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Sally. In the early hours of November 4th, 2017, Saudi Arabia changed forever.

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Across the country, princes, bureaucrats and businessmen who had long believed themselves above the law discovered that their immunity had evaporated.

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Charged with corruption, some were pulled from their beds,

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while others were summoned to non-existent meetings or detained as soon as their international flights touched down in the kingdom.

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Amongst them were Air Force generals, Navy admirals and three sons of former King Abdullah,

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including the commander of the Saudi Arabian National Guard.

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A former minister of finance and a governor of the central bank found themselves confined together with former ministers of commerce,

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planning and communications, along with three brothers of Osama bin Laden.

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Some three hundred prominent individuals were taken to Riyadh's Ritz Carlton Hotel,

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which was converted for the occasion into the world's first five star prison.

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These events marked the end of an order that had governed Saudi Arabia for sixty five years.

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Welcome to Middle East Centre Book Talk.

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The Oxford podcast on new books about the Middle East is the sum of the books written by members of our community.

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Well, the books are community are talking about. My name is Eugene Rogan and I teach the modern history of the Middle East.

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My guest is David Rundell. David came to Oxford in 1976 to read for the NFL in modern Middle Eastern studies.

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He was a student of Albert who Rani's and a direct contemporary of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman.

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After completing the MFL in 1978, David entered the US Foreign Service in 1981.

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He was posted as a political officer to the US embassy in Riyadh, marking the beginning of a 30 year career in diplomacy.

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Sixteen of those spent in Saudi Arabia alone. He retired in 2010 as chief of mission at the American Embassy in Riyadh.

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As America's most experienced Saudi hand friends and colleagues have long anticipated,

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his book on Saudi Arabia, Vision or Mirage, Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads.

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The book was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury Is I.B. Tourists Important to critical acclaim?

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The Wall Street Journal declared it a book of staggering breadth,

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the depth and The New York Times claimed Rondell covers the kingdom from top to bottom with vast wisdom, depth and understanding.

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Given the pace of change witnessed in the once conservative Saudi kingdom over the past five years, this is a timely book.

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David, welcome to Book Talk. Thank you very much.

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It is a real pleasure to be back at Oxford, although I have to say in many ways I never left.

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It's always with me and certainly in spirit and the intellectual training that I received there.

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In your introduction, you say the first question to ask about Saudi Arabia is not when will its government collapse, but why is it still here?

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You develop at length the history of the emergence of three distinct Saudi states and the principles that guided the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia,

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King Abdulaziz, down to the present.

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How do you account for the survival of the Saudi state against all the challenges of the 20th century imperialism,

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secular nationalism, the rise of political Islam and both its Shiite and Sunni variations.

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Well, this is something that I developed over a really a whole career to try and answer that very question.

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And in the end, I believe that there are four legs that Saudi stability principally stands upon.

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The first is the historic legitimacy that the LSD family has, because they created the country,

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they unified what were a collection of small city states and wandering tribes and so much in the sense that Bismarck

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unified Germany or cavorts unified Italy created something that didn't exist before the Saudi family did that.

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And that gives them some legitimacy, quite a bit of legitimacy. The second thing that they did was they managed a system of succession, which, again,

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was somewhat unusual, certainly in the Arabian Peninsula, one of their rival families.

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You know, the Al-Rashid had murdered the last eight amirs of their dynasty and exiled themselves, had had problems with that in the past.

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So they created a method that peacefully and quickly transferred power.

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And that, again, was unusual in many of the Middle Eastern states and that also provided intimacy.

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The third leg of their stool, if you will, or table of stability, was elite cohesion and balancing stakeholders.

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There are stakeholder groups in Saudi Arabia. Each of them has an elite that is recognised.

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Some are more formal than others. And the monarchy has a symbiotic relationship with them.

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And that elite bring their followers to support the monarchy.

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And the monarchy supports those elite so that they remain the leaders of their community.

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So this is a relationship that has functioned effectively for a long time with the tribes, with the religious establishment, with the merchant class,

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with the new modern technocratic class, and amongst the royal family itself,

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which I view as a basically a hereditary political party in a one party state.

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Then the final issue was, what do they provide the average person, the average individual?

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And here again, they have provided by Middle Eastern standards, a competent government for a long time.

