Ref: ADS-37
Summary: the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman continued to polish his image while staking his claim to leadership of the Arab and Muslim world but the issue of Palestine remains a significant challenge and a potential stumbling block to his ambitions.
Today we announce #1 in our all new top ten podcasts countdown. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen’s A good year for MbS was first podcast 3 December 2024. The podcast has garnered 1110 listens since its release.
Kristian is a Middle East fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston. He is a regular contributor to the Arab Digest newsletter and podcasts and the author of several books on the Gulf states. His most recent is the award-winning Centres of Power in the Gulf States published by Hurst.
When we launched the podcast five years ago we had no idea what sort of reception to expect. Now 300 podcasts later we are delighted they have been listened to a quarter of a million times by people right around the world. That response is a measure of the outstanding quality of our contributors. We are fortunate and very grateful to have them.
In today’s newsletter we publish a short excerpt from Kristian’s podcast. You can listen to the full podcast here.
Speaking about Palestine, Mohammed bin Salman is reported to have said privately that ‘he doesn’t care about the Palestinians, but that his people do’ and that he has to take that into consideration. So when you look at Palestine and the Palestinians how do you think he’s handled that particular portfolio since the beginning of the war?
Well I think that quote certainly rings true. And if it’s actually something he’d said it does encapsulate the dilemma, the very sensitive and delicate balancing act that he faces to being seen to be doing something. But it’s not necessarily something that he would have prioritised before October 7, 2023. And he said similar things in his 2018 visit to the US as well if we’re to believe comments released at the time that ‘the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’ And if you remember Mohammed bin Salman gave a Fox News interview about two and a half weeks before October 7 where he said ‘every day gets closer to a historic breakthrough.’ And by historic breakthrough, he meant a deal with Israel. And I think nowadays after a year plus of the war in Gaza the historic breakthrough has changed. What he needs has gone from being a historic breakthrough with Israel to needing to show now a historic breakthrough in support of a meaningful pathway towards genuine statehood for Palestine. So the terms have changed. He can’t simply make concessions on economic issues to get Netanyahu to sign off on an agreement, he now needs to really show that he’s the one who can deliver a Palestinian state because I think he’s also playing on his role as leader in waiting of the most powerful country in the Arab and Islamic world. We’ve seen that in the way that the Saudis have hosted Arab League and OIC meetings and have tried to really establish Saudi Arabia as the one country that can actually convene and rally the wider Muslim community over Palestine. The stakes have gone up. So even if Mohammed bin Salman, before October 7 had not made this a priority I think the events of the past 14 months are such that there’s so much public anger across the Gulf, across the Middle East and across the wider Arab and Islamic world that he’s now really got to deliver something if he’s going to come to an agreement with Israel or with the US that involves Palestinians in any meaningful way.
And MbS doesn’t need to be in any hurry to do a deal with the Israelis. He doesn’t need to satisfy Joe Biden’s desperate aspiration to make something happen before the end of his presidency.
Mohamed bin Salman is not bound by electoral timelines and cycles. On the other hand the normalisation card is a card you can only play once and so he needs to make sure that he plays that card for all it’s worth. So I think that’s his dilemma: how do you play it and when do you play it to ensure that the odds are stacked in your favour to the maximum point? Biden wanted a foreign policy success to show that he could do what Obama had done in 2015 with the Iran deal and to offset memories of the Afghanistan debacle in 2021. Now, of course, that went south on October 7 and instead Biden – who ironically tried to create for himself an image of the foreign policy expert over four decades in politics – his legacy is going to be remembered for the disasters of Afghanistan and now of Gaza and even of Ukraine which has perhaps gone awry as well.
Finally then Kristian, Donald Trump is back in the White House in January and I was thinking about Trump and that billboard he had with all of the military hardware he was going to sell to the Saudis with Mohammad bin Salman sitting there looking on with a bemused expression. And the inference was clear: the Saudis are a cash cow for Donald Trump to use as he sees fit. I’m just wondering how enthusiastically MbS will embrace this now more powerful and triumphant Trump.
Well, I think that specific incident in the Oval Office in 2018 was probably quite embarrassing for the Saudis especially when Trump turned to MbS and said ‘that’s peanuts for you.’ And the perception that he saw the Saudis as purely a cash cow probably was reinforced by the subsequent investment into Jared Kushner’s investment company from the PIF (Public Investment Fund) allegedly against the advice of their own business investment committee. So it’s certainly a perception, perhaps, that the Trump family thinks that way. Even so I think the Saudis will work with Trump. He’s transactional. They’re transactional. They’ll try and find a modus operandi. But I think the Saudis are probably going in with eyes wide open this time around. In 2017 there was a perception that the Saudis felt that Trump would swing US policy in their favour especially over Qatar and the blockade which Trump initially supported and then changed his mind about. And I think they learnt a lesson: Trump is unpredictable and he can just change his mind on a whim, change it once and change it back again. And then, of course, I think the legacy of 2019 and of the fact that the Trump administration did not do anything to support the Saudis or the Emirates, not just on September 14 with the Abqaiq attack, but for months beforehand of attacks on maritime and energy targets in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. That has continued to reverberate. If anything, that was the single event that changed the last five years of Gulf politics where the Saudis and Emiratis immediately began to reach out to Iran separately to de-escalate. And we’ve seen that led to the March 2023 agreement to restore relations and that has led to the continuing diplomacy across the Gulf over the past 14 months since the war in Gaza. And the question is, do the incoming Trump 2.0 officials recognise the legacy of that decision in 2019 or do they just think they can come in and reimpose maximum pressure as if nothing had changed? And if the Trump administration thinks they can just come in and act like it’s December 2020 all over again – the Abraham accords have just been signed and Iran is under maximum pressure – I think they’re going to have a quite a rude awakening because the Gulf itself has moved a long way over the past four years and arguably a lot of it was put in motion with that one decision in 2019 by the Trump administration not to intervene, not to do anything to support their Saudi partners.
We launch our new podcast season 10 September with the Sudanese political analyst Dallia Abdelmoneim. As noted by UNHCR Sudan’s ongoing civil war has left 18 million people facing acute food insecurity. With more than 12 million forced from their homes since the start of the conflict in April 2023 the country is experiencing the largest internal displacement crisis in the world.