With plenty spoken of the Arab in this month, I must first begin with a solemn, if painstakingly inadequate sense of having been right in my first assertions of the kingdom's already heralded third-generation monarch. And just as the scions and concrete checks of liberal democracy have gone into stagnation at home, we ought well observe the relation between the good, the liberal and the democratic as fickle and not - at all - the same thing.
Anyways, this bin Salman (the patronymic being key) will be the next king, a statement so certain that he might as well be called - and is indeed treated as if he were - king in all but name, and custodian in fact of the two holy mosques, the foremost treasure of the Sauds once the oil is used up or expunged from the global economy. While his program has been reform
How much influence, we can ask at first, does he hold? His father, it should be said, served already under the eldest (surviving) brother King Saud (numbers are superfluent) as governor of the Riyadh province in the 1950s. A veteran player in this game of princes - or emirs - and by necessity approaching death must have weakened his spirit and prestige, if not (as is so very popular to assume) his mind. And with the old scion and master gone, this prince must manoeuver by his own path. He certainly seemed to have done that fateful day in 2018, when issuing a bloody (if nothing else) writ of horror to the world; this fate will befall any so harsh a critic as this Jamal, without the kingdom of the Saud and Al Wahhab, as - very well known - within.
This cannot entirely be true, of course. While repression in previous years - Faysal, not necessarily Abdullah - has never been gentle or subscribing to the proclamation of 1945 which, in earnest, the old warrior officially decried, it has been soft-spoken in its dealings with the greater, outer world, and confined not only to the kingdom's very established borders - the defeat of the Ikhwan that had ensured their power, ensured that - and often erratic rather than bone-chilling. Reactionary politics may be softer, or less hard in its repression, but while the peace of the period inaugurated in February 1929 and enforced by the oil wealth discovered in the the first years of the new kingdom which followed, nourished in the following decade, is now certainly over and closed, a creaking hinge to the screams of the martyrdom in old Constantinople. And as the great Guinness spoke, though not in Lawrence in Arabia, that a strike from power for the destruction of this foe would in fact make him immortal, has so far proven satisfyingly truthful, if not shattering the order that the bleating of the Arab Spring as well failed to challenge.
Also the bounty of the desert kingdom... at least for a few more years. One of many proposals, focused on attracting the kaffir, has been to convert these seaside oil drilling platforms into tourist attractions.
What, then, can possibly replace it? The great century of the Sauds, inaugurated in the 1920s with bloody battles against the Jabal Shammer and the moderate - we must presume, out of fear for the predominance of our worldview - Hashemites of old Arabia; the old aristocracy, if we are to relieve by omission the Sauds from that insult, is now definitely coming to an end. And while father has seen the intricacies and demands of dynastic succession for long enough to solve it, that was a legacy too. Imagine, for ninety years, such fates, and how good a promise it would have seemed when the last blood had been spilled. Now, as with everything monarchy, it will be worthless unless consolidated for longer - and this much is known to him, and his many disgruntled uncles and cousins, if not much else.
The petrodollar economy has been most dramatically introduced into a burgeoning stock market, now culled yet again but to the benefit of this yet oil-and-gas-rich tyrant, in order to replace its core feature by the new. These investments are indeed drastic, hopeful and even innovatory, but as with the wealthy man of decadence and consumption, any strategic move must be weighted in light of the mind that places it's needs, as well as its ambition. And a near-century of gluttony has made the needs of these kings, pressing as they may be within the close of this decade and the kingdom's centenary in 2032 under King Muhammed, now perhaps the First. Dented and dulled, packed with the audacity of youth - that force which, we are well informed, is so strong both within and without, and now demonstrated to its full extent - is less a recipe for success as the judicious, yet self-sacrificing - voice of experience. Of this Muhammad I has naught, except for the second-hand smoke he has inhaled and the rigorous studies he hasn't endured in the school of government and administration (being, to what extent he may be called what he wants to be, a soldier, a military man) except for the men - and, yes, few women - in his ranks.
Litmus test as this may be, the way he responded with the 2017 purge to the snatching of Khashoggi's life in 2018, and the momentous decision of father to keep the cub in the pathway of power. From this course, he may hardly be dislodged - the the defence ministry which was, cleverly, the Sudairi's bounty for its many years of growth, the staircase pressing the heels of Salman. Now the pup must be key in reading his future path into the desert... and possibly out from it.
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