Faced with financial, logistical, and geopolitical challenges, Riyadh has been forced to review its ambitious project, The Line, and critically reassess “economic normalization” with Israel.
Launched in 2017, Saudi Arabia’s NEOM, a sprawling high-tech development on the northwestern Red Sea coast, was introduced as the crown jewel of Vision 2030.
This futuristic desert megaproject, extending over some Jordanian and Egyptian territory, was cast as a bold leap toward economic diversification under the leadership of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS). But, recent geopolitical setbacks have raised significant concerns about the viability of some of NEOM’s components.
Initially celebrated for its revolutionary design, The Line, a linear city within NEOM, was to redefine urban living. Yet, recent reports suggest a dramatic scaling back. Earlier this month, Bloomberg revealed a massive reduction in the metropolis’ scope – from 105 to 1.5 miles – and a decrease in likely inhabitants from 1.5 million to fewer than 300,000 by 2030. Furthermore, funding uncertainties and workforce reductions indicate a project in jeopardy.
While this adjustment does not signify a wholesale failure of Vision 2030, it does prompt a re-evaluation of the project’s most ambitious elements.
Experts suggest that The Line’s original scale was overly optimistic, lacking the necessary urban infrastructure for such an innovative endeavor. Financial and geopolitical challenges, including regional instability and insufficient foreign direct investment, further complicate NEOM’s future.
The drastic downsizing of The Line “appears to be a reassessment of timeline feasibility,” Dr Robert Mogielnicki, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, tells The Cradle. “There are many experimental, world-first dimensions within the NEOM gigaproject, and some are eventually going to need rightsizing or rethinking.”
Also speaking to The Cradle, Dr Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Baker Institute Fellow at Rice University, believes the project’s contraction to be a good thing:
Reports that The Line may be scaled back significantly is actually a positive move if it injects greater realism into a project whose initial scale appeared fanciful and difficult to translate into reality. Greater pragmatism in designing and delivering the gigaprojects associated with Vision 2030 is a good thing and means there is a greater likelihood of the projects making it off the drawing board.
Given financial and economic factors, The Line was never feasible as initially presented. Ultimately, the amount of wealth the Saudis generate from oil is not enough to finance the most ambitious of MbS’ Vision 2030 projects. And Riyadh has not been able to lure the levels of foreign direct investment needed to make these extremely expensive vanity projects realizable.
“The vast scope of [The Line] always struck me and many other observers as aspirational rather than realistic,” explains Gordon Gray, the former US ambassador to Tunisia.
Speaking to The Cradle, Ryan Bohl, a Middle East and North African analyst at risk intelligence company RANE, says:
I’d argue that the goals for The Line were unrealistic from the start, given that there’s virtually no urban infrastructure in the area, and it’s very difficult for cities to be started from scratch like that, regardless of the amount of investment poured in. Even if Saudi Arabia had, for example, done something extreme like declare NEOM to be their new capital city, it would still probably struggle to attract residents as we’ve seen from other historical examples like Brazil’s shift of its capital to Brasília.
It attracts attention. That sort of discourse – positive or negative – creates a buzz. That buzz was supposed to attract investors who wanted to be a part of this, help Saudi Arabia build a city of the future, and try to do something completely outlandish and absolutely unconventional.
Gaza: a wrench in the works
The leadership in Riyadh has understood that the success of Vision 2030 heavily depends on attracting substantial foreign direct investment into the Kingdom. Ultimately, stability in Saudi Arabia and the wider West Asian region is crucial.
Consequently, Riyadh’s recent foreign policy has been less ideological, focusing instead on maintaining amicable terms with all major players in West Asia to advance Saudi business, commercial, and economic interests.
Within this context, Riyadh has worked to reach a peace deal with Yemen’s Ansarallah resistance movement, made an effort to preserve the Beijing-brokered 2023 Saudi–Iranian détente, restored relations with Qatar and Syria, and mended fences with Turkiye.
Therefore, beyond financial and economic constraints that require a reassessment of the most ambitious Vision 2030 projects, such as The Line, Israel’s brutal six-month war on Gaza and the expansion of that conflict into the Red Sea have created headwinds for Saudi Arabia’s geoeconomic plans.
As Arhama Siddiqa, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad, explains to The Cradle:
Given the current instability in the Red Sea region, investors may hesitate to support a large-scale project like NEOM due to perceived risks. Even if the direct security threat to NEOM is minimal, the overall instability in the area can deter investors from committing substantial resources to a long-term venture. Additionally, the broader [West Asia] conflict further complicates the situation, adding another layer of uncertainty. Addressing these security concerns could require Saudi Arabia to allocate more resources to regional security measures, potentially diverting funds from the NEOM project.
There is no denying that Saudi Arabia’s economic diversification agenda is vulnerable to naval operations in the Red Sea. NEOM and other Red Sea projects require vessels to be able to freely travel from the Gulf of Aden through the Bab al-Mandab and up to Saudi Arabia’s west coast.
The Gaza war’s potential spillover into this vital waterway continues to raise concerns for Saudi officials about the impact on the Kingdom’s Vision 2030.
These dynamics help explain Riyadh’s frustration with the White House for not leveraging its influence over Israel to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza. It has led to Saudi Arabia’s decision to abstain from joining any US-led security initiatives and military operations in the Red Sea and Yemen.
The Israel–NEOM connection
Israel’s geographic proximity to northwestern Saudi Arabia, its technological advancement, and its vibrant startup culture position the occupation state as a promising partner for Vision 2030 and the NEOM project, particularly in biotechnology, cybersecurity, and manufacturing.
Writing in March 2021, Dr Ali Dogan, previously a Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, went as far as arguing that “relations with Israel are necessary for Saudi Arabia to complete NEOM.”
Dr Mohammad Yaghi, a research fellow at Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, similarly stated that NEOM “requires peace and coordination with Israel, especially if the city is to have a chance of becoming a tourist attraction.”
However, Saudi Arabia’s leadership role in the Islamic world, exemplified by the monarch’s title as the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” makes any formal normalization of relations with Tel Aviv highly sensitive.
Initially, it was thought that while the UAE and Bahrain could establish overt relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia would continue to engage covertly, ensuring essential collaborations like those rumored in the tech sector could progress discreetly.
An example being in June 2020, when controversy arose over Saudi Arabia’s alleged engagement with an Israeli cybersecurity firm, which the Saudi embassy later denied.
Yet, almost seven months into Israel’s campaign to annihilate Gaza, can Saudi Arabia still look to Tel Aviv as a partner in NEOM?
It appears that amid ongoing crises in the region, chiefly the Gaza genocide, Riyadh must be careful to avoid being seen as cooperating with the Israelis in covert ways, and full-fledged normalization seems off the table for the foreseeable future.
Nonetheless, after the dust settles in Gaza and the Red Sea security crisis calms down, Saudi Arabia will likely maintain its interest in fostering ties with Israel as part of an “economic normalization” between the two countries. This could be important to Vision 2030’s future, particularly in NEOM.
But Israel’s unprecedented military campaign in Gaza will likely alter West Asia in many ways for decades to come. Even after the current war in Gaza is over, anger toward Israel and the US will continue.
Without a doubt, the Israeli–NEOM connection will be increasingly sensitive and controversial, both in the Kingdom and the wider region – a factor that the leadership in Riyadh cannot dismiss.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (R) and Iraqi Oil Minister Ihsan Abdul-Jabbar Ismail, arrive at the 29th annual Middle East Petroleum and Gas conference in the Bahraini capital Manama on May 16, 2022 (AFP)
Ministers from a group of oil exporting countries led by Saudi Arabia and Russia agreed on Wednesday to slash output by two million barrels a day, prompting pushback from the US and igniting fears that it could propel global inflation higher.
The decision came despite heavy lobbying by Washington in Gulf capitals against the move.
“It’s clear that Opec+ is aligning with Russia with today’s announcement,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said aboard Air Force One.
“The president is disappointed by the shortsighted decision of Opec+,” national security advisor Jake Sullivan and top economic advisor Brian Deese said in a statement.
‘Tell me where is the act of belligerence’
– Abdulaziz bin Salman, Saudi energy minister
The cut, equivalent to two percent of daily global supply, was proposed by the Saudi-led Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia at Wednesday’s Opec+ meeting in Vienna. It is substantially higher than the one million barrels analysts had expected, and the biggest cut since April 2020.
Saudi Arabia and Russia aim to support prices amid signs that the global economy is slowing, with the possibility of a recession on the horizon. Oil prices usually drop when global economic growth slows.
The decision to cut production is likely to put pressure on relations between the US and Saudi Arabia, with Wednesday’s move seen as a win for Russia, particularly as it has faced battlefield losses in Ukraine, and reduced revenue from falling oil prices in recent weeks.
‘Technical and not political?’
US President Joe Biden visited Saudi Arabia in July, in a bid to repair strained ties with Saudi Arabia. Shortly after meeting with Saudi rulers, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Biden said he expected Riyadh to take “further steps” to boost oil supply.
The backlash against Wednesday’s production cut has already appeared in some quarters of Washington.
US Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, a noted critic of Saudi Arabia, said the Opec+ decision should lead to “a wholesale re-evaluation of the US alliance with Saudi Arabia”.
Read More » Gulf states are pushing back against that narrative.
Saudi Arabia set to support Russia’s role in Opec+ despite looming sanctions
“Tell me where is the act of belligerence,” Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said during a news conference at Opec’s headquarters in Vienna, when asked if the cut would strain ties with the US.
“We shall act and react to what is happening to the global economy in the most responsible and responsive way.”
The energy minister of the United Arab Emirates, Suhail al-Mazrouei, said the cut in production was “technical and not political”.
OPEC Secretary-General Haitham Al Ghais, from Kuwait said the cartel was trying to ensure “security [and] stability to the energy markets.”
“Everything has a price,” Ghais said. “Energy security has a price as well.”
Recession headwinds
Oil prices skyrocketed above $100 a barrel earlier this year after Russia invaded Ukraine.
While they have fallen about 32 percent from their highs over the past four months, the drop has been due mainly to fears of slowing economic growth – particularly in China – as opposed to increased production.
Some say Riyadh needs little motivation outside of economics to back the production cut.
“Saudi Arabia sees a recession coming next year and they don’t want to be stuck with millions of barrels of cheap oil. They see now as the time to get the best price,” a former senior US official told Middle East Eye, on condition of anonymity.
Egypt and Qatar find ‘synergies’ in post-Ukraine Middle East Read More »
The kingdom’s coffers have been buoyed by high crude prices. Earlier this year, Saudi Aramco overtook Apple as the world’s most valuable company.
Saudi Arabia is expected to be one of the world’s fastest-growing economies this year, and is using its oil wealth to push ahead with pro-business reforms and mega-projects such as Neom, designed to wean the country off its reliance on petrodollars.
And with an inflation rate of 2.8 percent, the oil-rich kingdom has also been more insulated from the price rises that are sweeping the globe – a hot-button political issue for Biden’s party in the November midterm elections.
‘Reduce Opec’s control’
In response to Wednesday’s decision, Biden called on his administration and US Congress to explore ways to “boost US energy production and reduce Opec’s control over energy prices,” the White House said.
The statement said Biden was ordering another dip into the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, with 10 million barrels set to be put on the market next month, in an attempt to dampen price rises.
However, those reserves are fast emptying after record withdrawals were ordered by the administration, starting back in March. The reserves are now at their lowest level since July 1984, and it is not clear when the administration plans to purchase a refill.
Turkey doubles Russian oil imports amid western sanctions Read More »
Oil prices had risen about five percent since Friday, in anticipation of Wednesday’s meeting. International benchmark Brent was up 1.86 percent, at $93.47 a barrel Wednesday morning.
Analysts say the cut was likely to hinder western countries’ efforts to cut Russia’s profits on oil sales. The European Union has moved towards agreeing a G-7 plan to cap the price paid for Russian oil.
Also on Wednesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for EU countries to make deeper cuts to gas demand, while proposing a raft of price cap measures designed to protect consumers and businesses.
In September, Russia cut gas supplies to Europe via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline in response to Western sanctions. Soaring energy prices have prompted Europe to look to alternative suppliers of gas, including Israel, Egypt, Algeria and Qatar to fill the void left by Russia.
The sentence comes amid reports that officials shut off water and electricity and used surveillance drones to evict the Howeitat tribe to make way for MBS’ $500 million dream city.
Artist view of the ‘Mirror Line’, a 120-kilometer horizontal skyscraper, a landmark in Neom, north of Saudi Arabia (Reuters)
Two members of the Howeitat tribe in Saudi Arabia who were forcibly expelled to make room for the $500 billion Neom megacity received harsh jail sentences for the mere reason of demonstrating against the project, according to a UK-based rights organization.