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And what does that mean? No. One, that means security. Saudi Arabia has not had civil wars, invasions, revolutions, coups,

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all of these things which plague many Middle Eastern countries, have really not happened to any great extent in Saudi Arabia.

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So they provided security. They provided economic development, which we've talked a bit about.

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And again, economic development, I should point out, is not automatic.

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It's not just because you have oil that you're going to have economic development.

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That's I think is is it's a gross underestimation of what they actually achieved.

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You look at Venezuela. You look at Libya. I mean, Libya's hardly even a country anymore.

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You look at what happened in Iran or Iraq or Nigeria.

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Just because you have oil doesn't mean you're going to be economically able to develop your country.

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And then the final thing that they did was they provided gradual social change at a pace that most people would find acceptable.

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And again,

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it's a misunderstanding to believe that the Saudi people are chafing for nightclubs and mini skirts and that the Elci would are holding them back.

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Actually, in many cases, the people have been more conservative than the monarchy and the monarchy is actually push them forward.

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But by and large, they've gone at the pace that the people wanted.

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But I just would mention that, you know, when they introduced girls education and some of your listeners would know this,

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but they had to use the military to actually, if you will,

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integrate schools the same way they did in the American South when they desegregated those schools.

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People were killed in riots that affected the first television station,

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which people were protesting against the TV because I thought that was against Islam.

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So the government has actually been reasonably progressive in that point.

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And I would really say that they've gone at a pace that was acceptable to most people.

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So those are the four legs of stability in terms of the specific points you mentioned.

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I think that's kind of an interesting to comment on that.

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Saudis have a very different relationship with imperialism than most Middle Eastern countries.

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They were never colonised. They have basically a positive relationship with the American oil men who came there and developed it.

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And the British government never dominated them in the same way that it dominated Iraq or Egypt.

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And in fact, the British were very influential in helping them to get rid of the Ottomans.

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Something you would know a great deal about. And so where is an Egypt or Iraq, the.

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Origin of the state is from an anti imperialist.

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Let's get rid of the Westerner's because they're not helping us in Saudi Arabia is quite the opposite in Saudi Arabia.

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The British are helping us get rid of the Ottomans and the Americans are helping us find oil.

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So they had a very different relationship to imperialism than much of the Arab world.

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Nationalism was until recently, not a very important issue in Saudi Arabia.

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Their ideology was really more religion.

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And then again, this is quite similar to the one one way I look at Saudi Arabia is to study European history and just to see how it evolved.

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And you can often see very similar parallels.

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And there was a time in European history when religion was really the primary ideological force and slowly after the French Revolution,

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that was replaced by nationalism. And that's beginning to happen in Saudi Arabia today.

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But nationalism up until fairly recently was not what it was.

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They didn't even have a national day. Just for example, National Day was considered against Islam because it only should only have eight.

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But that's changed. Now they actually have National Day. So, again, that's an indication of that change.

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And then the final thing I would say about religion is that the Saudi interpretation of Hanbali Islam,

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which often goes by the name of Wahhabism in the West, basically raises allegiance to the rule or to a religious responsibility.

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In other words, they believe that stability is a little bit of a change here.

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But what they really believe is that in order to be saved on Judgement Day,

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you need to live in an Islamic leave governed state to have an Islamic law governed state need to have stability, to have stability.

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You need to have one ruler who nobody revolts against. And therefore, this supporting of the existing government becomes a religious duty.

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And what that means is that they don't really worry.

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That is to say, the religious scholars don't worry about how you got to power.

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We in the West are very concerned about whether or not you were elected.

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They don't really care how you got to be the king, whether you murdered your brother or got elected.

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Doesn't really matter. What matters is how you do your job.

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Once you are the king and that's what determines your continued legitimacy.

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So their attitude toward religion has been a little bit different than many actually in the Westerns and even some Arab countries.

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And therefore, that also has contributed to their stability. So hopefully that answered your question.

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We've identified key stakeholders in the Saudi system as the tribes, the religious clerics,

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the merchants, the technocrats and the members of the royal family itself.

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So how is the balance of power between the stakeholders changed since you first went to the kingdom nearly 40 years ago?

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Well, some some stakeholders have seen their influence decline.

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I would say that the tribes and the religious establishment have they are certainly still important,

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but they are less important than they were 40 years ago, particularly the religious establishment,

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which at one point had a role in selecting the monarch. They don't anymore or at least let's be clear, they had a role in the application of King s.

