Saudi Arabia's "Genius" Crown Prince

large in US consciousness. It started in the nineteen seventies when oil was everybody's focus. It rose during the first Goal four and then it peaked in the years immediately after September eleventh. Since then, Saudi Arabia has never been entirely out of the news, but it has become an especially intense focus of scrutiny and interest during the Trump administration. And that's as of the close relationship between the new dominant Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman or MBS as he's

called for short, and the Trump administration. You'll remember that Donald Trump made a well publicized to visit the Saudi Arabia in the spring of twenty seventeen that was the one with a eerie, creepy crystal ball, and he showed his great closeness to the government. Then this week, Trump authorized a small troop deployment to the country after airstrikes hit a major oil processing plant there. Saudi Arabia says

that Iran was behind the attack, a charge that Iran denies. Meanwhile, domestically, an internal revolution of sorts, a quiet revolution, if you will, has been happening inside of the Saudi Arabia. This is a transformation both in social morays, with women suddenly able to drive, and simultaneously in political power, with a traditional Saudi royal elite family gradually giving way to a single

overarching figure. MBS himself to discuss the complex personality Bhammed bin Salman, the history of US Saudi relations and the revolutionary developments going on right now in Saudi Arabia. I am thrilled to have with me here in the studio Bernard Heckel, Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He says that to truly understand Saudi Arabia, you actually

have to start by considering the country's climate. It is absolutely a very one of the driest places in the world and in fact, one of the harshest ecologies in the world. And I think one way to understand Saudi culture is that historically it was an adaptation to that ecology.

Fascinating to tell me about about that adaptation and how it connects to how Saudi Arabia was governed for really the last couple of hundred years around since around the time of the American Revolution, right, So, because it was a very harsh ecology, you had, the principal form of social organization was tribal, and tribes are organized around you know, an eponym, a grandfather, and often are in conflict with

one another over material resources. So it happened and means we are the tribe of so and so that's right, We're descendants of of you know, Muhammad been someone and and typically a tribe is also named after an ancestor um. So these tribes were often feuding over resources. And the Wahabis arose in a world in which you had a lot of violence of that kind. And it was a religious revivalist movement that basically tried to bring order, instability, and create a state to control and tamp down the

nomadic the violent impulse of the nomads. So around two hundred and fifty years ago, in this environment of nomadism, with no central state, this religious revival movement, Wahabism comes into existence. Right, named for even Ablwahab himself. It's his name, that's right, It's that's right. It's named after a religious reformer who was a kind of you can think of him as a Calvin if you like, or a Luther of his day, who basically said, you know that true

Islam is not practiced. People have deviated from the belief in the One True God, and in the name of God's oneness, the doctrine of God's oneness, I'm going to impose the true faith on everyone, and I'll use the sword if necessary to do so. So how did this religious reform movement marry itself into a political state. So the religious reformer himself made a pact with a local leader of a town and essentially said, you know, if you mobilize your resources in the name of this religious ideology,

I will give you legitimacy. And then they started preaching and fighting and soon began to acquire other territory in bringing other territory under their under their power until around eighteen o five when they captured Mecca and Medina, and much of modern day Arabia came under their influence. And the name of the man with whom Ibanabluwahab made this deal was Muhammad Ibansoud. And so there is the earth of the name Saudi Arabia. It's a guy, it is

Saud is a guy. I often say to people. There are not many countries in the world that are named the Arabia of somebody. In particular, Saudi Arabia means the Arabia that belongs to the family of Saud. That's right, and in fact the country owes its existence to their

religio military efforts to unite this entire territory. So the birth of Saudi Arabia happens again right around the time of the American Revolution, and it grows out of this close alliance between the religious reformer and Wahabism and the Saudi family and the government that grows out of that. So the modern Saudi states, in their various iterations for the last two hundred years, are all reflections of that

unique marriage. And in fact, you know, that's why what's happening today is somewhat remarkable because we see that alliance between a religious movement and a political family, a dynasty coming somewhat apart. So this at least being reconfigured. How has the relationship between the religious dynasty, because it's been a couple hundred years and the political dynasty traditionally operated until this most recent generation, right, So this Saudi history

in the Saudist states have had three different iterations. So you had the first Saudi State, which was founded on this pact in seventeen forty four and lasted until eighteen eighteen when it was crushed by the Ottomans. Then there was a second Saudi State, which was less powerful, less influential in the nineteenth century, didn't didn't go very far. And then we are now in the third Saudi State. And this third Saudis state was initiated by one of

the descendants of the founder, Muhammad Eben Sud. He's known as out King Ablaziz otherwise known as Eben Saud as well, and he began the unification with through the use of this religious ideology and violence of the modern Saudi State, which was ultimately declared a kingdom in nineteen thirty two and he became a king. But he allied with this family, this religious family of the reformer traditional alliance, and he

went back that's right, he went back to it. He mobilized a religious ideology and forces to bring other territories under his control. Just started around nineteen o two. By nineteen thirty two we have the creation of modern Saudi Arabia. And amazingly, he did not do this on the suspicion that there was oil wealth waiting to be found. Yeah, none at all. And then as though by direct divine providence, right shortly after the state was consolidated, boom, they find oil.

