi Arabia and leading it is becoming increasingly questionable. The fact is, he rules neither alone nor unchallenged. There is a process and there are certain red lines that MbS may have crossed in the Khashoggi affair if he is to win the support of leading royals. Perhaps the most important is not to call too much unfortunate attention to yourself or the kingdom. Saudi Arabia has spent quite literally a king’s ransom donations to leading institutions in major Western nations, especially the United States, to make sure that this image is never irreparably tarnished.

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The Atlantic: The United States Could End the War in Yemen If It Wanted To

That war has long since devolved into a humanitarian catastrophe. The United Nations stopped counting its civilian death toll two years ago, when it hit 10,000. An independent estimate by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, which tracks conflicts worldwide, found that nearly 50,000 people, including combatants, died between January 2016 and July 2018. The war has also left more than 22 million people—75 percent of the population of Yemen, already one of the poorest countries in the world—in need of humanitarian aid.

As public anger over America’s role in the Saudi-led war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen has grown, Congress has slowly tried to exert pressure on America’s longtime allies to reduce civilian casualties. Last month, a bipartisan group of lawmakers included a provision in the defense spending bill requiring the Trump administration to certify that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are taking “demonstrable actions” to avoid harming civilians and making a “good faith” effort to reach a political settlement to end the war. Congress required the administration to make this certification a prerequisite for the Pentagon to continue providing military assistance to the coalition. This assistance, much of which began under the Obama administration, includes the mid-air refueling of Saudi and Emirati jets, intelligence assistance, and billions of dollars-worth of missiles, bombs, and spare parts for the Saudi air force. [...]

While the Saudis are quick to blame Iran for the war, several researchers, including Thomas Juneau, a professor at the University of Ottawa and a former analyst at Canada’s Department of National Defense, have shown that the Houthis did not receive significant support from Tehran before the Saudi intervention in 2015. Iran has stepped up military assistance to the Houthis since the war, and Hezbollah has begun sending military advisers to train the Yemeni rebels. But the costs of this assistance fall far short of those incurred by Saudi Arabia and its allies. For Iran, the Yemen conflict is a low-cost way to bleed its regional rival.

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Politico: Cuba on the Thames

Corbyn’s fate greatly depends on the unfolding Brexit drama, expected to climax in the coming weeks as the U.K. pushes for a deal before its scheduled exit in March 2019. But the impact of a Corbyn government, should he assume the reins of power, could be much more significant.

While the prospect of a Corbyn government would likely make post-Brexit trade relations with Europe more straightforward in the short term, predictions of a socialist London have already set alarm bells ringing in Washington, according to U.S. officials asked to draw up memos for the State Department in case of another snap election this year. [...]

Corbyn promised a Britain in which the rich would be more heavily taxed, utilities and the railways would be nationalized, the government would invest in 400,000 jobs focused on tackling climate change, and large companies would be forced to give workers stakes of up to 10 percent and pay annual dividends to staff. He signaled Labour would end British backing for Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen, immediately recognize a Palestinian state, and tilt firmly away from the U.S. as a key ally.[...]

In 2015, during Corbyn’s first conference, lobbyists were conspicuously thin on the ground, uncertain of how to influence the most socialist Labour leadership in modern history. This year, BP, Google, Visa, Bombardier and Fujitsu were all represented with stands at the conference floor. PwC, Hitachi, Novartis and Cisco all hosted or co-hosted fringe events, and numerous others sent lobbyists keen to fix up meetings with members of a potential government-in-waiting.

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The New York Review of Books: ‘I Can’t Believe I’m in Saudi Arabia’

For middle-class urban Saudis the social changes brought in by King Salman and his powerful son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, generally known as MBS, are significant. A movie theater has been built where men and women may sit together—the first film shown was Black Panther, which proved very popular. Women have been permitted to attend sporting events, albeit in single-sex areas, but the most important decree, introduced in 2016, may have been the one curtailing the powers of the mutaween. No longer can the men tasked with “promoting virtue and preventing vice” arrest women on the streets and whip them for failing to cover themselves adequately. Their job must be carried out “in a gentle and humane way.” Robbed of the powers they used to exert with such arbitrary cruelty, they have melted away. [...]

A decade ago, James Mann’s The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression (2007) examined how Western politicians and businesspeople “foster an elaborate set of illusions about China, centered on the belief that commerce will lead inevitably to political change and democracy.” China’s continuing economic expansion coupled with its repression of those who challenge Communist Party rule has provided an object lesson to other governments: it is perfectly possible to allow certain changes that improve your citizens’ lives without letting loose pesky “Western” ideas like civil rights and free elections. In Saudi Arabia, change is designed precisely to curtail political upheaval or a demand for democracy. After the Arab Spring, which saw youth uprisings across the Middle East, King Salman understood that he had to do something for the two thirds of the population who are under thirty. Vision 2030, the ambitious economic and social plan designed by his thirty-three-year-old son, is designed to do just that. [...]

By the logic of a Saudi Arabia rather than a China fantasy, however, there is no contradiction. MBS knows that if the kingdom is to diversify its economy and reduce its dependence on oil, women must become more productive, so they need to drive and not waste their earnings on a driver. He wanted everyone to understand that women were being allowed to drive not because they had campaigned for it, but because their rulers had issued a decree. The point was clear: civil disobedience will not bring results; changes will come only from submission to a benign monarch who will decide what is best. [...]

The war in Yemen has provided many such opportunities for the state to co-opt and neutralize both modernizers and traditionalists. It is not the first time Saudi Arabia has intervened in its impoverished neighbor, but now there is an added sectarian dimension: the Houthis, who seized control of the capital, Sanaa, in early 2015 were to some extent sponsored by Shia Iran, the regional rival to Sunni Saudi Arabia. “This new military interventionism immediately became popular among many Saudi constituences, from Islamists to liberals,” writes Al-Rasheed. “By amplifying the undoubtedly genuine Iranian threat, the Saudi regime invoked both nationalism and sectarianism.”

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