Karen Elliott House
Subject: The Once and Future Saudi King
Bio: Former Managing Editor at the Wall Street Journal, Pulitzer Prize Winner, and Author of The Man Who Would Be King: Mohammed bin Salman and the Transformation of Saudi Arabia
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and international relations. Today’s topic is The Once and Future Saudi King.
Our speaker is Karen Elliott House who is the former Managing Editor at the Wall Street Journal, and the author of a new book entitled The Man Who Would Be King: Mohammed bin Salman and the Transformation of Saudi Arabia. Karen previously won the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting in the Middle East.
This podcast was taped at a conference that I hosted in Washington DC. So, you are going to hear questions asked by me as well as by my friends.
Karen, please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Karen Elliott House:
I met MBS in 2010 when I interviewed his father who was then the Governor of Riyadh, and he was just a tall, skinny kid in the room with his dad. And then I met him in 2016, but he was clearly the power behind his father. Who is he? He was the sixth son of his father, so he shouldn’t have amounted to much of anything in a hierarchical society.
Is he just another Arab autocrat or is he an autocratic reformer like Peter the Great who modernized Russia? What is it that he’s trying to do to the country? Because in my nearly 50 years of going to Saudi Arabia, I had watched one elderly king after the other, like a silent movie, nothing happened. MBS burst out of the chute, as we would say in Texas, doing a lot, chaining the religious police, taking them off the streets with their bamboo poles pointing at people like me. He allowed women to drive. In the last 10 years, the country has changed dramatically.
A decade ago, there was no mixing of men and women. Now, they are going up in elevators, crowded together to their government or private sector office. They’re driving, women have money now to go sit in restaurants.
It’s important to understand that by modernizing, he does not want to westernize Saudi Arabia. He, like Putin, regards the American society as dissolute. He is anti-homosexual, anti LGBTQ. The family is still the key unit in Saudi society. Saudi society remains religious. He is saying that he wants to remove religiosity as opposed to religion. Under the Wahabi, the Saudis spent endless time on where did you pray? How many times did you pray? Who saw you pray? The visibility of it as opposed to the spirituality of it. So, he is not anti-religion, he just says religion is between you and God, not me and you. I am not God’s enforcer. People have to answer for themselves to God. They have removed religion as the glue for holding society together and instead replaced it with nationalism. We are proud Saudis. Saudi First is the country’s motto.
His biggest constituency is young Saudis. 60% of Saudis are under 30. And those young people wouldn’t have been able to find Israel on a map prior to the last two years, have watched what’s gone on in Gaza. 90% of Saudis are against recognition of Israel. That’s a problem for him. And by doing so, arouses opposition among the religious and the royals whom he suppressed by locking the royals up in the Ritz-Carlton and removing the key religious figures to prison who didn’t agree with on what he was doing.
Larry Bernstein:
I have a failure of imagination in regards that my first action would be to round up my relatives and throw them into a Ritz Carlton. It’s something I would never even think of doing. My aunts and uncles would be upset with me if I did something like that. I’m not sure they would ever look at me the same. Maybe that was the point. Tell us about the decision and the repercussions of putting your friends and family in a Ritz prison.
Karen Elliott House:
The Ritz-Carlton had at least two purposes. One key purpose of locking up the most prominent members of the royal family was to remove potential opposition. The first person called to the Ritz Carlton was King Abdullah’s eldest son, Mutaib bin Abdullah who ran the National Guard and there were three military forces in Saudi Arabia: defense, interior, and National Guard. They had control of defense because MBS was the defense minister. So, they locked up Mutaib and fired him as the head of the National Guard. And according to what people say, they took a billion dollars from him and Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud, the Saudi businessman was also locked up and others.
It was to remove potential power opponents and to signal to young Saudis, I am leveling the playing field. The royal family is not going to have an advantage over you because we’re going to wean ourselves off oil. The government is no longer going to provide everybody a job and a lifetime income. You’re going to have to work. We’re going to develop the private sector.
Larry Bernstein:
What I meant by my aunt and uncle would not look at me the same after I locked them up, there would be disappointment, where’s the love, where’s the relationship? And it’s now based on fear, not love. And maybe that’s what Machiavelli was talking about. He established that as an opening gambit in his power struggle.
Karen Elliott House:
Fear by intimidation. It’s a very traditional Saudi thing to do. His grandfather, when he came back to Saudi Arabia after he had been thrown out, returned in 1902. He fought a 30-year civil war to bring all the tribes under his control. And at one point another tribe destroyed a town in his area. He had a platform built and he brought the 19 men that were responsible and one by one had their heads chopped off. And then he said to the 19th, go tell what you had seen of the justice of Ibn Saud, be my propaganda about how effective intimidation is. So, killing members of your own family and opponents is simply deep in the Saudi history.