Just for supporting their family’s refusal to be forcibly evicted from their houses in the Tabuk area of northwest Saudi Arabia, Abdulilah Al-Howeiti and his relative, Abdullah Dukhail Al-Howeiti, both received a 50-year prison sentence and a 50-year travel ban, according to Alqst.
The Specialized Criminal Court of Appeal’s decisions in their cases were just the latest in a slew of lengthy sentences imposed by Saudi courts this summer.
Salma Al-Shehab, a student at Leeds University and mother of two, and Nourah bint Saeed Al-Qahtani, a mother of five, received sentences of 34 and 45 years respectively in response to tweets that were critical of the Saudi government. Alqst reported last week that writer, translator, and computer programmer Osama Khaled received a 32-year sentence for “allegations relating to the right of free speech.”
According to unverified reports, a third member of the Howeitat was also sentenced at a Saudi court. “The lengthy prison sentence handed [out] against members of the Howeitat tribe follow a dangerous pattern we are seeing unfold in Saudi Arabia,” Ramzi Kaiss, legal and policy officer at MENA Rights Group, told Middle East Eye.
Since US President Joe Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia in July, Kaiss said there had been a “more repressive approach by the Saudi state security and judicial authorities against individuals exercising their right to freedom of speech.”
Alqst‘s head of monitoring and communications, Lina Al-Hathlou, said, “This is becoming a new trend. No one will be saved from this. I think that anyone who gets arrested now will be handed a lengthy sentence.”
‘They are being watched’
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman originally revealed the plans for Neom in 2017, when he claimed a futuristic city would be constructed on Saudi Arabia’s northwest coast.
Little has been built as of yet, but huge sums have been paid to experts, and increasingly bizarre plans have been made public. Nevertheless, the Saudi government has made efforts to rid the province of Tabuk’s 170 km of its inhabitants, many of whom are Howeitat.
According to reports, compensation for displaced tribespeople who owned large properties ranged up to 1 million riyals ($266,000) and 100,000 riyals ($27,000) for those who owned smaller dwellings. But according to information previously provided to MEE, relocated Tabuk households are often given payments of roughly $3,000.
Howeitat tribespeople have reported since December that the Saudi authorities’ campaign to drive them from their land has escalated. New measures include cutting water and electricity supplies and deploying surveillance drones above residences, MEE has been told.
According to Alya Al-Howeiti, a UK-based activist and a member of the tribe, 150 Howeitat have been jailed for opposing the Neom project, including the recently condemned tribesmen.
Western consultancies condemned
Saudi’s new megacity will include a 170km straight line city, an eight-sided city that floats on water, and a ski resort with a folded vertical village, among other grandiose and architecturally challenging projects.
Prior to Abdul Rahim’s killing, the tribe and human rights organizations wrote an open letter to three consulting firms urging them to end their work on Neom “unless and until” negative effects on human rights were addressed.
MEE asked the same consultancies – Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, and Oliver Wyman – about the continuous allegations of human rights violations facing the Howeitat.
A Boston Consulting Group spokesperson said, “We do not comment about specific clients and projects to protect client confidentiality.” The other two companies did not respond.
“These companies should condemn the violations being committed and consider reassessing their involvement in projects that promote wide-scale human rights violations,” said Kaiss.
“If violations are not addressed or mitigated, then these companies should responsibly halt their engagement in these projects and with the authorities promoting abuses, instead of causing further harm.”
Saudi Arabia’s government and Neom also did not respond to requests for comment.
Jewish-American entrepreneur Bruce Gurfein is actively working on normalizing relations between “Israel” and the Gulf countries through grey zone business development.
Normalization-facilitator Bruce Gurfein on the road from Saudi Arabia to occupied Al-Quds (Bruce Gurfein)
Jewish-American entrepreneur Bruce Gurfein, who had been living in the Gulf countries for 25 years and had brokered Arab-Israeli deals long before the 2020 normalization of Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Bahrain, sought to do business in the grey areas while formal ties remain underway.
Similar to the UAE and Bahrain before the 2020 deal, Israelis and Saudis were often not allowed to enter each other’s land unless they have second passports granted by other nations. However, through subsidiaries incorporated in other nations, a number of Israeli businesses have succeeded in conducting business in Saudi Arabia.
Gurfein is the CEO of Connect LLC, a technological investment business owned by Abdullah Al Naboodah, one of the UAE’s richest individuals. He’s attempting to establish a business accelerator in Saudi Arabia that will entice firms that are developing innovative approaches to food security and agriculture in the desert. He noted that the businesses could come from different backgrounds, including “Israel”.
Earlier, Gurfein had said that he had made a trip from Saudi Arabia to occupied Al-Quds, proof that the Gulf is open to doing business in grey areas prior to normalization. During his trip, the CEO stopped at a few farms in the desert to test the waters on his grey area project.
— Bruce Gurfein بروس غورفاين (@BruceGurfein) August 2, 2022
“We’re hoping that the noise that this trip is going to create will bring additional companies,” Gurfein said. “We’re setting up the infrastructure so that when the companies come, we know where we can redirect them. That’s why we’re dealing with these farms.”
Gurfein advises people who are hopeful that Saudi Arabia would fully join the normalization agreements to take their time.
Before leaving Saudi Arabia, Gurfein observed in a blog post on LinkedIn that the earlier generation of Saudi Arabian monarchs was internally opposed to connections with “Israel”.
“A premature open peace agreement with Israel would inevitably hurt the rest of the changes and efforts within Saudi today and lead to a formal peace, a peace between governments, but not necessarily between their people,” Gurfein wrote. “If we want real peace to be achieved between Israel and Saudi Arabia, we need to build financial structures and trade platforms via third parties and countries that will allow the nations to get to know each other on a personal level and let the people see the benefits of business relationships and a true open peace.”
In an article by Israel Hayom, it has been revealed that Israeli envoys visited Riyadh several times throughout a period of time that extends for over a decade now. However, these visits have always been kept secret.
There has been one exception to the secret visits and that is former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit in November of 2020 to the Red Sea city of Neom, which was widely yet carefully publicized, where he met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS).
Previously, Israeli security minister Benny Gantz had visited Saudi Arabia as chief of staff, while Aluf Meir Dagan, Tamir Pardo, and Yossi Cohen arrived as heads of Mossad and Ben Shabbat as head of the National Security Council. The purpose of the visit was to develop military coordination, especially against Iran. Netanyahu, as did most Israeli officials, had flown to SA in a private plane especially leased for this occasion. At the time, it was business contacts that have matured into political, military, and security deals.
Earlier, Al-Rajhi Bank, the world’s largest Islamic bank, has become the largest shareholder in the Israeli startup Otonomo Technologies Ltd.
According to a regulatory filing dated July 4, Saudi-based investment firm Mithaq Capital SPC boosted its stake in Otonomo from 5.2% to 20.41%.
Otonomo is a software firm that leverages proprietary technology and data from millions of cars to give cloud-based solutions for car manufacturers and service providers to create service apps for their customers.
Mithaq would be able to discuss and influence Otonomo’s decisions on strategy, governance, and business as a result of the investment.
Furthermore, a visit to Saudi Arabia by 13 American Jewish leaders in June was only one of the attempts made by other private campaigners to speed up the normalization process. Eli Epstein, a business executive from New York, organized the trip. Through similar efforts, “Israel” was able to establish diplomatic relations with Bahrain and the UAE.
Gurfein, as well, through his ties to Connect LLC was able to play a role in the grey zone act of normalization by connecting an Israeli hospital to the UAE. Gurfein facilitated the process of person-to-person normalization tactic pushed forward by US congress to normalize ties between Gulf countries and “Israel.”
“Neom will buy things that they need,” he said. “If Israeli companies have technologies that they can’t find anywhere else, then we’re definitely going to see a good turnaround. But is Neom actively seeking Israeli technology? Less so.”
— Bruce Gurfein بروس غورفاين (@BruceGurfein) August 11, 2022
On July 15, Biden visited Saudi Arabia and “Israel” during a MENA trip. However, a day prior to the arrival of US President Joe Biden at the Ben Gurion airport, an Israeli official told reporters, that Biden’s trip to the region is an “unprecedented opportunity to change dynamics in the Middle East.”
However, a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in “Tel Aviv,” Yoel Guzansky, said otherwise by stating that “The bigger the expectations, the bigger the disappointment.”
The announcement that “Israel” had been waiting for, which eventually surfaced hours before Biden took off for Jeddah, is that the Civil Aviation Authority of Saudi Arabia stated that all commercial aviation carriers could now fly across the nation. Israeli Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, referred to the Saudi statement as “the first official step in normalization with Saudi Arabia” despite the fact that it made no mention of “Israel.”
Following Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia, it is worth noting that Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan denied, in a statement, much of what US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid remarked during their bilateral meeting, which was thought to be mainly about the normalization of relations with “Israel” and increasing oil production.
The summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, as Farhan said, “focused on partnership with the United States of America,” saying “no kind of military or technological cooperation with Israel was proposed, neither at the summit nor before it.”
It was, regardless, clear that the publicized grey zone normalization was welcomed by MBS despite the disappointment of the Israeli colonial regime in the slowing down of the process.
No one wanted to play football with Muhammad bin Salman. Sure, the boy was a member of Saudi Arabia’s royal family, but so were 15,000 other people. His classmates preferred the company of his cousins, who were higher up the assumed order of succession, a childhood acquaintance recalls. As for the isolated child who would one day become crown prince, a family friend recounts hearing him called “little Saddam”.
Home life was tricky for bin Salman, too (he is now more commonly known by his initials, [MBS]. His father, Salman, already had five sons with his first wife, an educated woman from an elite urban family. MBS’s mother, Salman’s third wife, was a tribeswoman. When MBS visited the palace where his father lived with his first wife, his older half-brothers mocked him as the “son of a Bedouin”. Later, his elder brothers and cousins were sent to universities in America and Britain. The Bedouin offspring of Prince Salman stayed in Riyadh to attend King Saud University.
As young adults, the royals sometimes cruised on superyachts together; MBS was reportedly treated like an errand boy, sent onshore to buy cigarettes. A photo from one of these holidays shows a group of 16 royals posing on a yacht-deck in shorts and sunglasses, the hills of the French Riviera behind them. In the middle is MBS’s cousin, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a billionaire investor dubbed “the Arabian Warren Buffett”. MBS, tall and broad-shouldered in a white t-shirt, is pushed to the farthest edge.
Fast forward to today, and MB has moved to the center of the frame, the most important decision-maker in Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy but MBS’s 86-year-old father, though nominally head of state, is rarely seen in public anymore. It has been clear for several years that MBS is in charge. “In effect,” a former Saudi intelligence agent told me, “King Salman is no longer king.”
At first glance the 36-year-old prince looks like the ruler many young Saudis had been waiting for, closer in age to his people than any previous king – 70% of the Saudi population is under 30. The millennial autocrat is said to be fanatical about the video game “Call of Duty”: he blasts through the inertia and privileges of the mosque and royal court as though he were fighting virtual opponents on screen.
His restless impatience and disdain for convention have helped him push through reforms that many thoughts wouldn’t happen for generations. The most visible transformation of Saudi Arabia is the presence of women in public where once they were either absent or closely guarded by their husband or father. There are other changes, too. Previously, the kingdom offered few diversions besides praying at the mosque; today you can watch Justin Bieber in concert, sing karaoke or go to a Formula 1 race. A few months ago, I even went to a rave in a hotel….
But embracing Western consumer culture doesn’t mean embracing Western democratic values: it can as easily support a distinctively modern, surveillance state. On my recent trips to Saudi Arabia, people from all levels of society seemed terrified about being overheard voicing disrespect or criticism, something I’d never seen there before. “I’ve survived four kings,” said a veteran analyst who refused to speculate about why much of Jeddah, the country’s second-largest city, is being bulldozed: “Let me survive a fifth.”
The West, beguiled by promises of change and dependent on Saudi oil, at first seemed prepared to ignore MBS’s excesses. Then, in late 2018, Saudi officials in Istanbul murdered a Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, and dismembered his body with a bone saw. Even the most pro-Saudi leaders turned away.
…. After Putin invaded Ukraine in February, the price of crude shot up. Boris Johnson was on a plane within weeks. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, previously a sworn enemy of the crown prince, embraced MBS in Riyadh in April. War even forced America’s president into a humiliating climbdown. On the campaign trail in 2020 Joe Biden had vowed to turn Saudi Arabia into a “pariah”. But on July 15th he went to make his peace with MBS– trying to avoid shaking MBS’s hand, he instead opted for a fist bump that left the two looking all the chummier. Even critics at home acknowledged MBs’s victory. “He made Biden look weak,” said a Saudi columnist in Jeddah. “He stood up to a superpower and won before the world.”
