John Quiggin Walks the Web of the Future and Examines the House of Saud
JQ:
After the Sauds: The downfall of the Gaddafi dictatorship now seems certain, despite brutal and bloody attempts at repression. The failure of these attempts kills off what was briefly the conventional wisdom, that dictatorships in the region can hold on if they “don’t blink“. At this point, Gaddafi and his remaining supporters will be lucky if they can make it to The Hague for their trials.... Now a new conventional wisdom seems to be emerging... while dictatorships (more accurately perhaps, tyrannies, in the classical sense of monarchs who have seized their thrones with no prior hereditary claim) are doomed, but that monarchies can survive with cosmetic concessions. In particular, on this analysis, the US relationship with the House of Saud can go on more or less as before.
There’s an element of truth here, but the central claim is wishful thinking
The element of truth is that the Arab monarchies have good prospects of survival if they can manage the transition to constitutional monarchy. And it makes sense for them to do so. After all, a constitutional monarch gets to live, literally, like a king, without having to worry about boring stuff like budgets and foreign affairs. And, in the modern context, the risk that such a setup will be overthrown by a military coup, as happened to quite a few of the postcolonial constitutional monarchs, is much diminished. By contrast, there’s no such thing as a constitutional dictatorship or tyranny and no way to make the transition from President-for-Life to constitutional monarch....
[T]he general point is valid enough. But it doesn’t yield the kind of conclusion implied by the conventional wisdom. The first big difficulty is with the assumption that the monarchs can retain sufficient power to be useful allies of the kind US foreign policy has traditionally sought.... That seems unlikely to me. Monarchs who want to survive should be looking to transform themselves into ornamental figureheads/elder statesmen, not just sacking their existing governments but holding free elections to pick new ones and handing over effective power. That shouldn’t be too hard in, say, Morocco or Jordan, but it will imply that existing relationships with the kings of those countries will be about as valuable as close personal ties with Queen Beatrix.... The other big problem is that this can’t easily be done in Saudi Arabia. There are not even the forms of a constitutional government to begin with. Worse, the state is not so much a monarchy as an aristocracy/oligarchy saddled with 7000 members of the House of Saud, and many more of the hangers-on that typify such states. These people have a lot to lose, and nothing to gain, from any move in the direction of democracy.
The absence of any kind of organised opposition may allow the Sauds to hang on through the current crisis, but assuming that democratisation is successful elsewhere, the regime will stand out as an indefensible medieval anachronism.... I’d put the life expectancy of the regime in months or maybe years, but not in decades. In particular, it’s hard to imagine the monarchy outlasting the current King, Abdullah, aged 88 (according to Wikipedia, his brother and heir aged 82, enjoys the flattering title “Prince of Thieves“).
What would the Middle East be like, if Arabia were no longer ruled by the Sauds? No doubt experts have written on this, but a cursory Google didn’t find any, so it’s open for blog speculation....
Saudi Arabia has already ceased to play the central role it once held in oil markets.... If the downfall of the Sauds were chaotic, output might fall, and world prices rise. But as far as oil consumers are concerned, what you lose on the short-term roundabouts you gain on the long-term swings. Arabian oil is very easy to extract, so sooner or later, all of it will be....
The conventional ‘realist’ view is that Saudi Arabia counterbalances Iran.... I think this is silly. Anyone can see that the Iranian Basij are the same as the goons used by dictatorships elsewhere in the region. They managed to beat pro-democracy protestors last time, but it will be more difficult to pull that off again....
[W]hile Saudi Arabia has not exactly been friendly to Israel, it has been more subject to US influence than any likely successor regime will be. But again, the big effect for Israel will be the demonstration effect as more and more dictatorships and absolute monarchies fall. Why should Palestinians, alone in the region, be denied a democratic government and recognised international boundaries?
Finally, there’s the US.... [T]here are plenty of examples (Indonesia, Phillipines) suggesting that the successor regimes won’t necessarily be hostile.... Uncounted billions (counting Iraq, trillions) of dollars have been spent on the premise that the US has a vital interest in determining political outcomes in the Middle East. Yet in the current upsurge the US Administration has been reduced to the role of a bystander at a sporting event of which they don’t know the rules....
More than any other state in the region, and perhaps in the world, Saudi Arabia is a creation of US policy. A democratic Arabia, if it emerges, will be just another moderately problematic trading partner. After the Sauds, there will be no real reason for the US to have a Middle East policy, just as it no longer has, in any effective sense, a Latin America or Europe policy.
