Sally. In the early hours of November 4th, 2017, Saudi Arabia changed forever.
Across the country, princes, bureaucrats and businessmen who had long believed themselves above the law discovered that their immunity had evaporated.
Charged with corruption, some were pulled from their beds,
while others were summoned to non-existent meetings or detained as soon as their international flights touched down in the kingdom.
Amongst them were Air Force generals, Navy admirals and three sons of former King Abdullah,
including the commander of the Saudi Arabian National Guard.
A former minister of finance and a governor of the central bank found themselves confined together with former ministers of commerce,
planning and communications, along with three brothers of Osama bin Laden.
Some three hundred prominent individuals were taken to Riyadh's Ritz Carlton Hotel,
which was converted for the occasion into the world's first five star prison.
These events marked the end of an order that had governed Saudi Arabia for sixty five years.
Welcome to Middle East Centre Book Talk.
The Oxford podcast on new books about the Middle East is the sum of the books written by members of our community.
Well, the books are community are talking about. My name is Eugene Rogan and I teach the modern history of the Middle East.
My guest is David Rundell. David came to Oxford in 1976 to read for the NFL in modern Middle Eastern studies.
He was a student of Albert who Rani's and a direct contemporary of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman.
After completing the MFL in 1978, David entered the US Foreign Service in 1981.
He was posted as a political officer to the US embassy in Riyadh, marking the beginning of a 30 year career in diplomacy.
Sixteen of those spent in Saudi Arabia alone. He retired in 2010 as chief of mission at the American Embassy in Riyadh.
As America's most experienced Saudi hand friends and colleagues have long anticipated,
his book on Saudi Arabia, Vision or Mirage, Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads.
The book was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury Is I.B. Tourists Important to critical acclaim?
The Wall Street Journal declared it a book of staggering breadth,
the depth and The New York Times claimed Rondell covers the kingdom from top to bottom with vast wisdom, depth and understanding.
Given the pace of change witnessed in the once conservative Saudi kingdom over the past five years, this is a timely book.
David, welcome to Book Talk. Thank you very much.
It is a real pleasure to be back at Oxford, although I have to say in many ways I never left.
It's always with me and certainly in spirit and the intellectual training that I received there.
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?
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,
King Abdulaziz, down to the present.
How do you account for the survival of the Saudi state against all the challenges of the 20th century imperialism,
secular nationalism, the rise of political Islam and both its Shiite and Sunni variations.
Well, this is something that I developed over a really a whole career to try and answer that very question.
And in the end, I believe that there are four legs that Saudi stability principally stands upon.
The first is the historic legitimacy that the LSD family has, because they created the country,
they unified what were a collection of small city states and wandering tribes and so much in the sense that Bismarck
unified Germany or cavorts unified Italy created something that didn't exist before the Saudi family did that.
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,
was somewhat unusual, certainly in the Arabian Peninsula, one of their rival families.
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.
So they created a method that peacefully and quickly transferred power.
And that, again, was unusual in many of the Middle Eastern states and that also provided intimacy.
The third leg of their stool, if you will, or table of stability, was elite cohesion and balancing stakeholders.
There are stakeholder groups in Saudi Arabia. Each of them has an elite that is recognised.
Some are more formal than others. And the monarchy has a symbiotic relationship with them.
And that elite bring their followers to support the monarchy.
And the monarchy supports those elite so that they remain the leaders of their community.
So this is a relationship that has functioned effectively for a long time with the tribes, with the religious establishment, with the merchant class,
with the new modern technocratic class, and amongst the royal family itself,
which I view as a basically a hereditary political party in a one party state.
Then the final issue was, what do they provide the average person, the average individual?
And here again, they have provided by Middle Eastern standards, a competent government for a long time.
And what does that mean? No. One, that means security. Saudi Arabia has not had civil wars, invasions, revolutions, coups,
all of these things which plague many Middle Eastern countries, have really not happened to any great extent in Saudi Arabia.
So they provided security. They provided economic development, which we've talked a bit about.
And again, economic development, I should point out, is not automatic.
It's not just because you have oil that you're going to have economic development.
That's I think is is it's a gross underestimation of what they actually achieved.
You look at Venezuela. You look at Libya. I mean, Libya's hardly even a country anymore.
You look at what happened in Iran or Iraq or Nigeria.
Just because you have oil doesn't mean you're going to be economically able to develop your country.
And then the final thing that they did was they provided gradual social change at a pace that most people would find acceptable.
And again,
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.
Actually, in many cases, the people have been more conservative than the monarchy and the monarchy is actually push them forward.
But by and large, they've gone at the pace that the people wanted.