For MBS, this is a moment of triumph. His journey from the fringe of a photograph to the heart of power is almost complete. He will probably be king for decades. During that time, his country’s oil will be needed to sate the world’s enduring demand for energy.
A kingdom where the word of one man counts for so much depends utterly on his character. The hope is that, with his position secure, MBS will forswear the vengefulness and intolerance that produced Khashoggi’s murder. But some, among them his childhood classmates, fear something darker. They are reminded of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, a one-time modernizer who became so addicted to accumulating power that he turned reckless and dangerous. “At first power bestows grandeur,” a former Western intelligence officer told me, of MBS. “But then comes the loneliness, suspicion and fear that others will try to grab what you grabbed.”
During the early years of MBS’s ascent, I was vaguely aware of him as one prince among many. I probably wouldn’t have paid him much attention if an old contact of mine hadn’t joined his staff. His new boss, my contact said, was serious about shaking things up. He arranged the meeting at a faux-ancient mud-brick village on the outskirts of Riyadh in 2016. As my Economist colleagues and I approached, the gates of MBS’s compound suddenly slid open, like a Bond-villain’s lair. In the inner chamber sat MBS.
Reform has often been promised in Saudi Arabia – usually in response to American hectoring – but successive kings lacked the mettle to push change through. When the Al-Saud conquered Arabia in the 1920s, they made an alliance with an ultra-conservative religious group called the Wahhabis. In 1979, after a group of religious extremists staged a brief armed takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the Al-Saud decided to make the kingdom more devout to fend off a possible Islamic revolution, as had just happened in Iran. Wahhabi clerics were empowered to run society as they saw fit.
The Wahhabis exercised control through the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, otherwise known as the religious police. They whacked the ankles of women whose hair poked through their veil and lashed the legs of men who wore shorts. The arrangement suited the House of Saud. Wahhabism provided social control and gave legitimacy to the Saudi state, leaving the royals free to enjoy their oil wealth in the more permissive environments of London and Paris, or behind the gates of their palaces.
I’m loth to admit it now, but as the prince talked in Riyadh about his plans to modernize society and the economy, I was impressed by his enthusiasm, vision and command of the details. He gave what turned out to be accurate answers about how and when his reforms would happen. Though he was not yet crown prince, he frequently referred to Saudi Arabia as “my” country. We arrived at around 9pm. At 2am, MBS was still in full flow.
MBS was affable, self-assured, smiling. His advisers were more subdued. If they spoke at all, it was to robotically repeat their master’s lines. Yet when MBS left the room to take a call, they started chatting animatedly. As the prince re-entered, silence fell.
Like many in those early years, I was excited about what MBS might do for the kingdom. When I returned to the capital a few months later I saw a number of men wearing shorts. I kept looking over my shoulder for the religious police, but none came – they had been stripped of their powers of arrest.
As crown prince, MBS introduced a code of law so that judicial sentencing accords with state guidelines, not a judge’s own interpretation of the Koran. He criminalized stoning to death and forced marriage. The most overt change involved the role of women. MBS attacked guardianship laws that prevented women from working, travelling, owning a passport, opening a business, having hospital treatment or divorcing without approval from a male relative. In practice, many Saudi women have found these new rights hard to claim in a patriarchal society, and men can still file claims of disobedience against female relatives. But MBS’s reforms were more than cosmetic. Some clerics were jailed; the rest soon fell into line.
For foreigners, Riyadh is less forbidding these days. “I’m afraid I’ll be caught for not drinking,” a teetotal businessman told me. “There’s cocaine, alcohol and hookers like I haven’t seen in southern California,” says another party-goer. “It’s really heavy-duty stuff”.
When MBS first entered public life, he had a reputation for being as strait-laced as his father, rare among royals. That quickly changed. Many of the people interviewed for this article said that they believe MBS frequently uses drugs, which he denies. A court insider says that in 2015 his friends decided that he needed some r&r on an island in the Maldives. According to investigative journalists Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck in their book “Blood and Oil”, 150 models were recruited to join the gathering and were then shuttled “by golf cart to a medical center to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases”. Several international music stars were flown in, including Afrojack, a Dutch dj. Then the press blew MBS cover.
Thereafter, the prince preferred to unwind off the Red Sea coast. At weekends his entourage formed a flotilla by mooring their yachts around his, Serene, which has a driving range and a cinema. According to a former official, “dj MBS”, as his friends called him, would spin the discs wearing his trademark cowboy hat. The yacht is only one of the luxuries MBS has splurged on. He also bought a £230m ersatz French chateau near Versailles, built in 2008 (the meditation room doubles as an aquarium). He is said to have boasted that he wanted to be the first trillionaire.
We put these and other allegations in this article to MBS’s representatives. Through the Saudi embassy in London, they issued a broad denial, saying “the allegations are denied and are without foundation.”
MBS’s loosening of social mores reflects the values of many of his youthful peers, in Saudi and beyond – as does his taste for the flashier side of life. Yet despite the social revolution, the prince is no keener than Wahhabi clerics on letting people think for themselves. Shortly before lifting a ban on women driving in 2018, MBS’s officials imprisoned Loujain al-Hathloul, one of the leaders of the campaign for women’s rights. Her family say jailers waterboarded and electrocuted her, and that Saud al-Qahtani, one of MBS’s closest advisers, was present during her torment and threatened to rape her. [A un investigation found reasonable grounds to believe that Qahtani was involved in the torture of female activists. Qahtani allegedly told one of these women: “I’ll do whatever I like to you, and then I’ll dissolve you and flush you down the toilet.”] Hathloul was charged with inciting change to the ruling system. The message was clear: only one person was allowed to do that.
MBS is ruthlessly ambitious – he reportedly loved reading about Alexander the Great as a teenager – but he also owes his rise to some extraordinary twists of fortune. Succession can be an unpredictable affair in Saudi Arabia. The monarchy is only two generations old, founded in 1932, and the crown has so far moved from brother to brother among the founding ruler’s sons. That has become harder as the prospective heirs age. MBS’s father wasn’t tipped to be king, but after his two older brothers died unexpectedly in 2011 and 2012, he was catapulted up the line of succession.
When Salman became the heir-designate aged 76, he needed a chief of staff. Most courtiers expected him to choose one of the suave, English-speaking children of his first wife. Instead he appointed a son who spoke Arabic with a guttural Bedouin accent. [MBS has learned English fast since then: when we met in 2016 he sometimes corrected his translator.]
The choice to elevate MBS was less surprising to those who knew his father well. Salman had dedicated himself to his job as governor of Riyadh rather than chasing more lucrative commissions, and was a stickler for 8am starts, even in his 70s. He was known as the family disciplinarian, not averse to giving wayward royals a thwack with his walking stick or even a spell in his private prison. He clearly saw something of himself in his sixth son. MBS might love video games, but he was also a hard worker and keen to advance.
MBS put few limits on what he was prepared to do to achieve control. He earned the nickname Abu Rasasa – father of the bullet – after widespread rumors that he sent a bullet in the post to an official who ruled against him in a land dispute [Saudi officials have previously denied this rumor]. He was fearsome in private, too. “There are these terrible tempers, smashing up offices, trashing the palace,” says a source with palace connections. “He’s extremely violent.” Several associates describe him as having wild mood swings. Two former palace insiders say that, during an argument with his mother, he once sprayed her ceiling with bullets. According to multiple sources and news reports, he has locked his mother away.
It’s hard to say how many wives he has; officially, there’s just one, a glamorous princess called Sara bint Mashour, but courtiers say he has at least one more. MBS presents his family life as normal and happy: earlier this year he told the Atlantic magazine that he eats breakfast with his children each morning [he has three boys and two girls, according to Gulf News – the eldest is said to be 11]. One diplomat spoke of MBS’s kindness to his wife. But other sources inside the royal circle say that, on at least one occasion, Princess Sara was so badly beaten by her husband that she had to seek medical treatment.
We put this and other allegations in this piece to MBS’s representatives, who described them as “plain fabrication”, adding that “the kingdom is unfortunately used to false allegations made against its leadership, usually based on politically [or other] motivated malicious sources, particularly discredited individuals who have a long record of fabrications and baseless claims.”
MBS finally got a taste of political power in 2015 when Salman became king. Salman appointed his son deputy crown prince and minister of defense. One of MBS’s first moves was to launch a war in neighboring Yemen. Even America, the kingdom’s closest military ally, was told only at the last minute.
There was an obvious obstacle in MBS’s path to the throne: his cousin, the 57-year-old heir-designate, Muhammad bin Nayef. Bin Nayef was the intelligence chief and the kingdom’s main interlocutor with the CIA. He was widely credited with stamping out al-Qaeda in Saudi after 9/11. In June 2017 bin Nayef was summoned to meet the elderly king at his palace in Mecca.
The story of what happened next has emerged from press reports and my interviews. It seems that bin Nayef arrived by helicopter and took the lift to the fourth floor. Instead of the monarch, MBS’sagents were waiting. Bin Nayef was stripped of his weapons and phone, and told that a royal council had dismissed him. He was left alone to consider his options. Seven hours later, a court videographer filmed the charade of MBS kissing his cousin, then accepting his abdication as crown prince. King Salman kept a back seat throughout. Bin Nayef is now in detention [his uncle, who also had a claim to the throne, apparently intervened to try and protect bin Nayef, but was himself later detained]. The staged resignation – an old trick of Saddam Hussein’s – would become MBS’s signature move.
That was just the warm-up act. In October 2017 MBS hosted an international investment conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh. At “Davos in the desert”, the likes of Christine Lagarde, Son Masayoshi and other business glitterati listened to MBS’s pitch for Saudi Arabia’s post-oil future, including the construction of Neom, a new $500bn “smart city”. The event was a hit. Diplomatic grumblings about the war in Yemen or the fate of America’s security partner, Muhammad bin Nayef, faded.
The gathering was also an opportunity to invite back royals who were often abroad. Once the foreigners had left, MBS pounced. Hundreds of princes and businessmen were swept up. According to a biography of MBS by Ben Hubbard, a New York Times journalist, one of them realized something was amiss only when they got to their hotel room: there were no pens, razors or glasses – nothing that could be used as a weapon.
MBS held the detainees in the Ritz-Carlton for several weeks [the Marriott and other hotels were also commandeered to house the overflow]. Prisoners’ phones were confiscated. Some were said to have been hooded, deprived of sleep and beaten until they agreed to transfer money and hand over an inventory of their assets. All told, MBS’s guests at the Ritz-Carlton coughed up about $100bn.
Even royals previously thought untouchable, such as the powerful prince who ran the national guard, got similar treatment. Princess Basma, the youngest child of the second king of Saudi Arabia, was jailed for three years without charge or access to a lawyer; after being released she still had to wear an electronic ankle bracelet, according to a close associate of hers.
The crushing of the royals and business elite was billed as a crackdown on corruption – and undoubtedly it netted many corruptly acquired assets, which MBS said would be returned to the Saudi treasury. The methods, however, looked more like something from a gangster film than a judicial procedure.
Interrogations were overseen by Saud al-Qahtani, who reported directly to MBS whenever a detainee broke and gave out their bank details. [All the allegations in this piece concerning Qahtani were put to him via his lawyer. No response was given.] Qahtani had installed himself as one of MBS’s favored henchmen, though earlier in his career, he’d plotted against Salman and his son, trying to sideline them with rumors that Salman had dementia. Qahtani was so loyal to the former faction that he’d named his son after his then boss. According to a former courtier, on the day of the old king’s funeral the two men had it out: MBS slapped Qahtani in the face. Later, MBS let Qahtani prove his worth and brought him on to his staff. Qahtani duly named his younger son Muhammad.
On paper, Qahtani was a communications adviser, a former journalist who understood Twitter and used an army of bots and loyal followers to intimidate critics on social media [his office included giant screens and holograms that staff used for target-practice with laser guns]. In practice he was entrusted with MBS’s most important and violent missions – the ones that established his grip on power.
His remit extended far beyond Saudi’s borders. In 2016 he kidnapped Prince Sultan, a minor royal who had been bad-mouthing MBS. MBS offered his jet to fly Sultan from Paris to Cairo – instead, the plane was diverted to Saudi Arabia. According to Hope’s and Scheck’s book, Qahtani posed as Captain Saud, an airline pilot, though surprisingly one who had an expensive Hublot watch.