That's right. Lo and behold, you know, the largest oil fields in the world are in Saudi Arabia. One of them, for instance, called Kawar is the size of Delaware oil field is the size of that. And it has been pumping you know, close to five million barrels for the last fifty some years. With I mean no end in immediate site. Eventually it will end, yes, and that's part

of what we'll talk about. Yes, but you know this is you know, the Saudi Arabia has about twenty three percent of the world's proven oil reserves, and it is the cheapest number, and it's the cheapest oil to produce in the world as well. I mean, you know, it just literally almost comes out of the ground with minimal effort, right,

with minimal effort. So this extraordinary thing happens in which what was otherwise a kind of minor kingdom in an area that most countries had never bothered with, yes, suddenly became one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the world because it's sitting on these oil resources. Yes. I would have imagined that when that happened, the ruler would have tacked away from his alliance with the religious authorities and just gone in on his own. But that

didn't happen. Yeah, why why did it happen? Well, I mean to understand King Ablasis even so, you have to understand that the man, I think had it several qualities, the most important of which is that he knew the limits of his own power, and he knew that his population was deeply conservative, in fact, religiously quite reactionary, and that he needed religion in order to control his population.

There's an apocryphal saying. I think it's apocryphal, but it's perfectly in keeping with his temperament and his character, which says that religion he is meant to have said, religion is like a falcon. The one who controls it hunts with it. So he understood the power of religion, you know, very very well. So King Ablasis creates this dynasty, and

then he does that kind of remarkable thing. He had an enormous number of sons, right, Yes, not quite a hundred, but in that no, he had about thirty four thirty

five sons and an equal number of daughters. And he set things up so that the inheritance of his royal throne would not just go from father to son, father to son, father to son, as many sort of Game of Thrones ish regimes, yes, do it, but rather in a kind of somewhat unusual model where it went to his one of his older sons, right, and then it was supposed to go down through the brothers. That's right.

Why why I've always been curious about this. It's such an unusual way of doing things, and it's been so crucial to the history of Saudi Arabia. How did they come up with this mechanism of emsignating designating errors? I mean I think. I think that first of all, it's not a it's not a super formalized system, Okay, so it can be changed, and it is being changed now. Yeah, we're coming to the revolution that any moment now, right.

So the first thing to understand also is that that the creation of Saudi Arabia was not just the work of King Ablasis. It was also the creation of some of his sons who were very close an age to him. I mean, many of them had fought these battles themselves with him because they were with him pretty young, that's right. Yeah. And so so the idea that somehow you could side line these people who were the founding fathers of the

kingdom was deemed untenable. So it was determined that the most competent, the most eligible of the sons would become the king by consensus and acclamation of the other brothers, and the government was divvied up between the brothers. So you had different ministries under the control of different brothers, each one of which became sort of almost like a semi autonomous statelet if you like, within the state. So one guy controlled the Ministry of the Interior, another person

was the governor of a large province. A third was in charge of the foreign ministry and so on, though they like to use a non brother for the ministry of oil. Right, that's right for too important, that's right for the kind of crown jewels of the system. And there are really two. One is the oil company Saudi Aramco, that's always been run by a technocrat, and princes were

kept away in order not to mess it up. And the other is the central bank, what is called the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, that's always been run also by a technocrat. So they divided up power between themselves. You know, it became a gerontocracy. It became a country that was increasingly ruled by very old people because the brothers got older.

