Saudi Arabia Has Become a Geopolitical Loose Cannon

The Saudi state is an artifact of Western militarism and imperialism, growing out of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Abdul Aziz ibn Saud eventually fulfilled his lengthy quest to unify the peninsula. Discovery of oil in 1938 gave his country an unexpected international importance.

Four decades ago the Islamic revolution in Iran, which inspired Shia in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s eastern provinces, and seizure of Mecca’s Grand Mosque by Islamic extremists caused the monarchy to turn its theocracy in a totalitarian direction. The royals enforced the Wahhabist clergy’s fundamentalist interpretation of Islam in return for the latter urging obedience to the Saudi state. Hence, ruling princes mixed private libertinism with public piety, treated women as inferior, prohibited non-Muslim faiths, and deployed the mutawa, or religious police. Also, they provided large-scale subsidies to spread Wahhabism abroad, through mosques, schools, teachers and textbooks.

The result was a decrepit, corrupt gerontocracy undermining virtually every Western value and interest. However, the doddering monarchy, passed among the aging sons of ibn Saud, possessed oil and money aplenty. This earned the regime plenty of affection in the West, and especially the United States.

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