Even people who have nothing to do with politics have become afraid to speak near a functioning mobile phone
With rendition strategies like this, and the cash tap shut off, even royals who weren’t inside the Ritz-Carlton felt the pressure to divest themselves of ostentatious assets. The father of the Saudi ambassador to Britain put Glympton Park, his beloved 2,000-acre estate in the Cotswolds, up for sale. Riyadh’s jewellers did a roaring trade pawning the diamonds of lesser royals. “It’s like the Romanovs selling their Fabergé eggs,” said an adviser to an auction house.
Many commoners rejoiced at the downfall of their entitled elite. Princes and princesses who once lived off huge handouts began looking for jobs. Their titles became irrelevant. Unable to afford the cost of irrigation, their green ranches became desert again. Banks turned them away. One financial adviser recalled his response to princes trying to get credit on the strength of their royal status: “You call yourselves princes, but they say there’s only one prince now.”
The Ritz-Carlton episode was just one element of an extraordinary project of centralization. MBS yanked control of various security services back from the princes. He took charge of Aramco, the semi-autonomous state oil company. He installed himself as boss of the sovereign-wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund. “He destroyed all the powerful families,” says a retired diplomat. By late 2017, law, money and security in Saudi all flowed directly from him.
Among those who lost out were the fellow princes who had pushed a young MBS to the edge of the family photo on the yacht all those years ago. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, in the center of that shot, surrendered part of his $17bn wealth. As the shakedown widened, MBS’s elder half-siblings put up their yacht for sale. Many of his cousins were locked up. “Payback time,” one victim said.
While MBS was squeezing the elite at home, he was forging some important friendships abroad.
MBS and Donald Trump, who was elected president in 2016, had a lot in common. Both had the hunger of the underdog and loathed the snooty policymaking establishments in their countries; they reveled in provocation. The historic compact, by which Saudi Arabia provided oil to American consumers and America guaranteed the country’s security, had frayed in recent years. Barack Obama’s hurried exit from Iraq in 2011 and his nuclear deal with Iran in 2015 had left Saudi Arabia worried that it could no longer rely on American protection. America’s development of its own shale-oil reserves had also reduced its dependence on Saudi oil. Then Trump and MBS got cozy.
With the Trump administration’s tacit [and sometimes explicit] support, MBS set about treating the entire Middle East much as he did Saudi Arabia, trying to push aside rulers whom he found to be inconvenient. He announced a blockade of Qatar, a tiny gas-rich state to the east of Saudi Arabia. In 2017, angered by Lebanon’s dealings with Iran, MBS invited the prime minister, Saad Hariri, a long-time beneficiary of Saudi patronage, on a starlit camping trip. Hariri turned up, had his phone confiscated and soon found himself reading out a resignation speech on tv.
Both moves ultimately backfired. But Trump’s Middle East adviser, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, did little to discourage such antics. Together, he and MBS dreamt up a new regional order over WhatsApp, calling each other “Jared” and “Muhammad”. Their rapport was so great that, at Kushner’s prompting, MBS started the process of recognizing “Israel”. His father, still officially king, put a stop to that.
MBS visited America in March 2018, hanging out in Silicon Valley with Peter Thiel and Tim Cook, and meeting celebrities, including Rupert Murdoch, James Cameron and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson. Many people were keen to meet the man who controlled a $230bn sovereign-wealth fund. To his frustration, they were less willing to reciprocate by investing in the kingdom.
That October the intercontinental bonhomie came to an abrupt halt. I was due to go to a conference in Turkey that month. A Saudi journalist I knew, Jamal Khashoggi, got in touch to suggest meeting up: he was also going to be in Istanbul, for an appointment at the consulate. Khashoggi was a court insider whose criticisms of MBS in the Washington Post and elsewhere had attracted much attention. He seemed to be making more effort than usual to stay in touch. While I was at the conference a friend of his phoned me: Jamal still hadn’t emerged from the consulate, he said. By the time I got there, Turkish police were cordoning off the building.
The full story soon came out in leaked intelligence reports and, later, a un inquiry. A Saudi hit squad, which reportedly coordinated with Saud al-Qahtani, had flown to Istanbul. As they waited for Khashoggi to enter the consulate, they discussed plans for dismembering his body. According to tapes recorded inside the consulate by Turkish intelligence, Khashoggi was told, “We’re coming to get you.” There was a struggle, followed by the sound of plastic sheets being wrapped. A CIA report said that MBS approved the operation.
MBS has said he takes responsibility for the murder, but denies ordering it. He sacked Qahtani and another official implicated in the intelligence reports. The fallout was immediate. Companies and speakers pulled out of that year’s Davos in the desert; the Gates Foundation ended its partnership with Misk, an artistic and educational charity set up by the prince. Ari Emanuel, a Hollywood agent, cancelled a $400m deal with the kingdom.
The crown prince seems to have been genuinely surprised at the animus – “disappointed”, says an associate. Hadn’t he committed to all the reforms the West had been asking for? Perhaps he had underestimated the outcry provoked by going after a well-connected international figure, as opposed to a royal unknown outside Saudi Arabia. Or perhaps he understood Western governments’ priorities better than they did themselves. They had done little when Muhammad bin Nayef, their partner in battling terrorism, had disappeared; they had shrugged at reports of torture in the Ritz-Carlton, and at MBS’s reckless bombardment of Yemen. Why did they have so much to say about the killing of a single journalist?
Three years after the Khashoggi killing, Davos in the desert opened with the singer Gloria Gaynor. As images of smiling children flashed up on a giant screen behind her, she broke into her disco anthem, “I Will Survive”, asking the audience: “Did you think I’d crumble? Did you think I’d lay down and die?”
The chief executives of private-equity giants BlackRock and Blackstone were back, as were the heads of Goldman Sachs, SocGen and Standard Chartered. Even Amazon sent a representative despite the fact that its boss, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post, the paper that employed Khashoggi. Meanwhile, Qahtani was creeping back into favor at the royal court – although he had been implicated by the un for Khashoggi’s murder, a Saudi court took the decision not to charge him.
MBS revitalized the near-dormant sovereign-wealth fund, pumping tens of billions of dollars into tech, entertainment and sports, to create a softer, more appealing image of Saudi and co-opt new partners. In April 2020, the fund led a consortium to buy Newcastle United, a premier-league football team [the deal took 18 months]. The following year it launched an audacious bid to create Saudi’s own golf tour, the LIV series, hoping to lure players with a prize pot of $255m, far larger than that of American tournaments. At the first LIV tour this year, some top players boycotted the event, others went for the cash.
Joe Biden has proved tougher to woo. Soon after becoming president, Biden withdrew American military support for the war in Yemen. He wouldn’t talk to MBS, insisting that communications go through King Salman instead. He didn’t even nominate an ambassador to Riyadh for 15 months. The chat everywhere was that Saudi-American relations were in a deep freeze. Then, in February 2022, MBS had a stroke of luck: Russia invaded Ukraine.
In the days after war broke out, Biden himself tried to call MBS. The crown prince declined to speak to the president. He did take Putin’s call, however. The two men were already close. MBS had personally brought Russia into an expanded version of the OPEC cartel in order for Saudi Arabia to keep control of global oil production. Putin cemented the friendship in 2018 at the g20 summit in Buenos Aires, which took place weeks after the Khashoggi killing. While Western leaders shunned MBS, Putin gave the Saudi ruler a high-five before sitting down next to him.
MBS’s defiance of America seems to have paid off. After months of evasion, Biden reluctantly agreed to meet MBS in Jeddah in July, on the prince’s own turf and his own terms. The visit gave MBS recognition but did little to rebuild relations. There wasn’t even a concrete assurance of increasing oil production.
Some in the American foreign-policy establishment remain hopeful that MBS could become a helpful partner in the region, pointing to his recent retreat from confrontation with Qatar and his eagerness to find a diplomatic exit from Yemen. Perhaps, they say, he is maturing as a leader.
This seems optimistic. MBS’s disastrous campaign in Yemen was ostensibly in support of the country’s president but in April, hours after being summoned to a meeting and offered Arabic coffee and dates, Yemen’s president was reading out a resignation speech on tv. MBS took it upon himself to get rid of him personally – suggesting that his mode of international diplomacy remains as high-handed as ever. “What they’ve learned”, says one foreign analyst, “is don’t murder journalists who dine regularly with congressmen in the United States.”
The West has taught MBS something else, too – something that autocrats the world over may draw comfort from. No matter the sin, they would argue, if you sit tight through the odium and fury, eventually the financiers, the celebrities, even the Western leaders, will come running back. At 36, MBS has time on his side. Some observers fear that he may become only more dangerous as oil reserves start to decline and the treasure trove shrinks. “What happens when he’s a middle-aged man ruling a middle-income country and starts to get bored?” asks a diplomat who knows MBS personally. “Will he go on more adventures?”
Earlier this year, I visited an old friend in his office in Saudi Arabia. Before we started talking, he put his phone in a pouch that blocks the signal, to prevent government spies from listening in. Dissidents do that kind of thing in police states like China, but I’d never seen it before in Saudi Arabia. It isn’t just people involved with politics who are taking such precautions: most Saudis have become afraid to speak near a functioning mobile phone. People used to talk fairly openly in their offices, homes and cafés. Now, they are picked up for almost nothing.
As we chatted over the whir of his office air conditioning, my friend reeled off a list of people he knew who had been detained in the past month: a retired air-force chief who died in prison, a hospital administrator hauled away from his desk, a mother taken in front of her seven children, a lawyer who died seven days after his release from prison. “These people aren’t rabble rousers,” my friend said. “No one understands why.”
Officially, the government says it has no political prisoners. Rights groups reckon that thousands have been swept up in MBS’s dragnet. I’ve covered the Middle East since the 1990s and can’t think of anywhere where so many of my own contacts are behind bars.
Few ordinary Saudis predicted that when MBS was done trampling on the elites and the clerics, he would come for them next. Bringing Saudis into the modern, networked, online world has made it easier for the state to monitor what they are saying. A Red Crescent employee called Abdulrahman al-Sadhan used to run a satirical Twitter account under a pseudonym. In 2018 MBS’s agents arrested him and held him incommunicado for two years. American prosecutors later charged two former Twitter employees with allegedly handing over the real names behind various accounts to a Saudi official – al-Sadhan’s family believes that his name was among them. [The trial of one employee is ongoing; he denies passing on information to Saudi officials.]
On the face of it, MBS has nothing to worry about. Public opinion polls – if they can be trusted – suggest he is popular, particularly with younger Saudis. But there is a growing sense that discontent is brewing beneath the surface. MBS has broken crucial social contracts with the Saudi populace, by reducing handouts while, at the same time, dispensing with the tradition of hearing the feedback of ordinary people after Friday prayers.
It isn’t hard to imagine some of the issues they’d raise if they had the chance. Many people are struggling as the cost of living rises. When other governments were cushioning their citizens during the pandemic, MBS slashed fuel subsidies and tripled vat. Unable to afford the cost of pumping water, some farmers left crops to wither in the field. Fees for permits and fines have spiraled, too. Though MBS speaks eloquently about the country’s youth, he is struggling to find them jobs. Unemployment remains stubbornly stuck in double digits. Half of the jobless have a university degree, but most white-collar workers I met on MBS’s mega-projects were foreign.
Saudi Arabia’s attempts to diversify its economy – and so compensate for the long-term decline of oil reserves – isn’t going well either. The pandemic delayed plans for a rapid increase in international tourism. Extorting billions of dollars from your relatives may not be the best way to convince investors that the kingdom is a liberal haven.
The young prince has reversed even the baby steps towards democracy taken by previous kings. Municipal elections have been suspended – as a cost-cutting exercise, explains the supine press. The Shura Council, a consultative body of 150 people, has only met online since the pandemic [other institutions have gathered in person for months]. “I wish I had more of a voice,” said one member. Whenever I mentioned the prince, his leg twitched.
A frequent visitor to the royal court says MBS now gives the impression of someone who’s always thinking that people are plotting against him. He seems to be preoccupied with loyalty. He fills key posts either with young royals, foreigners with no local base to threaten him or people he has already broken. A government minister, Ibrahim Assaf, was one of those locked up in the Ritz-Carlton – two months later MBS sent him to the World Economic Forum as his representative. A senior executive on one of his construction projects is someone who says he was tortured in one of his prisons. “He went from being strung naked from his ankles, beaten and stripped of all his assets to a high-level project manager,” says a close acquaintance of the man.