And that's right. The brothers got older and older, and they stayed on, you know, in positions of power, some of them for forty fifty years as ministers different and different agencies of the government. And as a result you had the consequences of that politically, that people as they got older didn't want to change things. It's a place

that's extremely conservative to begin with. So to understand MBS also you have to understand that that he comes out of a system that was essentially run by extremely old people who were unwilling to change how the country. Yeah, how the country was run. So as the brothers get as the even of the youngest of the brothers gets older and older, any observer inside and outside can tell that at some point they're gonna have to switch away

from the brothers. That's now set the stage for the current day and the rise of the crown Prince Mohammed bin Salmon. Where does he stand first of all generationally compared to a Blasi's Ben Salwood? You know, I mean, he is the grandson of the founder King, but the grandfather died in nineteen fifty three and he's still in his early thirties today, and he was born around nineteen eighty I believe. But his father has still let us not forget the King of Saudi Arabia, King Salmon is

the son. Yes, he's the son of the founder. So we're still technically speaking, yes, we're still on the sons. That's what the original founder. We're not quite done yet, that's right. And what happened is, as things do happen, people die, and so a lot of the sons have died, and many of the principal architects of the system have passed away. King Salmon is one of the last great sons and of the founder, and one of the great

pillars of the of the system. He was, for instance, the governor of the of the largest province, the province of Riad, for you know, many decades. He was the enforcer of the family's discipline. Um. He was the keeper of the history of the family and of the kingdom. He's you know, he's a formidable person. The present king someone he decided that we're going to move away from this old system of brothers and consensus to one of primogenitor, where you know, his son will become although not he

chose not to not to choose his eldest son. Why not? What was wrong with the eldest son. It's not clear. It's not clear why he chose U Mohammad bin Salman MBS. MBS is the son of the third wife, is the eldest of the of the children of the third wife of the king. And you know, there are rumors as to why. One is that he saw in him something

that he didn't see in the other sons. You know, going back to a Saudi um saying again to do it again to another number two, yes, another, often saying in Saudi Arabia they say that the father is the falconer of his sons. In other words, the father knows which of his sons is the best hunting falcon, and so it seems that he has chosen emy. Clearly, he has chosen MBS as the best of the falcons. I don't think I should tell my kids that I am your falconer. I don't know. I don't know how well

that would that would go over, but it makes sense. Yes, okay, So the stage is now set. King Salman says, we're changing the order. Instead of going to one of my brothers, and there are a handful of them left, I am going to designate my son, Mahmad bin Saman MBS as the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. He is going to get the torne. He's going to be the first king of Saudi Arabia who was not either of modern Saudi Arabia, who's not either King Abdlasi's himself or one of his sons. Correct.

And that leads to something of a sense of dissatisfaction among the other brothers because he's breaking the chain of succession is breaking all the rules, and in response, MBS has to take decisive action involving the Ritz Carlton Hotel. So yes, tell us from this perspective, So what was going on? So I think you know, to understand the Ritz, you have to understand also that this is an absolutist monarchy and absolute monarchy. So the king has final say

in all matters. And this king is king. While all the key brothers who would have in the past stood in his way tried, you know, whose views mattered are no longer around, right, who were supposed to but they were also so the older brothers dead, the older most senior ones are gone, so he had room for maneuver. He had much more room for maneuver. He's an absolute monarch, and everyone in Saudi Arabia ultimately looks to the king.

So the king's will, just like in the case of Louis the fourteenth is final and we'll determine the nature

of succession. Now, what MBS does is he also sees a system that is incredibly corrupt, in which many princes but also businessmen and bureaucrats and administrators are involved in all kinds of schemes where you know, the government gets overcharged on contracts, all kinds of kickbacks take place, and NBS wants to show that there's a new sheriff in town and that that old system is no longer going to function, and you know, feeding at the trough, you know,

where the government is paying ten to twenty percent extra just because of this corruption on all its contracts is going to stop. So he has this arrest of hundreds of people, many of them princes. So these are his cousins, cousins, uncles, and he you know, he has them, you know, put in as well as bureaucrats as well as businessmen. You know, all the entire kind of elite that managed the system gets put into the Ritz Carlton and here in the West, everyone saw this as a shakedown on for MBS to

benefit personally from the money. When I asked around about like, well, is he trying to wrench it himself? And one Saudi said, but you know, he controls the river of money. I mean, he is in charge, you know, he is the state is the state, so he can take any money he wants from the state already, So it's not it's not. It was something else was. So I think it was

two things. One was to destroy that older system of corruption and perhaps create a new one with him at the center and centralized, yeah, you know, or a much smaller one, um, but certainly kind of a change in hierarchy and power. And it was about getting some of that money back into the public treasury. And I think he managed to do some of that. If the money was in country, the money that was overseas was almost impossible to bring back, and according to reports, they weren't gentle,

even with very senior members of the royal family. Yeah, it's possible. You know. Firstly, you have to remember that anything you remember, the royal family has never confronted a situation where someone says to them you can't have this, or you can't. You can't you know us, you can't leave your right, So I think so, I do think there was coercion that was used of different kinds. I have no proof that torture was used, but it wouldn't

