Saudi Arabia’s decision on Sunday to end sex-based restaurant segregation illustrates a stark choice facing U.S. policymakers.
Those policymakers can isolate Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman by aggressively confronting his repression, or they can support bin Salman’s effort to diversify his economy and modernize his society. The two interests are mutually exclusive. Yet both have compelling arguments in their favor.
On the pro-confrontation side, critics of the Saudi regime can rightly point to its increasing domestic repression. Over the past two years, bin Salman has imprisoned hundreds of clerics, civil society activists, and prospective political rivals. These detentions are rarely justified and reflect bin Salman’s paranoia far more than any serious threat to his authority. The Crown Prince orchestrated October 2018 murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi was particularly outrageous.
Still, if America allows these concerns to dominate our Saudi calculation, we risk very problematic outcomes.
For a start, jeopardizing bin Salman’s necessary reform program. That would pose a significant national security threat to the United States. The key here is that bin Salman’s reform program, as centered under his Vision 2030 agenda, is critical to his nation’s long-term stability. With global oil prices now structurally capped by shale oil extraction, Saudi Arabia must find a new way to be economically dynamic. That means empowering women with reforms such as the restaurant segregation suspension, and other acts such as the legalization of female driving. These reforms are equally critical towards making Saudi Arabia more attractive to foreign investment.
But what if bin Salman fails and the regime reverts to its traditional reliance on oil patronage as a means of ensuring social stability? What happens when the oil prices run low or the wells run dry?
Then you have a nation in which more than 40% of the population are under 25 years of age, and lacking employment or means of social mobility. In a nation long influenced by extremist Salafi-extremist theology, that matching of youth dissatisfaction to Islamist extremism is a recipe for ISIS 2.0. Khashoggi’s suffering, and that of certain Saudis, is best addressed alongside America’s alliance, not isolation.
The issue here isn’t just one of avoiding a dangerous future. On Yemen, for example, does anyone seriously think that suspending U.S. support to Riyadh will make that regime treat civilians better? Of course it won’t. It will simply encourage bin Salman to grasp Vladimir Putin’s outstretched hand. The Russian leader’s penchant for bombing civilian hospitals gives us an indication of how his advice to bin Salman would play out in Yemen.
As I say, policymakers must pay heed to bin Salman’s restaurant liberalization. It’s more important to our interests than Khashoggi’s awful demise.