But I just would mention that, you know, when they introduced girls education and some of your listeners would know this,
but they had to use the military to actually, if you will,
integrate schools the same way they did in the American South when they desegregated those schools.
People were killed in riots that affected the first television station,
which people were protesting against the TV because I thought that was against Islam.
So the government has actually been reasonably progressive in that point.
And I would really say that they've gone at a pace that was acceptable to most people.
So those are the four legs of stability in terms of the specific points you mentioned.
I think that's kind of an interesting to comment on that.
Saudis have a very different relationship with imperialism than most Middle Eastern countries.
They were never colonised. They have basically a positive relationship with the American oil men who came there and developed it.
And the British government never dominated them in the same way that it dominated Iraq or Egypt.
And in fact, the British were very influential in helping them to get rid of the Ottomans.
Something you would know a great deal about. And so where is an Egypt or Iraq, the.
Origin of the state is from an anti imperialist.
Let's get rid of the Westerner's because they're not helping us in Saudi Arabia is quite the opposite in Saudi Arabia.
The British are helping us get rid of the Ottomans and the Americans are helping us find oil.
So they had a very different relationship to imperialism than much of the Arab world.
Nationalism was until recently, not a very important issue in Saudi Arabia.
Their ideology was really more religion.
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.
And you can often see very similar parallels.
And there was a time in European history when religion was really the primary ideological force and slowly after the French Revolution,
that was replaced by nationalism. And that's beginning to happen in Saudi Arabia today.
But nationalism up until fairly recently was not what it was.
They didn't even have a national day. Just for example, National Day was considered against Islam because it only should only have eight.
But that's changed. Now they actually have National Day. So, again, that's an indication of that change.
And then the final thing I would say about religion is that the Saudi interpretation of Hanbali Islam,
which often goes by the name of Wahhabism in the West, basically raises allegiance to the rule or to a religious responsibility.
In other words, they believe that stability is a little bit of a change here.
But what they really believe is that in order to be saved on Judgement Day,
you need to live in an Islamic leave governed state to have an Islamic law governed state need to have stability, to have stability.
You need to have one ruler who nobody revolts against. And therefore, this supporting of the existing government becomes a religious duty.
And what that means is that they don't really worry.
That is to say, the religious scholars don't worry about how you got to power.
We in the West are very concerned about whether or not you were elected.
They don't really care how you got to be the king, whether you murdered your brother or got elected.
Doesn't really matter. What matters is how you do your job.
Once you are the king and that's what determines your continued legitimacy.
So their attitude toward religion has been a little bit different than many actually in the Westerns and even some Arab countries.
And therefore, that also has contributed to their stability. So hopefully that answered your question.
We've identified key stakeholders in the Saudi system as the tribes, the religious clerics,
the merchants, the technocrats and the members of the royal family itself.
So how is the balance of power between the stakeholders changed since you first went to the kingdom nearly 40 years ago?
Well, some some stakeholders have seen their influence decline.
I would say that the tribes and the religious establishment have they are certainly still important,
but they are less important than they were 40 years ago, particularly the religious establishment,
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.
So the tribes and the religious community have lost influence.
I think the technocrat's,
the modern secularly educated technocrats and the business community have seen their influence and importance to society grow.
The royal family itself has seen its its remains important.
But the number of members of that family that are important has declined.
So it has become more concentrated. And then I would add that there are a couple of new stakeholder groups,
which I would say are youth and women who were totally non-existent stakeholder groups before,
and they are not organised and they are not politically active in the same exact sense that these other groups are with.
They don't have an organised elite that deals with the monarchy, but they are stakeholder groups that the government now pays attention to.
So I would say that's how the stakeholder groups have changed.
Your book is really about domestic Saudi politics and not so much about its foreign relations.
You're particularly discreet about Saudi US relations, which I think is a real strength of the book.
You didn't make this into a study of Saudi American relations.
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.
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?
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.
Over the past 40 years, some things have changed and some things have remained constant.
What has remained constant is that Saudi Arabia, at the end of the day, depends upon the United States for its security.
And Saudi Arabia remains, at the end of the day, very important to the global economy.
Those things existed 40 years ago and they still exist.
Those issues or those facts? What has changed is the Cold War has ended.
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?
And I just tell you another interesting story that was very clear, because they see this is a sidelight, but, you know,
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.
Simple.
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?
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.
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.
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.
So for the first part of my career, that is pretty much what we tried to do.
And the Saudis helped us. The Saudis were one country that never shirked whatever we asked them to do.
They were they were willing to help. Whether it was, you know, funding contras in Nicaragua, which some people didn't like,
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.
