Saudi Arabia took another small but significant step toward modernity this weekend, ending executions for those convicted of capital offenses as minors.
Indeed, minors convicted of such offenses will now face only a maximum of 10 years in prison. Among those the ruling will save is Ali Mohammed al Nimr, a Saudi youth and Shiite activist who for five years has been under a sentence of death. The prospective execution of al Nimr, whose cleric uncle was executed in 2016, risked inflaming always-tense relations between Saudi Arabia’s Shiite minority population and the ruling government.
But this wasn’t the only major human rights-related news out of Riyadh last week.
The regime also ended its long tradition of public flogging. Applied by judges for offenses against Islamic tradition, flogging has long been a marker of Saudi medievalism. These reforms are thus to be welcomed — not simply in and of themselves, but also for what they say about the desert kingdom’s political direction.
Because while King Salman is getting credit for the new changes, it is his son and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman who is responsible. Trying to build a new Saudi Arabia, the crown prince recognizes that flogging and foreign investment do not easily coexist. And attracting foreign investment is critical to Mohammed bin Salman’s long-term agenda. Focused on developing Saudi Arabia as a center of international commerce and tourism, he needs to show progress toward conforming with global norms. The prince correctly judges that if he fails in his effort, the ruling House of Saud and its citizens face a very dark future. Hence his coordinated Vision 2030 agenda, which involves, among other things, the construction of an ultramodern city named Neom.
True, many say that Mohammed bin Salman isn’t the man to deliver this evolution. They point to the crown prince’s murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. And the kingdom’s disastrous war in Yemen. They also note his authoritarian centralization of power at home.
I recognize those concerns but disagree with those who say they should drive American separation from Saudi Arabia. It is clearly in America’s interest that we support the prince’s reform agenda.
With oil prices on a sustaining low trajectory, due, primarily, to increased U.S. shale-based supply providing an effective price ceiling on Saudi crude, the kingdom can no longer rely on its traditional feudal economic system to survive. That system involved the kingdom’s largesse to its citizens, allowing them to live well without much reciprocal productive activity. But those days are gone. The only way Saudi Arabia can survive in the long term is if its young population can access a stable employment market, and if the world sees the kingdom as an attractive place to do business and visit.
The alternative is Saudi Arabia’s collapse into retrenched cronyism and extremist Islam — a recipe, in the context of its young population, for an Islamic State 2.0. And if its nemesis Iran gets a nuclear weapon, prospectively, a nuclear-armed ISIS 2.0.
In that light, yes, these are small steps. But steps in the right direction, nonetheless.