All remain vulnerable to MBS’s tantrums. Saudi sources say he once locked a minister in a toilet for ten hours. [The minister later appeared on tv blabbering platitudes about the prince’s wisdom.] A senior official I’ve spoken to says he wants out. “Everyone in his circle is terrified of him,” says an insider. And that could make it hard for him to govern a country of 35m people effectively. Former courtiers say no one close to MBS is prepared to offer a truthful assessment of whether his increasingly grandiose schemes are viable. “Saying no”, says one, “is not something they will ever do.”
If MBS has a mission beyond extending his power, you might expect to find it in Neom, the city he promised to build in the desert. Neom would be nothing less than “a civilizational leap for humanity”, he said in 2017. Head-spinning details followed. The city’s food would be grown on hydroponic walls on a floating structure. It would be powered by the world’s largest green-hydrogen plant. Thousands of snow-blowers would create a ski resort on a nearby mountain. One day it would have driverless cars and passenger drones.
According to the official timetable, the main city would be completed by 2020. Further districts would be added by 2025. The prince’s tourism minister, Ahmed al-Khateeb, dismissed rumors that the timetable was proving over-ambitious. “Come see with your eyes and not with your ears,” he urged. So, I went.
Finding Neom was the first problem. There were no road signs to it. After three hours’ drive we came to the spot indicated by the map. It was bare, but for the odd fig tree. Camels strolled across the empty highway. Piles of rubble lined the road, remnants of the town bulldozed to make way for the mighty metropolis.
The designated area is nearly the size of Belgium. As far as I could tell, only two projects had been completed, MBS’s palace, and something Google Earth calls “The Neom Experience Centre” [when I drove to see it, it was obscured by a prefabricated hut]. The only other solid building I could see was a hotel constructed before Neom was conceived: The Royal Tulip. A poster in the lobby urged me to “Discover Neom”. But when I asked for a guide the hotel manager cursed my sister with Arabic vulgarities and tried to shoo me away. There was no sign of the media hub with “frictionless facilitation”, “advanced infrastructure” and “collaborative ecosystems” promised by the Neom website. Neom’s head of communications and media, Wayne Borg, said he was “out of Kingdom at present”.
The hotel restaurant was teeming with consultants – all the ones I met were foreign. I later found a Saudi project manager. “We think we’re about to start working, but every two months the consultants coin a new plan,” he told me. “They’re still doing plans of plans.” There was a kind of manic short-termism among these foreigners. Many were paid $40,000 a month, plus handsome bonuses. “It’s like riding a bull,” one of the Neom consultants told me. “You know you’re gonna fall, that no one can last on a bull longer than a minute and a half, two minutes, so you make the most of it.”
Despite the high salaries, there are reports that foreigners are leaving the Neom project because they find the gap between expectations and reality so stressful. The head of Neom is said by his friends to be “terrified” at the lack of progress.
Eventually, I found a retired Saudi air-force technician who offered to drive me around the city for $600. He took me to a sculpture standing in the desert with the words, “I love Neom”. A short way farther on we found a new stretch of tarmac, said to mark the edge of the dream city. Beyond it, the lone and level sands stretched far away.
Saudi firms are working alongside US corporations, in tandem with Washington, to wash the slate clean.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, right, greets President Joe Biden, with a fist bump after his arrival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on Friday July 15, 2022. (Saudi Press Agency)
The military-entertainment complex is at work, and this time with its most crucial client, Saudi Arabia. The US government and its giant corporation lackeys are working round the clock, along with Riyadh, to clean a reputation tarnished with pariah statuses and human rights abuses to pave the way for future cooperation and normalization – in other words, getting those strategic interests.
Partnerships between celebrities and governments are becoming increasingly popular, and it is not very uncommon for private firms to take on projects to link influencers with foreign governments for some good PR.
Recent times have seen US firms welcome a top-dollar client – Saudi Arabia – that has been attempting to launder a good reputation as it paves the way for normalization with what NATO dubs the “only democracy in the Middle East.” Within this framework and logic, “Israel” and Saudi Arabia both work to whitewash a dirty slate of endless crimes, and they’ll need to keep doing so to work together at this stage.
“[Mohammed bin Salman] tried to launder his reputation, whitewash it through bringing in celebrities to hold concerts, to sportswash it by buying soccer clubs, and anyway he can sort of try to rehabilitate his reputation and his image,” said Seth Binder, director of advocacy at the Project on Middle East Democracy. “I think to my mind, President Biden’s trip is that sort of final complete rehabilitation.”
An article published in Politico exposed details of a proposal from the largest PR firm in the world, Edelman, which devised a strategy to fix Saudi Arabia’s bloody reputation – the proposal is an exhibition of how far Riyadh is willing to go to crumble its pariah status today.
The campaign, which Edelman proposed to the US Department of Justice, is a five-year-long campaign named “Search Beyond”, which will include productions with international celebrities from within the Kingdom. A former Edelman employee divulged that the celebrities were chosen strategically, and not in a random fashion.
So the idea comes, according to the article, as follows: What if Riyadh hosted Trevor Noah’s “The Daily Show” from multiple locations in the country for an entire week, knowing that Noah is a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights among other humanitarian issues? Or, what if Priyanka Chopra, a staunch supporter of women’s rights and feminist activism, hops on board the campaign? Other names included famous DJs Steve Aoki and David Guetta, in addition to Netflix’s “Never Have I Ever” actress Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, and social media influencer Olivia Culpo. Even a partnership with world-class music festivals like Coachella is on the table.
The cash set to be paid to celebrities, in many instances, is even far more than what they get from acting in a film. The spokespeople for Edelman themselves are being paid about $787,000 over a year of serving their Saudi clients.
This wouldn’t be the first project that Edelman is implementing with or in Saudi Arabia. The PR giant also did PR for NEOM Company – the company developing a utopian city on the Saudi coast, and it has also promoted LinkedIn in Saudi Arabia in a way that markets it as a “platform that amplified the voices of Saudi career women.”
However, “Search Beyond” is one of the most profit-bearing projects among most partnerships at home, according to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings. Edelman broke down the costs of the project into 4 categories: research, planning, and strategy; media relations and strategic partnerships; social media plan development and outreach; and client management and reporting.
Edelman also promised to “monitor online conversations and media coverage to identify ‘friends’ and detractors,” “commence a relationship-building programme of US-based media contacts,” and host “monthly client meetings.”
Ben Freeman, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said using pop culture for their “reputational laundering campaign” is something Riyadh has been trying to do for years, whether it is through sportswashing or through Hollywood connections.
“I think that this lobbying campaign … is a big part of the reason why Biden was able to do this trip, why this was at all possible. It’s because of places like Edelman and the other folks working for the Saudis.”
Edelman filed paperwork earlier this month with the Department of Justice to conduct public relations for an advertising company based in Saudi Arabia, with the contract costing $208,000. The Saudi company works closely with the Saudi Data Artificial Intelligence Agency.
With all these ideas up in the air and on the table, nevertheless, an MTV Entertainment spokesperson said that neither MTV nor the Daily Show were involved in “Search Beyond” and declined to comment on whether they will be willing to work with Saudi Arabia in the future.
Hiring PR firms won’t be the first and last attempt, especially when reports arose that yesterday at the Jeddah Summit, questions pertaining to Riyadh’s pariah status and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi were censored in the media.
This is not poetry nor mere exaggerations with the hope of spreading false hope. It is the reality of the Yemeni geographic revenge against the occupation.
Israeli technology is one of the most important sources of input for the Neom project, which heavily relies on stability that cannot be attained without securing the Red Sea itself.
For the UAE, Bahrain, “Israel,” and the United States to launch maritime military exercises is no show of force; it is a reflection of deep concern and misgiving, primarily that of “Israel.”
“Israel” is dealing with four nightmares in the Red Sea, and Yemen seems to be their common thread.
The first nightmare: “We will strike critical targets.” That is how Ansar Allah responded last year to “Israel’s” comment on the situation in Yemen. Ansar Allah’s words were not just mere lip service, for Yemeni drones and Sanaa’s missile capabilities pose a genuine threat to the occupation on the Red Sea front, which has been confirmed by various Israeli military research centers.
Throughout the entirety of the Yemeni Army and Popular Committee-controlled Yemen, threatening “Eilat” is not any harder than threatening Saudi Aramco – that is Ari Heistein’s approach, a researcher in the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies. Though Heistein underrates the Yemeni threat, he acknowledges that Ansar Allah is able to use long-range missiles to hit targets from very far ranges. He sums up the whole situation with a single phrase: “It is realistic; however, it is limited.”
The precarious aspect of “limitation” stems from one basic angle: long-range missiles would grant the Israeli defense systems a certain margin of time to respond. This study was written two weeks ahead of the battle of Seif al-Quds, which proved that the issues in the Israeli defense systems do not solely rely on preparation, for what merits preparation more than a war?
The second nightmare: during the 1967 war, “Israel” experienced firsthand the repercussions of the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran being closed, so what could be the adverse effects of a farther passage – Bab-el-Mandeb Strait – being closed?
Closing Bab-el-Mandeb Strait in the face of Israeli vessels could seriously harm Israeli trade, both in terms of imports and exports. India is the largest Israeli arms importer in the world, importing 43% of “Israel’s” arms exports between 2016 and 2020, while Vietnam is the third-largest in the world, importing 12% of “Israel’s” arms exports.
Arms exports are a vital part of the Israeli economy, as “Israel” ranks eighth in the world in terms of arms exports, exporting 3% of the world’s arms. Therefore, closing Bab-el-Mandeb in the face of Israeli ships, one of the main pillars of the Israeli economy, heavily impacts the lives of Israeli settlers, whom the Israeli authorities need many temptations to keep in place.
The Israeli economy heavily relies on imported goods, which cross through the Indian Ocean through Bab-el-Mandeb. “Israel” might experience a situation that is opposite to the one it went through during the October 1973 war, which saw “Israel” suffering because of Bab-el-Mandeb being closed in the face of Iranian tankers transporting oil to “Israel” back when Iran was under the Shah. Today, “Israel” is extremely worried about the same strait standing in solidarity with revolutionary Iran.
The third nightmare: “Israel” dreams about having coastal tourist-attractive cities, and they are part of its plans for the future, firstly due to profits they would generate, and secondly due to the doors they could open for normalization.
Carnegie Center calls this project “The diplomacy of the Saudi Neom.” Neom city is at the heart of this project, and Israeli technology is one of the most important sources of input for this project, which requires high levels of stability that cannot be attained without stability in the Red Sea. Losing the opportunity of having military stability in the Red Sea means “Israel” would lose its economic opportunities in these “smart cities.”
The fourth nightmare: China aims to ensure the finest conditions for stability in the regions and straits through which the Belt and Road Initiative goes. By taking a look at a map of the initiative, one sees that Bab-el-Mandeb is a pivotal intermediate link for its success. The same initiative deems the Haifa port as less of a priority in terms of pathways into the Mediterranean sea, especially because it has many alternatives.
“Israel,” who is acting very cautiously in fear of the US aims to please China, hopes to reap the utmost benefits from the project. However, Bab-el-Mandeb could seriously harm “Israel” if China was put in a zero-sum game. “Israel” would lose a railway that connects “Eilat” and “Ashdod” and huge gas pipelines that would transmit energy through the occupied territories and supply them with energy as well.
This is the Yemeni geographic revenge from the occupation, as the four Yemeni nightmares are enough to shake “Isreal” to the core in terms of the occupation’s security and economy.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II is pictured in Amman on 11 April 2021 (Yousef Allan/Jordanian Royal Palace/AFP)
David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was The Guardian’s foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.
For once, just for once, US President Joe Biden got something right in the Middle East, and I say this conscious of his abysmal record in the region.
In accepting the intelligence he was passed by the Jordanians that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was up to his ears in a plot to destabilise the rule of King Abdullah, Biden brought the scheme to a premature halt. Biden did well to do so.
His statement that the US was behind Abdullah had immediate consequences for the other partner in this scheme, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel.
While bin Salman was starving Jordan of funds (according to former Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher, the Saudis have not provided any direct bilateral assistance since 2014), Netanyahu was starving the kingdom of water.
Without Washington’s overt support, King Abdullah would now be in serious trouble, the victim of a two-pronged offensive from Saudi Arabia and Israel
This is water that Israel siphons off the River Jordan. Under past agreements, Israel has supplied Jordan with water, and when Jordan asks for an additional amount, Israel normally agrees without delay. Not this year: Netanyahu refused, allegedly in retaliation for an incident in which his helicopter was refused Jordanian airspace. He quickly changed his mind after a call from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to his counterpart, Gabi Ashkenazi.
Had former US President Donald Trump still been in power, it is doubtful whether any of this would have happened.