Alex Graham:
I’ve been waiting 40 years to say to Larry, you should really read more because if you study Ottoman history for 500 years, the Ottoman’s executed all the other heirs. The first guy to become Sultan would then kill all his brothers. So, by the standards of the broader region, this is somewhat peaceful way to bring them to the Ritz Carlton. But my question is, is this a sign of the strength of Saudi succession or its weakness?
And what happens to the next generation? MBS will his children lose out to some cousin?
Karen Elliott House:
He hopes not. At some point they had to make the generational change. Old Ibn Saud died in the 1950s and he had 44 sons by 22 wives, and so being king went from brother to brother, not father to son, and six of them have now been king, but they are all elderly now. The current king will be 90 in December.
In my first book I wrote on Saudi Arabia, I said their risk was that the kingdom was going like the old Soviet Union, one old man after another. Breshnev, Andropov, Cherenko, and Gorbachev and then it’s too late to do much. But when King Abdullah died, his half- brother Salman took over, but he didn’t follow with a younger half-brother who was at that time Deputy Crown Prince. He made him Crown Prince and then he fired him. So that guy is gone and he brought in his son. So, he made the generational change.
What MBS is trying to do is establish not the Abdulaziz line but the Salman line. From his father to him, to his son. He has a 16-year-old son who’s quiet and dignified. MBS took him for the last few years to events. When some visiting congressional delegation comes, he took him, he showed him the ropes, whether some of his cousins choose to challenge him remains to be seen. In the book I talked to a foreigner who wrote a book on succession, and he thinks that when King Salman dies, MBS will have to make some conciliatory moves to other parts of the family to keep everything quiet.
Rory MacFarquhar:
You wrote a fair amount in your book about modernization and how Saudi Arabia is being transformed under MBS. And part of it is is the role of women being substantially liberalized. But you also had a bit on entertainment investments that he’s making in theme parks, and then there’s the Neom city and it felt like it was one white elephant after another. This was doomed to fail. The likelihood that there was going to be a significant return on this investment that Saudi Arabia was going to become a big tourist destination despite not permitting, alcohol seems surreal.
Do you think that these investments will be profitable?
Karen Elliott House:
As I say in the book, I think not all of this is going to work. And as the worried royals say, if it doesn’t work this time, we won’t have the money to start over again. I think tourism has a good chance of working because that’s the reason for bringing people to go to sporting events and spend money in your hotels, in your towns. I think there will ultimately be alcohol served because as one of them put it, the Russian tourists won’t come if they can’t drink.
They did a poll about would you come to Saudi Arabia and to the Red Sea and like 90% of people said yes. And then when they asked without alcohol, it dropped to 30%. So now in Riyadh, there are lots of fine restaurants and they gave me on my March visit a wine menu and my eyes popped out, but it’s Spanish non-alcoholic wine. You get mocktails, fresh fruit drinks, beautifully done with no alcohol; they cost $20.
A Saudi friend sent me a sign from a Red Sea hotel. In the basement, they had a cabinet with shelves and a sign that said liquor. So, everybody assumes that there planning fine restaurants with a bar and glasses hanging over it. All the stuff you would see in this country, it’s just that there’s nothing in the glasses and no one at the bar. In Riyadh there is an expectation of change.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to discuss the murder of Khashoggi in the Turkish embassy. First, it was unbelievable how many foreign powers had listening devices in the place. It seems like you can’t kill anybody in the embassy anymore without everyone finding out. Two, Saudis said it was a group of bad actors within the organization. Many people believe that a decision ultimately resides with MBS.
Recently, there’s been conspiracy theories that suggested that the Saudis may not have been directly behind it, but it doesn’t make sense if it is a conspiracy to go kill this man in that way in that place. Trump made the comment that, we do the same thing. I didn’t know we were killing people in embassies. That was new to me.
Karen Elliott House:
Everybody will make an independent decision on that question, but for me it was too stupid to have been something the Crown Prince did, who I think is a quite smart guy, ordered it. Now, the counter to that is they had the bone saw, so they were at least prepared for it. As I write in the book, a rendition gone wrong. He wanted them brought back to Saudi Arabia where they could do whatever they want, and it wouldn’t attract much attention. Not like it would be killing somebody in your consulate. They could have run over him with a car in Istanbul. So, I may be giving the Crown Prince too much credit, but I feel like that it doesn’t make any sense.
