Washington is watching warily as the sands settle on the Arabian peninsula after this week’s whirlwind of events clouded the future of its plans in the Middle East, most notably the war against terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Though Saudi Arabia, the key U.S. ally in the region, appeared to have weathered immediate concerns about its stability after the death Thursday of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, a new threat loomed from the apparent collapse of Yemen’s government on the same day.
The Saudi royal family moved quickly to formalize the succession plan Abdullah had put into place, elevating Crown Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz to the throne and replacing him with Deputy Crown Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz. Defying expectations of a potential rivalry among members of the next generation, the royals quickly named the expected choice, Interior Minister Muhammad bin Nayef, as deputy crown prince.
“With the Arab world facing its worst crisis in decades the royals will want to present an image of stability and strength,” said Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution.
But the shocks are by no means over.
U.S. and Saudi officials were carefully watching developments in Yemen, where President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and his government quit under pressure from Shiite Houthi rebels just hours before Abdullah’s death was announced, throwing the U.S. anti-terror campaign there into disarray and raising fears of encirclement in Riyadh, which sees the Houthis as proxies for its main Middle East rival, Iran.
Saudi Arabia’s rulers also must take care of potential concerns among their own people.
Though the kingdom is ruled according to the dictates of the strict Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, its rulers are still seen as insufficiently pious by the extremists in al Qaeda and the Islamic State — a view some Saudis share. No Muslim caliph has ever successfully ruled without controlling the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and the would-be caliphs of the Islamic State see themselves as better stewards of that sacred trust.
Meanwhile, Abdullah was using the country’s vast oil wealth to buy the loyalty of more liberal Saudis and shield the kingdom from the effects of the Arab Spring, while pursuing an extremely cautious, though relatively liberal by Saudi standards, reform program. The new king, Salman, is expected to continue that slow pace, but it may prove to be not fast enough.
“Despite the appearance of a smooth transition in Riyadh, there are choppy seas ahead for Saudi Arabia,” said Danielle Pletka, senior vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
“Some half of the country is under 25, and while there’s still enough money sloshing about to buy quiescence, the lack of jobs, prospects or outlets for expression of any kind make for a pressure cooker of the type we’ve seen in Libya, Iran, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere,” she said.
David Ottaway, a former Washington Post correspondent in the region who now is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, noted that a key early test of the new king will be whether he carries through with Abdullah’s proposal to allow women to vote and run for election in municipal council races this year for the first time.
Another early test will be how Salman performs as king. Now 79, he has been widely reported to have Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, but Ottaway notes that he appeared able to function after assuming the throne on Friday.
“I think it’s been exaggerated about how sick he is,” Ottaway said. “I don’t see that borne out by the kind of activities he’s undertaking.”
Meanwhile, there’s also the question of how secure the new crown prince is in his post.
Muqrin, 69, the last remaining son of Saudi Arabia’s founder in the line of succession, is seen as a relatively liberal outsider more like the younger generation of princes than his own. For example, he was the first in his family to attend a Western university.
From 2005 to 2012, Muqrin led Saudi intelligence, a key post in the kingdom’s fight against extremists and its efforts to aid rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad.
“I wouldn’t expect the attempt to undermine Muqrin would come from Salman,” Ottaway said, noting that both Abdullah and Salman endorsed Muqrin’s elevation. “I think the problems inside the family have been sorted out for the immediate future.”
Despite the uncertainty, U.S. officials say they expect a smooth transition in their relationship with Saudi Arabia.
“We look forward to continuing the close partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia under the leadership of King Salman. Obviously, they’re in a period of mourning right now, but there are a range of issues that we have worked together on, whether it’s the Arab Peace Initiative or it’s the campaign to degrade and defeat [the Islamic State],” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. “We have a long history of cooperation. We don’t have any indication that that cooperation will change.”
One area of cooperation that’s unlikely to diminish is against Islamist extremist groups. As interior minister, Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad has earned a reputation as a hard-liner against such groups, which have tried to assassinate him several times.
In 2009, he was lightly injured when a suicide bomber dispatched by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula detonated a bomb hidden in his rectum during an audience.
“This will only increase my determination,” he later said.