Without Washington’s overt support, King Abdullah would now be in serious trouble: the victim of a two-pronged offensive from Saudi Arabia and Israel, his population seething with discontent, and his younger half-brother counting the days until he could take over.
The problem with Abdullah
But why were bin Salman and Netanyahu keen to put the skids under an ally like Abdullah?
Abdullah, a career soldier, is not exactly an opposition figure in the region. He of all people is not a Bashar al-Assad, Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Abdullah was fully signed up to the counter-revolution against the Arab Spring. Jordan joined the Saudi-led anti-Islamic State coalition, deployed aircraft to target the Houthis in Yemen, and withdrew its ambassador from Iran after the Saudi embassy in Tehran and consul in Mashhad were sacked and Saudi Arabia consequently cut diplomatic relations.Jordan arrested senior suspect over contact with Saudi crown prince Read More »
He attended the informal summit on a yacht in the Red Sea, convened to organise the fight against the influence of Turkey and Iran in the Middle East. That was in late 2015.
In January 2016, Abdullah told US congressmen in a private briefing that Turkey was exporting terrorists to Syria, a statement he denied making afterwards. But the remarks were documented in a Jordanian foreign ministry readout passed to MEE.
Jordan’s special forces trained men that Libyan general Khalifa Haftar used in his failed attempt to take Tripoli. This was the pet project of the UAE.
Why then, should this stalwart of the cause now be considered by his Arab allies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, an inconvenience that needs to be dealt with?
Insufficiently loyal
The answer partly lies in the psychology of bin Salman. It is not good enough to be partially signed up to his agenda. As far as he is concerned, you are either in or out.
“But there is also a feeling [in Riyadh] that Jordan and others should be with us or against us. So we were not completely with them on Iran. We were not completely with them on Qatar. We were not completely with them on Syria. We did what we could and I don’t think we should have gone further, but to them, that was not enough.”
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman welcomes Jordan’s King Abdullah II to Riyadh on 8 March 2021 (Bandar al-Jaloud/Saudi Royal Palace/AFP)
Abdullah’s equivocation certainly was not enough for the intended centrepiece of the new era, Saudi Arabia’s normalisation of relations with Israel.
Here, Jordan would have been directly involved and King Abdullah was having none of it. Had he gone along with the Trump plan, his kingdom – a careful balance between Jordanians and Palestinians – would have been in a state of insurrection.
In addition, Abdullah could not escape the fact that he was a Hashemite, whose legitimacy stems in part from Jordan’s role as custodian of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy sites in Jerusalem. This, too, was being threatened by the Al Sauds.
The importance of Aqaba
But the plan itself was regarded by both bin Salman and Netanyahu as too big to stop. I personalise this, because in both Saudi Arabia and Israel, there are experienced foreign policy and intelligence hands who appreciate how quickly this plan would have destabilised Jordan and Israel’s vulnerable eastern border.
The plan has been years in the preparation and the subject of clandestine meetings between the Saudi prince and the Israeli leader. At the centre of it lies Jordan’s sole access to the Red Sea, the strategic port of Aqaba.
The two cities of Aqaba and Ma’an were part of the kingdom of Hejaz from 1916 to 1925. In May 1925, Ibn Saud surrendered Aqaba and Ma’an and they became part of the British Emirate of Transjordan.
The price for turning on the tap of Saudi finance was too high for Abdullah to pay. It was total subservience to Riyadh
It would be another 40 years before the two independent countries would agree on a Jordan-Saudi border. Jordan got 19 kilometres of coastline on the Gulf of Aqaba and 6,000 square kilometres inland, while Saudi Arabia got 7,000 square kilometres of land.
For the new kid on the block, bin Salman, a prince who was always sensitive about his legitimacy, reclaiming Saudi influence over Aqaba in a big trade deal with Israel would be a big part of his claim to restoring Saudi dominance over its hinterland.
And the trade with Israel would be big. Bin Salman is spending $500bn constructing the city of Neom, which is eventually supposed to straddle Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. Sitting at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, the Jordanian port would be firmly in Saudi sights.
This is where Bassem Awadallah, the former chief of Jordan’s royal court, comes in. Two years before he definitively broke with King Abdullah, and while he was still Jordan’s envoy to Riyadh, Awadallah negotiated the launch of something called the Saudi-Jordanian Coordination Council, a vehicle that Jordanian officials at the time said would “unblock billions of dollars” for the cash-starved Hashemite kingdom.
A giant Jordanian flag is raised during a celebration in the port of Aqaba in 2016 (AFP)
Awadallah promised that the council would invest billions of Saudi dollars in Jordan’s leading economic sectors, focusing on the Aqaba Special Economic Zone.
The money, of course, never materialised. Saudi support for the kingdom diminished to a trickle, and according to an informed source, Muasher, Saudi funds stopped almost completely after 2014.Jordan: Why King Abdullah’s troubles are not over Read More »
The price for turning on the tap of Saudi finance was too high for Abdullah to pay. It was total subservience to Riyadh. Under this plan, Jordan would have become a satellite of Riyadh, much as Bahrain has become.
Netanyahu had his own sub-agenda in the huge trade that would flow from Neom once Saudi Arabia had formally recognised Israel.
A confirmed enemy of the Oslo plan to set up a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, Netanyahu and the Israeli right have always eyed annexation of Area C and the Jordan Valley, which comprises 60 percent of the West Bank. Under this new Nakba, the Palestinians living there, denied Israeli citizenship, would be slowly forced to move to Jordan. This could only happen under a Saudi-oriented plan, in which Jordanian workers could travel freely and work in Saudi Arabia. As it is, remittances from the Jordanian workforce in Saudi Arabia are an economic lifeblood to the bankrupt kingdom.
The money pouring into Jordan, accompanied by a mobile workforce of Jordanians and stateless Palestinians, would finally put to bed grandiose visions of a Palestinian state, and with it the two-state solution. On this, Netanyahu and bin Salman are as one: treat them as a mobile workforce, not citizens of a future state.
Hussein’s favoured son
That Prince Hamzah should be seen as the means by which Jordan is enlisted to this plan represents the final irony of this bizarre tale.
If the Hashemite blood runs deep in any veins, it is surely in his. He was King Hussein’s favoured son. In a letter sent to his brother Prince Hassan in 1999, King Hussein wrote: “Hamzeh, may God give him long life, has been envied since childhood because he was close to me, and because he wanted to know all matters large and small, and all details of the history of his family. He wanted to know about the struggle of his brothers and of his countrymen. I have been touched by his devotion to his country and by his integrity and magnanimity as he stayed beside me, not moving unless I forced him from time to time to carry out some duty on occasions that did not exceed the fingers on one hand.”
Abdullah broke the agreement he made with his father on his death bed when he replaced his half-brother with his son, Hussein, as crown prince in 2004.
The new foreign policy establishment in Washington should wean itself off the notion that US allies are its friends
But if Hashemite pride in and knowledge of Jordan’s history runs deep in Hamzah, he of all princes would have soon realised the cost to Jordan of accepting bin Salman’s billions and Netanyahu’s tacit encouragement, just as his father did.
Hamzah’s friends ardently dispute they are part of this plot and downplay connections with Awadallah. Hamzah only owns up to one thing: that he is immensely concerned at how low Jordan has fallen under years of misrule. In this, Hamzah is 100 percent right.
It is clear what has to happen now. King Abdullah should finally see that he must completely overhaul the Jordanian political system, by calling for free and fair elections and abiding by their result. Only that will unite the country around him.
This is what King Hussein did when he faced challenge and revolt by Jordanian tribes in the south of the kingdom; in 1989, Hussein overhauled the political system and held the freest elections in the history of the kingdom.
The government that emerged from this process led the country safely out of one of the most difficult moments for Jordan: Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf War.
The real villains
Biden, meanwhile, should realise that letting bin Salman get away with the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has a cost.
Bin Salman did not learn anything from the episode and carried on in exactly the same way, reckless and swift, against an Arab neighbour and ally, with potentially disastrous consequences.
The new foreign policy establishment in Washington should wean itself off the notion that US allies are its friends. It should learn once and for all that the active destabilisers of the Middle East are not the cartoon villains of Iran and Turkey.
Rather, they are the closest US allies, where US forces and military technology are either based, or as in the case of Israel, inextricably intertwined: Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Israel.
Jordan, the classic buffer state, is a case in point.
On Wednesday, the Saudis opened their annual confab in Riyadh, officially called the Future Investment Initiative but widely referred to as “Davos in the Desert.” That nickname had always annoyed the people who run the World Economic Forum and its signature event in Davos, Switzerland, because they—like most of the rest of the world that is concerned about protecting their brand—haven’t wanted much to do with Saudi Arabia and its crown prince in recent years.
That trend may be coming to an end, however. Increasingly, things are back to business as usual in Riyadh. A veritable A-list of Wall Street and private equity titans flew in for the event this week. Gone are the days when the leaders of the financial services industry stayed away, fearing the reputational costs of becoming associated with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. The remains of the journalist and onetime courtier to Saudi power centers have yet to be found. But investors have now decided there are deals to be done.
They are making a bet that the stated commitment by human rights organizations, journalists, and a relatively bipartisan group of US lawmakers to hold Saudi Arabia accountable doesn’t amount to much—and they may be right.
There is a general expectation in Washington that the Saudis are going to have a rough time with the new Biden administration. During the presidential campaign, Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris vowed that they would “reassess our [America’s] relationship with the kingdom, end US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.” After being sworn in as president earlier this month, Biden made good on that promise when he froze—at least temporarily—arms sales to Saudi Arabia that his predecessor approved.
Saudi Arabia is a problematic ally. In the last five years, its crown prince launched a futile military campaign in Yemen that has killed and injured tens of thousands of people, oversaw the hit team that dismembered Khashoggi, presided over the arrests and abuse of reformers, and led an international embargo of Qatar [which is also a not a model ally, but it is a critical security partner for the United States]. There are also lingering questions about Saudi Arabia and the role of its citizens in the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. As much as the Saudis want Americans to forget, there were 15 young Saudi men on those planes, not Qataris.
It is true that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has overseen important social changes in Saudi Arabia that have improved the lives of his citizens, but that does not diminish the entirely reasonable desire to hold the Saudis accountable for his many transgressions. Doing so may be harder than it seems, however.
There was never a chance that the global business community was going to write off Saudi Arabia. Sure, CEOs stayed away for a while, but even at the height of the outrage over Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal murder, Saudi Arabia remained a place where people believed they could make money. And since that is the sine qua non of financiers, consultants, and oil companies—and firms that provide all kinds of services—Mohammed bin Salman was forced to spend some time in the penalty box, but he was never made the international pariah some hoped he would become. Yes, the Saudis have a range of economic problems, the wisdom of vanity projects like the would-be high-tech city of Neom escape most people who look at them, and Riyadh’s efforts to restructure its labor market and establish the institutions of a market economy are enormous and difficult tasks—but the Saudis still have the biggest economy in the Middle East, which makes it an attractive partner to those who showed up in Riyadh for the Future Investment Initiative.
There is an argument to be made that just because business leaders want to consort with the Saudis that does not mean that the US government is obligated to do the same. That’s true enough—but that’s not to say Washington is simply free to do whatever it likes. It faces the constraints of geopolitics. At the same time that leaders of industry were rubbing shoulders in Riyadh, the US military was beefing up its presence in Saudi Arabia just in case there is conflict with Iran. US military planners see Saudi Arabia as an important partner in Iran policy. That includes the potential Iran policies under consideration by the Biden administration, whether they involve rejoining the 2015 nuclear agreement or negotiating a new deal. To make either work, the administration is going to need Riyadh to support the deal, which means that American negotiators are going to have to be sensitive to Saudi concerns.
Related to Iran and the geopolitics of the region is the war in Yemen. The Saudi assault on its neighbor to the south, which began in 2015, accomplished everything the intervention was supposed to prevent. As a result of Riyadh’s poorly thought-out and poorly executed military operations, the Iranians now actually do have a relationship with Ansarullah, and Saudi Arabia is less secure. The war is unwinnable, and the Saudis need to get out. What remains to be seen is whether they can do so without US help. The Saudis would no doubt like that help in the form of enhanced border security, including weapons systems.
This is going to be a tough decision for the administration given the strong strain of animus toward the Saudis in Washington and the Biden-Harris team’s own stated policy to “reassess” America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia. One argument they might respond with is: Screw them. Let them figure out how to get out of their own quagmire. That is understandable, but it’s not wise. It is in America’s interest both for the Saudis to get out of Yemen and for them to maintain good ties with Washington. Like it or not, Saudi Arabia is Washington’s primary interlocutor in the region, and an American deal with Iran is going to have to run at least partway through Yemen.
