BY STEVE COLL
The most significant political news from Saudi Arabia this week was not the death of King Abdullah, at the age of ninety, or the ascension of his half-brother Salman to the throne. Abdullah had been ill and Salman had been his designated successor for some time. The real news lay in a secondary announcement that Salman made upon becoming King. He named his nephew Muhammad bin Nayef as the Deputy Crown Prince, meaning that he is third in line for the throne. For the first time in modern Saudi Arabian history, a grandson of the kingdom’s first ruler, rather than a son, has a place in the order of succession.
In the information-pinched, refracted realm of Saudi watching, this is a thunderbolt. It means that the opaque shura of royal-family elders known as the Hayat Al Bayah, or the Allegiance Council, has for now resolved a puzzle that had been hanging over the kingdom for decades, namely, how to move power within the royal family down a generation without causing a bloody fissure among cousins of the sort depicted on “Game of Thrones.”
To appreciate the significance of this week’s news, it is necessary to go back to the deathbed of Saudi Arabia’s founding king, Abdul Aziz, who died in November, 1953, at about the age of seventy-seven. Abdul Aziz seized power in Riyadh in 1902. During the next three decades, he conquered the lucrative, pilgrim-gorged cities of Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina to his west. He also took over a succession of small oasis emirates to his east. Then, in the early nineteen-thirties, oilmen arrived and informed Abdul Aziz not only that he was the ruler of the holiest cities in Islam but that he would soon be unimaginably rich.
After the Second World War, as gushers poured in cash, Bechtel and other construction firms turned up to build roads, shiny palaces, hospitals, and ports. (A family called the Bin Ladens, in the construction trade, started to do very well.) But Abdul Aziz had a problem as he neared his final days. He had lived large, in the manner of many other Bedouin chieftains, and fathered more than forty sons by two dozen or so wives and concubines. By the most common tradition, his throne would pass to his eldest son, Saud, and then, in all likelihood, to Saud’s eldest son. But Saud was corpulent, self-indulgent, and incompetent. Abdul Aziz rightly feared that he was not up to advancing and preserving what he had built.
Yet Abdul Aziz’s second surviving son, Faisal, was shrewd, austere, and serious. Before he died, the king forged a compromise: he decreed that his throne would pass laterally from his eldest son to his youngest son, however long that took. This meant that, while Saud would become king upon Abdul Aziz’s death, Faisal would become Crown Prince, in a position to run things while Saud indulged himself. That decision proved sound. Faisal and the larger royal family eventually persuaded Saud to resign. Faisal modernized Saudi Arabia in many respects until, in 1975, a family member assassinated him.
The trouble was that, after Faisal, the line of succession looked like a line of gradually aging lemmings marching slowly toward a cliff. There was no mechanism to restore youth to the throne by going down a generation. Almost every son of Abdul Aziz wanted his turn on the throne. (The youngest, Muqrin, who was born when Abdul Aziz was in his seventies, is now the Crown Prince. He is sixty-nine years old.)
Also, as in many huge Arabian families, power congealed in groups of brothers who shared the same mother. (King Salman and his nephew Bin Nayef, for example, belong to a group known as the Sudairis, after a favorite wife of Abdul Aziz.) These clans generally coΓΆperated and negotiated informally, out of public eyesight, to divvy up access to the kingdom’s ministries and wealth. Yet the groups of brothers by the same mother were also rivals. When the full line of lateral successors ran its course, which clan would win the right to put a grandson of Abdul Aziz on the throne? And how would succession unfurl from that appointment?
In 2007, as questions of that sort increasingly raised a prospect of instability, the family announced the creation of the Allegiance Council, which apparently has one seat for each recognized son of Abdul Aziz, to be filled either by a living son or one of his male heirs. The Council created a formal means to do what the family had mostly managed to do informally after Faisal’s death: to identify merit within their ranks, prevent accession by incompetents, and bargain for balance among clans. Yet until this week, it was not clear that the Council would be able to solve the central riddle that Abdul Aziz had bequeathed.
Within the kingdom and outside, the choice of Muhammad bin Nayef as the Deputy Crown Prince, and the vehicle for dropping down a generation, will be read by many as a signal of reasoned debate and consensus about continuity within the Council. Bin Nayef ran counterterrorism operations in Saudi Arabia when the kingdom cracked down on Al Qaeda after 2003. He then became the interior minister. He is a favorite in Washington and London, regarded as more serious and committed to government than many others in the royal family. He is also a ruthless type who has spent his ministry’s enormous budget building one of the world’s most attentive police states.
Why make a decision now? The Saudi royals, sitting on top of some two hundred and sixty billion barrels of oil and many tens of billions of dollars in cash and other assets, have always looked a bit like a shaky bank waiting to be robbed, if only insurgents could mount a coup or revolution. These days, the royals surely recognize that their chronically unstable neighborhood has entered a convulsive period. The Islamic State, which Saudi patrons initially nurtured in an effort to defeat Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has turned on them and now seeks to threaten the royal family’s legitimacy. Yemen, on the kingdom’s southern border, is descending into further chaos. The United States is considering a grand nuclear bargain with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s rival, which would further upend regional geopolitics. This is a good time for the royal family to signal to the outside world and to its own subjects that it has a credible plan to transfer power to younger leaders.
If stability and continuity of family wealth are the royals’ main goals, Bin Nayef’s record speaks for itself: he repressed Al Qaeda, he helped put down a Shiite uprising in Bahrain in 2011, and he helped, alongside the late King Abdullah, to outlast the Arab Spring. For jealous cousins, that is a tough rΓ©sumΓ© to complain about.
Analysts have been forecasting the demise of the Saudi royal family for decades. They have been wrong in part because oil money on the Saudi scale can pay for a lot of governing errors and buy off a lot of dissidents, but also because the family is not a brittle institution. This week, the Saudi royals announced a new king, but they also announced their collective will to survive.
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