Cold War went away. And then we had what we would call, I guess, the war on terror.
And again, that the Saudis became strong allies in that.
So one conflict was replaced by support in another.
I think something else which changed really were the economic factors.
The United States is not Saudi Arabia's biggest trading partner anymore. We were for a long time.
Now, Europe and Europe is really and China are their biggest trading partners.
And also Russia has become their partner in energy markets.
So China and Russia are much more important to Saudi Arabia commercially than they were in the past.
And then the final thing I would say is that what has remained constant in the relationship is its volatility.
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,
at least in most of the history that I've been involved with.
And the relationship is always up and down, up and down, but within a certain set of parameters.
And the other thing about it is that it has remained a very personalised relationship.
There is a king and there is a president. And the relationship really does revolve a lot about the relationship between those two.
Who is the prime minister of Great Britain and the president?
The United States matters to some extent, but those relationships are largely institutionalised and not going to change overnight.
That's not true with the relationship with Saudi Arabia. The king could decide tomorrow.
He doesn't like Saudi or doesn't like America. And he decides he wants to be the friend of China or something.
The president has, you know, a Congress that he's got to bring along and that cost him politically often.
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.
So the relationship meaning remains more personal than than most other major relationships that we have.
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
became president in January 2017 and Mohammad bin Salman became crown prince in June of that same year.
These two men have pursued policies that have fundamentally altered the Saudi system.
Some might say broken the system. Certainly weaken the position of the traditional stakeholders and concentrated power in the crown prince's hands.
Will these changes pave the way to necessary reforms that set out in the much touted Vision 2030?
Or does disregard for the rules that held the king together with the Saudi project in jeopardy?
Well, that is the key question, isn't it? That is the meat of the whole book.
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.
The system that had existed for the past 65, five years, with one brother handing power over to another brother over to another brother,
was coming to a natural end because they were running out of brothers.
And so they were going to have to make this transition to the third generation of princes at some point.
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,
the fact that women are driving or he's balancing the budget or he was at least until covered.
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.
That's sort of what he avoided. That is, in fact, his biggest achievement.
And the. Five hundred plus grandsons who all thought they should have become the king could have been very destabilising.
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.
Dooen says that dynasties will last for 100 years or at the most three generations, and then they will collapse.
And I can assure you, King Salman is read it been called Doom. And he didn't want that to happen in his watch.
So he's engineered the rise of Mohammed bin Salman. No question about it.
Mohammed bin Salman was the anointed, chosen person. And he did consolidate power.
And that is a dramatic change in that the way the country used to use to operate and whether or not it now becomes.
A police state or whether it becomes a more accountable monarchy is a very open question.
I would have to say that at the moment, the odds looks like it's becoming more of a police state.
Power is being concentrated. This may well have been necessary to make the changes, to make the transition.
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.
And we can hope that the Saudi monarchy evolves peacefully.
The one thing that would lead me to believe that that might happen are two things.
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.
The different stakeholders trust the monarchy more than they trust each other.
So they have a strong base to start from. And the second factor is that the.
Ultimate goal of the monarchy is to remain influential and powerful, and if they saw that,
the best way to do that was to slowly relinquish some of their authority,
they might be willing to do that rather than face some sort of violent backlash.
So there's a chance that they can evolve and there's a chance that they won't.
I would argue that this is really where we have a choice to make.
We in the West and I mean Britain and the United States have a choice to make.
We need friends and allies in order to defend our own security and prosperity.
And that when it during my diplomatic career, that I was always taught that the role of American foreign policy or British foreign
policy is to protect the prosperity and security of the British or American people.
So to do that, we need we need friends and allies.
And I've gone through some of the things that the Saudis have done,
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.
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.
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.
These are problems. And we have to decide how do we protect our interests,
continue to promote the reforms that are going on this this quite significant economic and social
reforms that are taking place in Saudi Arabia and also get them to improve their human rights record.
And I think it's pretty clear that trying to sanction them or antagonise them in some way,
isolate them is probably not going to work with a group of people who know that they're important
to the global economy and believe that they are important in creating a global religion.
So they are in many ways. They have a unique culture and a unique history and a unique situation.
And I don't think isolating them is likely to help us obtain our goals.
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,
but also to continue with the positive, if you will, elements of our relationship.
So I think that's what I would what I would say about that.
Well, I think you're giving good advice for the incoming Biden administration as it looks to a post Trump relationship with Saudi Arabia.
David, thank you very much. I have been speaking with author David Rundell about his book, Vision or Mirage, Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads.
And this has been Middle East centre book talk. Thank you for listening.
Goodbye from Oxford.