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So the tribes and the religious community have lost influence.

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I think the technocrat's,

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the modern secularly educated technocrats and the business community have seen their influence and importance to society grow.

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The royal family itself has seen its its remains important.

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But the number of members of that family that are important has declined.

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So it has become more concentrated. And then I would add that there are a couple of new stakeholder groups,

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which I would say are youth and women who were totally non-existent stakeholder groups before,

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and they are not organised and they are not politically active in the same exact sense that these other groups are with.

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They don't have an organised elite that deals with the monarchy, but they are stakeholder groups that the government now pays attention to.

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So I would say that's how the stakeholder groups have changed.

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Your book is really about domestic Saudi politics and not so much about its foreign relations.

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You're particularly discreet about Saudi US relations, which I think is a real strength of the book.

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You didn't make this into a study of Saudi American relations.

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You don't tend to view the kingdom through American lenses, but America could be added to your list of stakeholders in the Saudi system.

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So let's bring America into the discussion. In your experience as a diplomat, how have U.S. Saudi relations evolved over the past 40 years?

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Well, that's again. That's a good question. I think you're right. You could consider the United States a stakeholder in the Saudi government.

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Over the past 40 years, some things have changed and some things have remained constant.

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What has remained constant is that Saudi Arabia, at the end of the day, depends upon the United States for its security.

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And Saudi Arabia remains, at the end of the day, very important to the global economy.

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Those things existed 40 years ago and they still exist.

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Those issues or those facts? What has changed is the Cold War has ended.

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The first part of my career. Every day I got up and looked in the mirror and said, what am I going to do to beat the Soviet Union today?

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And I just tell you another interesting story that was very clear, because they see this is a sidelight, but, you know,

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when I was a very junior officer in Washington, Ronald Reagan came and gave us a speech and he said, my plan for dealing with the Soviet Union is.

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Simple.

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Some of you will think it simplistic, and I remember thinking that's a big word, I thought this guy was, you know, is this a sort of a dumb actor?

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You know, he says and some of you will think, my plan's simplistic. And in that he just looked out at a store and he said, We're going to win.

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They're going to lose. And you're going to do it. And I thought, wow, no, you can go play golf for the rest of the day because he did his job.

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I mean, he told everybody very clearly what was going to happen and how it was going to happen and what we're supposed to do.

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So for the first part of my career, that is pretty much what we tried to do.

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And the Saudis helped us. The Saudis were one country that never shirked whatever we asked them to do.

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They were they were willing to help. Whether it was, you know, funding contras in Nicaragua, which some people didn't like,

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or supporting the Mujahideen or helping in Africa, in many ways, they were they were a very strong ally in the in the in the Cold War.

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Cold War went away. And then we had what we would call, I guess, the war on terror.

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And again, that the Saudis became strong allies in that.

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So one conflict was replaced by support in another.

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I think something else which changed really were the economic factors.

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The United States is not Saudi Arabia's biggest trading partner anymore. We were for a long time.

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Now, Europe and Europe is really and China are their biggest trading partners.

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And also Russia has become their partner in energy markets.

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So China and Russia are much more important to Saudi Arabia commercially than they were in the past.

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And then the final thing I would say is that what has remained constant in the relationship is its volatility.

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It's always volatile. I mean, this is these are these are countries that have shared interests and and not a lot of shared values,

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at least in most of the history that I've been involved with.

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And the relationship is always up and down, up and down, but within a certain set of parameters.

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And the other thing about it is that it has remained a very personalised relationship.

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There is a king and there is a president. And the relationship really does revolve a lot about the relationship between those two.

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Who is the prime minister of Great Britain and the president?

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The United States matters to some extent, but those relationships are largely institutionalised and not going to change overnight.

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That's not true with the relationship with Saudi Arabia. The king could decide tomorrow.

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He doesn't like Saudi or doesn't like America. And he decides he wants to be the friend of China or something.

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The president has, you know, a Congress that he's got to bring along and that cost him politically often.

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I've seen that many times that the president has to spend political capital to maintain this relationship, and sometimes he might not want to do that.

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So the relationship meaning remains more personal than than most other major relationships that we have.

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So that's how I see to my next question. OK. The way that the Saudi U.S. relationship has been transformed over the past four years since Donald Trump

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became president in January 2017 and Mohammad bin Salman became crown prince in June of that same year.

