On September 24, 2015, several thousand Muslim pilgrims died during a stampede at the annual hajj pilgrimage in Mecca. Two weeks earlier, 107 people were killed when a nearby crane toppled over in high winds and plunged through the roof of the Grand Mosque. In recent years Islam’s sacred city had been transformed by a building boom that razed historic neighborhoods and replaced them with skyscrapers, shopping malls, and luxury hotels. “The city is turning into Mecca-hattan,” complained the director of Britain’s Islamic Heritage Research Foundation. “Everything has been swept away to make way for the incessant march of luxury hotels, which are destroying the sanctity of the place and pricing normal pilgrims out.” Many Muslims blamed the Saudi royal family for tolerating the desecration of revered sites associated with the Prophet Mohammad and they saw the twin tragedies at the hajj as the inevitable outcome of years of greed, profligacy, and mismanagement. The fiercest criticism came from Iran, which suffered the most casualties. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei demanded an apology from Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and protested delays in repatriating his country’s dead and injured. Protesters in Tehran marched outside the Saudi embassy and clerics called for the Saudi royal family to be tried in the Hague for crimes against humanity. The Saudi authorities responded by accusing their neighbors across the Persian Gulf of politicizing a tragedy and exploiting public grief to settle scores.
The hajj stampede was the latest flashpoint in a series of confrontations between Iran and Saudi Arabia that had escalated since the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions opened a Pandora’s box of sectarian and political tensions in the Middle East. Out of the disarray and tumult emerged the regional architecture for a new “cold war” with Saudi Arabia rallying the region’s Sunni population against Iran, which mobilized Shia minorities and associated proxy groups. They took opposing sides in wars raging in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen and did not hesitate to draw in the United States, Russia, France, and Great Britain to support their strategic objectives. The oil markets became the latest frontline in their struggle for supremacy when in the second half of 2014 Saudi Arabia took advantage of a soft oil market to flood the world with surplus crude. Four years earlier The Oil Kings had revealed that the Saudis viewed the oil markets as a legitimate venue for conflict and a weapon to drive down prices to deprive Iran of income to meet financial obligations. “Iran will come under unprecedented economic and financial pressure as it tries to sustain an economy already battered by international sanctions,” boasted Nawaf Obaid, a security consultant with close ties to the Riyadh regime, in December 2014. He was aware that on two earlier occasions, in 1977 and again in 2008, flooded oil markets caused Iran’s economy to contract and were followed in short order by social and political unrest.
This time the Saudi flood did not go quite as well as expected, and if anything led to blowback when oil prices failed to rebound to a level that would cushion Saudi Arabia’s economy while still causing Iran’s to hemorrhage. The slowdown in growth in China helped ensure that oil prices stayed below $50 per barrel, significantly down from the original peak of over $100 per barrel. Tehran also deftly outmaneuvered Riyadh by signing a historic agreement with Washington to freeze its nuclear program. The nuclear deal allowed Tehran to claim the diplomatic high ground and signaled its willingness to reengage with the global economy. Iran’s economy still suffered from high inflation and unemployment but by the fall of 2015 it was clear that the Saudis were on the defensive.
Earlier in the year, King Salman had announced a more robust defense posture in the region. Salman was confident that he could pursue a policy of guns and butter, finance generous welfare handouts and wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen thanks to the kingdom’s foreign exchange reserves. Saudi Arabia also stepped up aid and arms to Egypt, Lebanon, and other Arab states that felt threatened by Iran or internal subversion. Yet Saudi Arabia’s military was largely untested and the regime faced a formidable foe in Iran. The House of Saud also faced a host of internal problems. Over the years the royal family had passed up repeated opportunities to introduce political reforms while the economy was strong and it ruled from a position of strength. The family had still made no real effort to build viable political institutions that could “let off steam” during hard times and channel popular discontent away from rather than toward the ruling elite. It had failed to engage the urban middle class, which remained politically illiterate and immature and could be expected to decamp to the south of France at the first sign of trouble. Saudi Arabia’s overextended economy also raised alarm, with the International Monetary Fund predicting that the kingdom would exhaust its financial reserves within five years if current levels of spending were not curtailed. In short, the House of Saud had failed to learn the lessons from Iran. In 1978 the Shah realized only too late that lavish spending programs did not buy loyalty, and that focusing on industrial development without paying attention to political reform raised the risk of revolution from below.
Faced with a broad array of domestic and foreign tests, King Salman and his ambitious young son Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman were in danger of overreaching. Far from containing unrest, their intervention in regional conflicts seemed only to add to the turmoil and extremism whipping through the region. The barbarous Islamic State accepted King Salman’s challenge and threatened to take its jihad to Saudi Arabia and lead an uprising against the House of Saud. Ominously, cells of suicide bombers infiltrated Riyadh, established safe houses and engaged in gun battles with the security forces. To the south, the war in Yemen spilled over into Saudi Arabia’s southern border. Unrest was also reported in the kingdom’s restive eastern provinces, heavily populated by a Shia minority. Some senior members of the ruling dynasty were so worried that the king and his son were driving them into a ditch that they plotted an “intervention.” “The public are also pushing this very hard, all kinds of people, tribal leaders,” an unnamed prince told the Guardian. “They say you have to do this or the country will go to disaster.”
Despite valiant efforts over the past decade to reduce their dependency on Middle East oil consumption, Americans remained hostages to fortune in the Middle East, heavily enmeshed in Saudi Arabia and invested in the fate of that country’s royal family. They were preoccupied as usual with Iran. There were the several hundred thousand Americans living and working in Persian Gulf states just a stone’s throw from wars, insurgencies, and genocidal atrocities. What would happen to them if the unrest spread south? They posed the softest of targets for Islamist terrorists and the Islamic State. Perhaps the real test for U.S. policymakers would come when Saudi Arabia, Washington’s anchor of stability, was faced with the first real stirrings of popular discontent, and perhaps even an urban insurrection. How would the Saudi royal family respond? The oil flood of 1977 helped steer Iran off a cliff—only time would tell if Saudi Arabia’s reliance on the oil markets as a weapon would lead it to disaster too. For now, at least, and for the foreseeable future, the United States remains highly vulnerable to unrest and revolution in the region.
A.S.C.