David Stellings:
Seems like MBS was remarkably, surprisingly effective at moving the Saudi population away from Wahabism and deradicalizing quickly. Do you think a model like that could be applied to the Israeli/Palestinian situation? There’s been talk about how a prerequisite for Palestinians and Israelis to live next to each other and get along involves the deradicalization of the Palestinian population.
Karen Elliott House:
Most of the experts I talk to think that de-radicalizing the Palestinian population, that the majority would be happy to have a life in Gaza, but that there are some who are committed to the destruction of Israel. Deradicalizing those people is a process like we used on Japan and Germany that you must spend a generation changing people. Germany and Japan, we had control over those countries the way MBS had control over his population. No one has control over the Palestinian population because the leadership is divided, weak and corrupt. And Israel has people in it who don’t want anything to do with the Palestinians.
David Kostin:
When I was last in Saudi Arabia in February just before Ramadan, I asked many business executives what they felt about Israel and the Saudi and whether there could be resolution or participation in the Abraham Accords. And one of the striking things to me was every single person said, let’s break the moral questions to the business questions. They were focusing on what they thought were business opportunities. My question to you is, do you suppose that MBS could make that happen?
Karen Elliott House:
Could he recognize Israel? I don’t think he would. I think he wants to. If he were to do it now, there’d be riots in the streets. I don’t personally see how that happens that either the ceasefire ends or there has to be real progress toward some solution. But if that happens, If there’s real progress towards some solution, I think he can at some point say Saudi First, I’m here to look after my people, so we’re going to move on with this. It’s in our interest, advances peace and stability in the region. It helps our jobs in both countries.
Alan Scholnick:
We hear about the Arab Street, and yet it’s always been a straw man’s argument. It’s always invoked with Israel. It seems to be an enlightened Arab street when it comes to modernization efforts. 90% opposed to Israel. MBS has got a lot of power in his country. He does control some media levers as it relates to other issues. And as someone who would like to see the Abraham Accords, is Al Jazeera working against him in that regard?
Karen Elliott House:
That’s one of the reasons MBS doesn’t like Qatar is that Al Jazeera does influence people. But your point is well taken. It is important to understand that Saudis by and large are not budding little democrats. The fact that 90% are against it is more a barometer of the, sorry to say this, assassination risk than the riots in the streets. Because Saudis are not accustomed to expressing a view or having their view matter. So, at some point, since I believe he wants to do it, I believe it will happen the recognition of Israel.
Larry Bernstein:
So I want to wrap up with one question. My mom asked me what I wanted for my 12th birthday, and I said a subscription to The Wall Street Journal. Tell us about the journal, what its role is, how it’s been changing, and what you see for its future.
Karen Elliott House:
I was fortunate to work for the Journal from 1974 to 2006, the best years of the Wall Street Journal. We were able to do anything. I won my Pulitzer Prize for spending six weeks with King Hussein when he was trying to decide whether to join the Reagan peace plan. I went to Jordan, Syria, and Israel. I joined the King when he visited India. He had a heart attack there. I then went to London and finally he did, but it took six weeks. That’s the only time my boss at the Journal ever sent a note and said, are you ever coming back? But other than that, they pretty much let you do what you wanted to do.
I don’t see big changes in the journal myself. I’ve been gone since 2006. I try to write for the op-ed page and mostly they say yes, but they have said no. I don’t see any big change in the editorial page. The editor of the editorial page, Paul Gigot was editor of the editorial page when I was a publisher. Some of my Jewish friends think there is a difference with the news content, that the paper is more negative. I don’t notice that. I notice they ran a very good investigative piece about Neom and all the negatives, which I’m sure didn’t please the Saudis. But their job isn’t to please the Israelis or the Saudis or anybody else. It’s to inform the rest of us. I’m still a big fan of the Journal. I read the New York Times, the FT, and the Washington Post. I don’t find the Washington Post or the New York Times as good as the Journal or the FT.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Karen for joining us. If you missed the last podcast, the topic was Know-how Drives Wealth Creation. Our speaker was Ricardo Hausmann who is a Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and he is also the Founder and Director of Harvard’s Growth Lab. Ricardo explained why know-how is critical and why additional capital and labor is not valuable if workers do not know how to use technology.
I want to make a plug for our next podcast with Joel Pollak who is Senior Editor at Large for the website Breitbart. I want to learn from Joel about the future of conservative media.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Know-how Drives Wealth Creation, here.