But should the United States cut the Saudis off from what they seem to love most about America—its fancy weapons systems? This is no longer in the realm of theoretical. The Biden administration’s ongoing review of Saudi Arabia will assess how it uses American weapons, specifically how many civilians it has killed and maimed in the process. Given the damage inflicted by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, such a reckoning is appropriate. But even if it allows Americans to take further steps to end their complicity in Saudi Arabia’s Yemen debacle, one should also acknowledge that it will not end that war.
Lost in all the discussions about “accountability” is the problem of defining what it would actually look like. Do Saudi Arabia’s critics want to see the crown prince replaced or in the dock? The United States is not going to determine Saudi Arabia’s leader. Even if the US intelligence community releases what it knows about the murder of Khashoggi—as the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, has demanded, and as the new director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, committed she would do in her written response to questions from senators during her confirmation hearings—Mohammed bin Salman will be the crown prince the next day and the day after that and the day after that, and so on. No doubt it would cause an international uproar, forcing those currently attending Davos in the Desert to stay away for a few years or maybe more. But they will find their way back to Saudi Arabia so long as they calculate that doing so is still good for business.
Also missing in the chatter about accountability are the potential consequences of imposing it. This isn’t to dismiss the idea of calling out the Saudis and refusing to sell them weapons out of hand but rather a plea to weigh the costs and benefits of such an approach. The Saudis may prove unwilling to work with the United States on a new nuclear deal with Iran or even try to undermine an agreement. Riyadh may feel encouraged to drift toward Washington’s competitors. Folks in Washington might dismiss that as idle threats, but the Chinese have a lot to offer, and the Russians are particularly good at taking advantage of stress between the United States and its traditional partners in the region. At the very least, tighter ties between the Saudis, Chinese, and Russians can make things harder for the United States, especially since great-power competition is now alleged to be the framework for American foreign policy.
Then again, US policymakers may not care about the downside risks of holding the Saudis accountable. Energy resources from the Persian Gulf are still important to the United States, but not like they once were, diminishing the urgency long attached to the Middle East and importance of close ties with countries like Saudi Arabia. The stakes may no longer be so high, giving the Biden team more room to maneuver. It just seems that up until now few inside the Beltway have worked through what accountability means in a rigorous way. That is unfortunate, because foreign policy by exhortation is likely to fail.
The “Israeli” entity’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mossad Cheif Yossi Cohen reportedly took a private flight Sunday to Saudi Arabia, where they met with Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman [MBS], according to “Israeli” sources.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also reportedly attended the meeting.
Netanyahu’s office had no immediate comment on the report.
According to the a flight tracker website, a Gulfstream IV jet, which Netanyahu used several times on flights to Moscow, took off from the entity’s Ben Gurion Airport yesterday [Sunday] and landed in NEOM megacity in the Tabuk Province of northwestern Saudi Arabia.
The flight tracking data indicated that the plane took off from Tel Aviv at 5 p.m. local time on Sunday and took off back to the “Israeli” entity in roughly five hours.
At a press conference at the White House last August, US President Donald Trump said that he expects Saudi Arabia to join other Gulf states like the United Arab Emirates [UAE] in normalizing relations with the “Israeli” entity.
There is no need for much effort to deduce the Saudi position regarding the move of its Emirati ally to publicize its relations with ‘Israel’. What the officials do not say publicly is proclaimed by the court media and writers in day and night, to the extent that some of them refused to grant the Palestinians “generosity” without return. Instead, the recompense was “blackmailing” practiced – for 70 years – in the Gulf “in the name of the sanctity of the cause”, according to articles of semi-unified narratives. It is clear now that the temporary royal silence and Riyadh’s reluctance to welcome – unlike Manama and Muscat – is the result of the kingdom not being ready to announce a full normalization with ‘Israel’. Therefore, it is hiding behind its allies [now the Emirates and then Bahrain and later Oman], waiting for a “suitable” day in which its crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, can proceed with the alliance, to consolidate the covenant of his ancestors and their promise.
The way the UAE has created “will form an Arab trend that exceeds all the failed obstacles that prevailed for seventy years.” This will undoubtedly contribute to strengthening the Saudi-‘Israeli’ rapprochement. This is a trend that was reinforced in recent years, under the alliance of the “two Mohammads” [Bin Zayed and Bin Salman]. The two pillars of common hostility toward Iran and the attempts to attract foreign investment to finance the economic transformation plan, Bin Salman’s “2030 Vision”, will unequivocally push the kingdom into an apparent rapprochement with ‘Israel’. Founding the $500 billion-city, “NEOM” – the backbone of this faltering “vision” – requires “peace and coordination with ‘Israel’, especially if the city will have the opportunity to become a tourist attraction,” according to researcher Mohammad Yaghi at the German Konrad Adenauer Foundation.
The intersections are many, as well as the “interests” that unite the undeclared alliance, in addition to the American pressure that is evident through the Gulf-‘Israeli’ “reconciliation” mediator, Jared Kushner, to compel the kingdom to publicize its “inevitable” relations with ‘Israel’. Kushner said a few days ago “the course of a warship cannot be changed overnight.” He reminded Riyadh yesterday that the normalization of its relations with Tel Aviv would be in the interest of the kingdom’s economy and defense. It would also contribute to limiting Iran’s power in the region. As for ‘Israel’, the “peace agreement” between it and the Emirates represents “the most important cornerstone on the road to achieving the central goal of normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia,” the expression belongs to an ‘Israeli’ political official who spoke to Yedioth Ahronoth.
In exchange for Riyadh’s official silence and Washington’s public calls, the Saudi media adhered, as usual, to a unified narrative based on marketing the idea that the kingdom views the normalization of relations between Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv as a sovereign Emirati affair, which would “yield good results for the Palestinian cause,” by “suspending the annexation process indefinitely,” despite all that has been said and spoken by ‘Israelis’ about baseless propaganda that the UAE marketed to justify its move. According to what has been written, the declaration “does not involve any interference in the Palestinian affair. It rather sets red lines for any policy that ‘Israel’ might pursue, which involves oppressing the rights of the Palestinian people, excluding the phantom of annexing the Palestinian lands, and the consolidating the two-state solution.”
The justification of the Emirati moves in terms of “realism” as “constituting an important breakthrough in the peace process … after it suffered from a long stalemate without any progress or success”, had a significant share. In addition to that, the call to “overcome the deadly division based on returning to calling for the Arab Peace Initiative as a basis for negotiation”.
Riyadh considers, through its media, that “the policy of estrangement and boycott has not achieved neither the interest of the Palestinians nor the Arabs.” Abu Dhabi chose “another communication and recognition-based approach to address the outstanding problems in a different climate,” because “the just Palestinian cause has remained for more than seventy years without a political solution that satisfies the Palestinians who were insisting on big things, betting on the power of righteousness and forgetting the right to power.” They depend entirely on “aid from the Arab countries, especially the rich Arab Gulf states, for their livelihoods, lives, jobs, authority, embassies, and all their life details.” They speak of “unprecedented emotional and ideological blackmail because of the Palestine issue,” although they are “like all the causes of liberation that the occupied peoples suffered to obtain their liberation from the colonialists, the Palestinians are not better than the Vietnamese, the Algerians, or the rest of nations.” They received peerless indulgence … while all historical documents confirm that they were the ones who sold their lands, not alone, but in villages and sub-districts until they were transformed into Jewish settlements.” Therefore, “there is no real solution of the Palestinian issue except for Palestinians to accept their situation and build a new identity of their own choice… and assuming responsibility is the right way.”
The normalization of relations between the UAE and ‘Israel’ will encourage all the other Gulf states to follow their counterparts and reveal their secret ties with ‘Israel’ not to let Abu Dhabi enjoying alone the combination of its capital and advanced ‘Israeli’ technology in all fields, to become, along with Tel Aviv, the most powerful and wealthy in the Middle East. This is according to Thomas Friedman in “The New York Times”, who in his article talks about another, a stronger and more psychological message addressed to Iran and its proxies, that “there are now two alliances in the region; The first is a UAE-led alliance of those who want the future to bury the past, and the second is an Iran-led alliance of those who wish that the past buries the future.”
ستسهم الخطوة الإماراتية في تعزيز التقارب السعودي – الإسرائيلي (أ ف ب )
لا تزال الرياض تبدي حذراً شديداً إزاء الترحيب العلني بإتمام الاتفاق الإماراتي – الإسرائيلي. حذرٌ، وإن كان لا ينسحب على ما يُنشر في الإعلام (وكلّه رسميّ)، يمكن ردّه إلى حسابات كثيرة لا تزال تتخطّى في أهميتها الراهنة رغبة المملكة في البوحليس ثمّة حاجة إلى كثيرِ جهدٍ لاستنباط موقف السعودية إزاء خطوة حليفتها الإماراتية إشهار علاقاتها مع إسرائيل. فما لا يقوله الرسميّون في العلن، يجاهر به إعلام البلاط وكتّابه صبحَ مساء، إلى درجةٍ أنّ منهم مَن أبى إلّا أن يمنِّن الفلسطينيين بـ»كرمٍ» مِن دون مقابل، بل إنّ المقابل كان «ابتزازاً» مورس ـــــ على مدى 70 عاماً ــــــ في حقّ دول الخليج «باسم قدسيّة القضيّة»، وفق ما تقرأه مقالات بسرديّات شبه موحّدة. لم يعد خافياً أنّ الصمت الملكي الموقّت وإحجام الرياض عن الترحيب ـــــ بخلاف المنامة ومسقط ـــــ مردّهما إلى عدم جاهزية المملكة بعد، للإعلان عن تطبيع كامل للعلاقات مع إسرائيل. لذا، فهيَ تتلطّى خلف حليفاتها (الآن الإمارات ومِن بعدها البحرين ولاحقاً عُمان)، في انتظار يومٍ «مناسب» يمكن فيه وليّ عهدها، محمد بن سلمان، أن يمضي في التحالف، ليرسِّخ عهد أجداده ووعدهم.
الطريق الذي شقّته الإمارات «سيشكّل تياراً عربياً يتجاوز كل الإعاقات الفاشلة التي سادت لسبعين عاماً»، وسيسهم، بلا شكّ، في تعزيز التقارب السعودي ــــــ الإسرائيلي. وذلك اتجّاهٌ تعزّز بالفعل في السنوات الأخيرة، في ظلّ تحالف «المحمّدَين» (ابن زايد وابن سلمان). ركيزتا العداء المشترك تجاه إيران، ومحاولات جذب استثمارات أجنبية لتمويل خطة التحوّل الاقتصادي، «رؤية 2030»، الخاصة بابن سلمان، ستدفعان ـــــ بلا لبس ـــــ المملكة إلى تقارب علنيّ مع إسرائيل. فإنشاء مدينة الـ500 مليار دولار، «نيوم» ـــــ العمود الفقري لهذه «الرؤية» المتعثّرة ـــــ يتطلّب «سلاماً وتنسيقاً مع إسرائيل، خصوصاً إذا كانت المدينة ستُتاح لها فرصة أن تصبح منطقة جذب سياحي»، وفق الباحث في مؤسّسة «كونراد أديناور» الألمانيّة، محمد ياغي.
التقاطعات كثيرة، وكذا «المصالح» التي تجمع الحلف غير المُعلن، مضافاً إليها ضغوط أميركيّة تتبدّى عبر وكيل «المصالحة» الخليجية ــــــ الإسرائيلية، جاريد كوشنر، لحمل المملكة على إشهار علاقاتها «الحتميّة» بإسرائيل. ورغم أنّه «لا يمكن تغيير مسار سفينة حربيّة بين عشيّة وضحاها»، على حدّ تعبير كوشنر قبل أيام، فهو عاد وذكّر الرياض، يوم أمس، بأنّ مِن شأن تطبيع علاقاتها مع تل أبيب أن يصبّ في مصلحة اقتصاد ودفاع المملكة، إلى جانب أنه سيسهم في الحدّ من قوّة إيران في المنطقة. بالنسبة إلى إسرائيل، يمثّل «اتفاق السلام» بينها وبين الإمارات «الحجر الأساس الأهمّ في الطريق إلى تحقيق الهدف المركزيّ المتمثّل في تطبيع العلاقات مع السعودية»، والتعبير لمسؤول سياسي إسرائيلي تحدّث إلى «يديعوت أحرونوت».