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These two men have pursued policies that have fundamentally altered the Saudi system.

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Some might say broken the system. Certainly weaken the position of the traditional stakeholders and concentrated power in the crown prince's hands.

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Will these changes pave the way to necessary reforms that set out in the much touted Vision 2030?

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Or does disregard for the rules that held the king together with the Saudi project in jeopardy?

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Well, that is the key question, isn't it? That is the meat of the whole book.

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The first comment I would make is that. I don't think that King someone broke the system so much as recognised that the system was coming to an end.

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The system that had existed for the past 65, five years, with one brother handing power over to another brother over to another brother,

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was coming to a natural end because they were running out of brothers.

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And so they were going to have to make this transition to the third generation of princes at some point.

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And that was never going to be easy. So when I look at what the king has achieved and I think he's achieved quite a lot, it's not, in my view,

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the fact that women are driving or he's balancing the budget or he was at least until covered.

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Those are significant, but what really is the most important achievement, in my view, is that he avoided a Game of Thrones or a family feud.

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That's sort of what he avoided. That is, in fact, his biggest achievement.

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And the. Five hundred plus grandsons who all thought they should have become the king could have been very destabilising.

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And as anyone who's been to the Middle East centre knows, they all know who had been doing this and they all know that it's been called.

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Dooen says that dynasties will last for 100 years or at the most three generations, and then they will collapse.

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And I can assure you, King Salman is read it been called Doom. And he didn't want that to happen in his watch.

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So he's engineered the rise of Mohammed bin Salman. No question about it.

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Mohammed bin Salman was the anointed, chosen person. And he did consolidate power.

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And that is a dramatic change in that the way the country used to use to operate and whether or not it now becomes.

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A police state or whether it becomes a more accountable monarchy is a very open question.

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I would have to say that at the moment, the odds looks like it's becoming more of a police state.

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Power is being concentrated. This may well have been necessary to make the changes, to make the transition.

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And we can only hope that when you look at the models of how European monarchies evolved, some of them evolved peacefully and some of them did not.

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And we can hope that the Saudi monarchy evolves peacefully.

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The one thing that would lead me to believe that that might happen are two things.

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Number one, the monarchy is legitimate. And the people most of the people support the idea of the monarchy today, in part because they don't.

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The different stakeholders trust the monarchy more than they trust each other.

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So they have a strong base to start from. And the second factor is that the.

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Ultimate goal of the monarchy is to remain influential and powerful, and if they saw that,

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the best way to do that was to slowly relinquish some of their authority,

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they might be willing to do that rather than face some sort of violent backlash.

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So there's a chance that they can evolve and there's a chance that they won't.

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I would argue that this is really where we have a choice to make.

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We in the West and I mean Britain and the United States have a choice to make.

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We need friends and allies in order to defend our own security and prosperity.

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And that when it during my diplomatic career, that I was always taught that the role of American foreign policy or British foreign

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policy is to protect the prosperity and security of the British or American people.

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So to do that, we need we need friends and allies.

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And I've gone through some of the things that the Saudis have done,

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whether it's in oil markets or counterterrorism or promoting the peace process or, as I say, just in general, being a status quo power.

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These are things which are helpful to us. But on the other hand. Support for human rights is also a strength of Britain and the United States.

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And here the Saudis have quite a bit to answer for, whether it's the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, the war in Yemen, the detention of dissidents.

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These are problems. And we have to decide how do we protect our interests,

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continue to promote the reforms that are going on this this quite significant economic and social

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reforms that are taking place in Saudi Arabia and also get them to improve their human rights record.

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And I think it's pretty clear that trying to sanction them or antagonise them in some way,

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isolate them is probably not going to work with a group of people who know that they're important

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to the global economy and believe that they are important in creating a global religion.

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So they are in many ways. They have a unique culture and a unique history and a unique situation.

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And I don't think isolating them is likely to help us obtain our goals.

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And so what I would argue is that we need to figure out how to constructively engage them to work on the problems that we have,

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but also to continue with the positive, if you will, elements of our relationship.

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So I think that's what I would what I would say about that.

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Well, I think you're giving good advice for the incoming Biden administration as it looks to a post Trump relationship with Saudi Arabia.

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David, thank you very much. I have been speaking with author David Rundell about his book, Vision or Mirage, Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads.

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And this has been Middle East centre book talk. Thank you for listening.

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Goodbye from Oxford.