في مقابل صمت الرياض الرسمي ودعوات واشنطن العلنيّة، التزم الإعلام السعودي، على جري عادته، سرديّة موحّدة، تقوم على تسويق فكرةٍ مفادها أنّ المملكة تنظر إلى تطبيع العلاقات بين أبو ظبي وتل أبيب باعتباره شأناً سيادياً إماراتياً، من شأنه أن «يسفر عن نتائج جيدة بالنسبة إلى القضية الفلسطينية»، عبر «تعليق عمليّة الضمّ إلى أجل غير مسمّى»، رغم كلّ ما حُكي ويحكى إسرائيلياً عن دعاية لا أساس لها سوّقتها الإمارات لتبرير خطوتها. بحسب ما كُتب، فإنّ الإعلان «لا ينطوي على أيّ تدخّل في الشأن الفلسطيني، بل (هو) حدّد خطوطاً حمراً لأي سياسة قد تنتهجها إسرائيل تنطوي على هضم حقوق الشعب الفلسطيني، وأبعد شبح ضم الأراضي الفلسطينية، وعزّز الحلّ عبر الدولتين».
ذكّر كوشنر الرياض بأنّ مِن شأن تطبيع علاقاتها مع تل أبيب أن يصبّ في مصلحة اقتصادها
تبرير الخطوة الإماراتية من باب «الواقعية» بوصفها «تشكل اختراقاً مهمّاً في عملية السلام… بعدما عانت من جمودٍ طويلٍ من دون أي تقدمٍ أو نجاحٍ»، كان له حصة وازنة، فضلاً عن الدعوة إلى «تجاوز الانقسام القاتل على قاعدة العودة إلى المطالبة بمبادرة السلام العربية كأساس للتفاوض». تعتبر الرياض، عبر إعلامها، أنّ «سياسة القطيعة والمقاطعة لم تحقّق لا مصلحة الفلسطينيين ولا مصلحة العرب»؛ من هنا، اختارت أبو ظبي «مقاربة أخرى تقوم على الاتصال والاعتراف لطرح المشكلات العالقة في مناخ مختلف»، ذلك أنّ «القضية الفلسطينية العادلة ظلّت لأكثر من سبعين عاماً من دون حلٍّ سياسي مُرضٍ للفلسطينيين الذين كانوا يصرّون على أشياء كبيرة، ويراهنون على قوة الحق ويتناسون حق القوة»، ويعتمدون «بالكامل على المساعدات من الدول العربية، وبخاصة دول الخليج العربي الغنية، في معاشهم وحياتهم ووظائفهم وسلطتهم وسفاراتهم، وفي كل تفاصيل حياتهم». إلى جانب كلّ ذلك، يتحدّث هؤلاء عن «ابتزاز عاطفي وأيدلوجي غير مسبوق (مورس) بسبب قضية فلسطين»، رغم أنّها «مثل كل قضايا التحرير التي كابدت الشعوب المحتلة لنيل تحررها من المستعمر، فلا الفلسطينيون أفضل من الفيتناميين ولا الجزائريين ولا بقية الأمم، ومع ذلك حظوا بدلال منقطع النظير… بينما كل الوثائق التاريخية تؤكّد أنهم هم من باعوا أراضيهم ليس بالمفرد بل بالقرى والنواحي حتى تحوّلت لمستوطنات يهودية». لذا، فـ»لا حلّ حقيقياً للقضية الفلسطينية إلا بمصارحة الفلسطينيين لأنفسهم وبناء هوية جديدة تقوم على أكتافهم لا أكتاف غيرهم… وتحمّل المسؤولية هي الطريق الصحيح». سيشجّع تطبيع العلاقات بين الإمارات وإسرائيل دول الخليج الأخرى جميعها على أن تحذو حذو نظيرتها، وتخرج بعلاقاتها السريّة مع إسرائيل إلى العلن، حتى لا تُترك أبو ظبي وحدها تتمتّع بالجمع بين رأسمالها والتكنولوجيا الإسرائيلية المتطوّرة في كلّ المجالات، وتصبح هي وتل أبيب الأكثر قوّة وثروة في الشرق الأوسط، بحسب توماس فريدمان في «نيويورك تايمز» الذي يتحدّث في مقالته عن رسالة أخرى أقوى وذات بعد نفسي، موجّهة إلى إيران ووكلائها، مفادها أن «هناك الآن تحالفين في المنطقة؛ الأول هو تحالف الراغبين في أن يدفن المستقبل الماضي بقيادة الإمارات، والثاني هو تحالف من يريدون للماضي أن يدفن المستقبل بقيادة إيران».
ـ من اتفاقية كامب ديفيد إلى مشروع «نيوم» مخطط امبريالي صهيوني عسكري اقتصادي متكامل لشرق أوسط جديد وفق أجندة صهيوأميركية تشمل الكيان الصهيوني بدولته المزعومة (إسرائيل) كلاعب وجزء أساسي من المنطقة، وتكمن تفاصيل ذلك في كتاب «الشرق الأوسط الجديد» لوزير الخارجية الإسرائيلي شمعون بيريز الذي صدر عام 1993 ، وتضمّن رؤيته لمستقبل المنطقة بأحلام كبرى تربط بين (إسرائيل) وفلسطين والأردن ومصر والسعودية بمشروع سياسي اقتصادي يخلق سوقاً اقتصادية في المنطقة على غرار السوق الأوروبية المشتركة، وبتحالف عسكري موحد على غرار حلف الناتو، من خلال إنشاء شبكات كهربائية لا تعترف بالحدود، ومنطقة حرة بلا حدود بين السعودية ومصر و(إسرائيل) ليتوافق ويترجم ذلك وفي وقت لاحق بـ (رؤية2030 ) لولي العهد السعودي محمد بن سلمان تحت اسم «نيوم» اختصار لجملة المستقبل الجديد، والذي يتضمّن إنشاء منطقة حرة تقع في قلب مربع يجمع السعودية ومصر والأردن وفلسطين المحتلة.
ـ بين هذا وذاك تتالت الأحداث على المنطقة ضمن إطار مشروع الشرق الأوسط الجديد الذي حلم به قادة ومنظري الكيان الصهيوني وأبرزهم شمعون بيريز، وبدأ ذلك بعد اتفاقية كامب ديفيد عام 1979 التي أخرجت مصر من معادلة الردع العربي، والجيش المصري من حرب المواجهة والوجود مع كيان العدو الصهيوني، إلى حرب الخليج الأولى بدعم أميركي وتمويل خليجي سعودي بشكل أساسي للرئيس الراحل صدام حسين لإنهاك وإضعاف قوى وجيوش وإمكانيات إيران والعراق، مروراً بحرب الخليج الثانية /غزو العراق للكويت/ التي كانت سبباً رئيسياً وبتخطيط مسبق لتواجد القواعد والقوات العسكرية الأميركية بشكل كبير في المنطقة، ثم اتفاقيات أوسلو (1و2) ووادي عربة التي كانت أكبر مؤامرة على قوى وفصائل المقاومة الفلسطينية، وليس انتهاء بالاحتلال الأميركي للعراق بحجج كاذبة واهية تحت عنوان امتلاك أسلحة الدمار الشامل، وتفاصيل أخرى لا مجال لذكرها في هذا المقال تمهيداً لسيناريو ما يسمّى (الربيع العربي) الذي بدأ من تونس أواخر عام 2010 متدحرجاً إلى عدد من الدول العربية، واصطدم بصخرة الصمود السوري وقوة التعاون والتشبيك والتكتيك لقوى محور المقاومة من إيران إلى العراق وسورية وحزب الله في لبنان مع الحليف الروسي والصديق الصيني، ففشل في تحقيق أهدافه في تقسيم وتجزئة المنطقة، وتطويق روسيا والصين وإيران للسيطرة على منابع وأنابيب النفط والغاز.
ـ ترافق ذلك مع الجزء الأساسي الذي سنركز عليه في هذا المقال لعلاقته المباشرة بـ مشروع نيوم، وهو «عاصفة الحزم» الحرب على اليمن التي بدأت عام 2015، وقامت بها قوى التحالف المدعومة من الولايات المتحدة الأميركية والتي تضمّ إلى جانب السعودية ثماني دول أخرى هي الإمارات ومصر والأردن والسودان وموريتانيا والسنغال والكويت واليحرين، إلى توقيع مصر اتفاقاً عام 2016 بإعطاء النظام السعودي جزيرتين ضروريتين لربط مشروع نيوم بسيناء بانتقال جزيرتي تيران وصنافير إلى السيادة السعودية لتصبح الرياض جزءاً من اتفاقية «كامب ديفيد» بأثر رجعي، ثم إعلان ترامب لصفقة القرن والترويج لها عام 2017 لتصفية القضية الفلسطينية، وتنسيق جارد كوشنير صهر الرئيس دونالد ترامب ومستشار البيت الأبيض عام 2019 لورشة المنامة في البحرين الجانب الاقتصادي من صفقة القرن للتمويل أملاً بنجاح الصفقة، وصولاً لمشروع محمد بن سلمان المدينة الذكية «نيوم».
ـ تعتبر حرب الإبادة اليمنية أحد أهمّ تفاصيل مشروع «نيوم» للسيطرة على مضيق باب المندب والثروات النفطية اليمنية وخاصة في محافظتي مأرب والجوف، حيث يعتبر مضيق باب المندب ذا أهمية استراتيجية عسكرية أمنية اقتصادية كبيرة يربط بين البحر الأحمر والخليج العربي والمحيط الهندي، ويعمل كطريق ملاحة للسفن النفطية وغير النفطية التي تنتقل بين الشرق الأوسط وبلدان البحر المتوسط، وتأتي أهمية اليمن الاستراتيجية بالسيطرة على مضيق باب المندب بامتلاكها جزيرة بريم، ومرة أخرى مُنيت قوى التحالف في حرب اليمن التي تخوضها السعودية بشكل رئيسي بالوكالة عن الولايات المتحدة الأميركية والعدو الصهيوني بفشل تحقيق الأهداف وفق ما سبق، وتتالت انتصارات الجيش اليمني واللجان الشعبية وحركة أنصار الله رغم الصواريخ الباليستية والقنابل المحرمة دولياً ومعاناة المجاعة وانتشار الأوبئة في اليمن، وخلقت معادلات ردع جديدة من خلال استهداف بارجة حربية وناقلة نفط سعوديتين، وضرب منشأة «أرامكو» النفطية السعودية، وما تلاه من انهيار الإنتاج النفطي لأسابيع عدة، وأصبحت تطال صواريخ المقاومة في اليمن العمق السعودي بمطاراته ومنشآته النفطية، إضافة للتفوّق في الحرب البرية في استعادة وتحرير العديد من الأراضي اليمنية، وخاصة محافظة الجوف التي فيها أكبر الحقول والشركات النفطية، وذلك في ظلّ تصدّع قوى التحالف التي عانت من انسحابات متتالية من قطر إلى العدد الأكبر من الجنود السودانيين إلى غيرها من بقية الدول التي أصبحت مشاركتها رمزية.
ـ تستمرّ المعارك والعمليات العسكرية لتحرير محافظة مأرب معقل سلطة حزب التجمع اليمني للإصلاح (الإخوان المسلمين في اليمن) وهو المسيطر على المفاصل المهمة في ما تسمّى الحكومة الشرعية في اليمن، وأهمّ الحصون التي تتمسك بها قوات التحالف وبما تحتويه من مخزون نفط استراتيجي، وبتأييد الحاضنة الشعبية من مشايخ وقبائل مأرب التي ناشدت حكومة صنعاء لتخلصهم من سلطة الإخوان المسلمين.
ـ خلال الأيام او الأسابيع المقبلة وبتحرير مأرب، مع بدايات العجز الاقتصادي للنظام السعودي من انخفاض إيرادات النفط جراء حرب أسعار النفط إلى انعدام إيرادات الحج والعمرة من جراء جائحة كورونا، وتفشي الفيروس في السعودية داخل وخارج أفراد الأسرة الحاكمة مع ما تعانيه من أزمات داخلية أخرى، وبالتكامل مع إنجازات محور وحلف المقاومة على مستوى الإقليم ستتغيّر موازين القوى، لتكون سنة فارقة مهمة على صعيد التحوّلات الكبرى لصالح محور حلف المقاومة.
ـ وبالتالي فإنّ تفوّق قوى المقاومة على القوة الإسرائيلية الأميركية الإمبريالية وأدواتها التركية والرجعية العربية قد تكون مقدّمة لرؤية استراتيجية لمشروع تحدٍّ جديد لدول غرب آسيا في برنامج متكامل للتشبيك في الإقليم لإنشاء كتلة اقتصادية اجتماعية كبرى قادرة دولها على تحقيق التنمية الاقتصادية، وتأمين فرص العمل، والحماية الأمنية والرعاية الصحية والخدمية لشعوبها.
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