surprise me, right, and it's clear that it was very effective. Yeah. So, as Mohammed bin Salman MBS consolidates power, he's also trying to change something about the authority of religion. At the same time, Yes, so we hear about women driving, which is something that the traditional religious scholars have been blocking for many, many years. How is he doing that and

how real is that? You know? Sometimes critics say, well, Mohammad bin Salman needs to be liked abroad, he needs support from the Trump administration and or to consolidate power. So he's throwing in the West some bones by saying, oh, we'll liberalize for women, will let them drive. But there's still a guardianship system in the country where women in theory can't travel or you know, make important life decisions without the agreement of a male guardian. So it's all

superficial talk. Talk about a what he's doing, and be how real it is. So I think again, to understand the changes that he's affecting, you have to understand the relationship that the Saudi state had with religion, and for that to understand that, you have to go back to

the Cold War. So during the Cold War, the Saudis were under immediate threat from other ideologies, namely communist ideology, socialism, Arab nationalism from Egypt, from Syria, and so on, and coups were taking place where military officers were toppling dynastic monarchies in Libya and Iraq, almost anywhere and everywhere in the Middle East. It was a bad period for kings

in the Middle that's right. And so the Americans who were at war with in a Cold War against the Communists, basically come to the Saudis in late nineteen fifties under Presdent Eisenhower and say to the Saudis, you know, why don't you mobilize Islam as a political ideology against the left. And initially the Saudis we're doing in God we trust by, don't you guys try the same, That's right. And the Saudis initially didn't have the wherewithal in the resources to

do this. They would have liked to. But it's only in the sixties, when a lot of the Muslim brothers who are members of an Islamist organization are being persecuted and discriminated against in countries like Egyptirian Iraq end up seeking refuge in Arabia, that the Saudis have the manpower the human capital to start using Islam as a political ideology against their ideological opponents outside. The always used it internally,

but they didn't have the manpower. They didn't have the educated, skillful peoples that moved through the arable world spreading their message, and it became, you know, absolutely central to how Saudi Arabia defended itself, and in fact it got ramped up at the end of the nineteen seventies of the Irania Revolution, which was also an Islamic revolution and sought to undermine Saudi legitimacy. So the Saudi's turned up the volume on Islam as a political ideology and as patrons of this ideology.

So this is a kind of a Cold War story. It's also a story of confronting Iran, and of course with the Cold War, the culmination of that alliance with the US using Islamis ideology was an Alfhanistan and that ended up producing al Qaida, which is an unintended consequence. So MBS against this background, MBS says, you know, this alliance with Islamists using Islam as you know, has brought

us nothing but grief. It produced al Qaida. The Americans are not blaming us for it, when in fact we were allies with the Americans, and so I don't want to have anything to do with it. I want to just give up Islamism completely and moreover, it's creating a society here in Saudi Arabia where no foreigner wants to come and work here. And I want to be like Dubai. I want to be dynamic. I want to create a knoledge economy. I want you know, people to want to

come here. And for that to happen, I need to socially liberalize. I need for women to be in the workplace. I need to perhaps allow for alcohol to be consumed, and I need a lot more kind of live and let live, which you know is impossible under the old dispensation. And so I'm breaking with that passed. So on that view, we don't even need to ask so much whether MBS is throwing a bone to the West. It's the opposite. It's that it's in MBS is actual interest to weaken

religious authorities. So when he does something like allow women to drive, it's not necessarily he cares so much about women. Inherently is that he's trying to produce a more westernize is too strong a term, but a more liberalized society to help himself and to help his economy. Yeah, I mean not politically liberal at all, but you know, something not liberal in the sense of Leney to be vote that's not on the cards, No, I think something like I mean, what he wants is to replace Islam with

nationalism and populism. He wants something similar to let's say Russia or China, you know, in terms of a political model where Saudi's care about being you know, Saudi's and don't care about Wahabism and don't want to spend money on building mosques overseas and that sort of thing. So he he's interested in changing the very kind of nature

of society and the allegiances of people. So that's the attractive might be the wrong word, but that's the kind of defensible, reasonable, understandable, reformist face as it were, of MBS. And yet at the same time he's come to be seen internationally as being very brutal in the process of doing this. And a crucial event in this was the murderer of someone whom we both knew, a Jamaashoji, a

Saudi himself from a prominent Saudi family. Super upsetting to many people who knew knew Jamaal Like yes, like like you and me talk a little bit about why that happened, and how we can try to make sense of it in light of the other objectives that Mohammed been Sama is pursuing. So I think, you know, Jamal represented in a way the old order, and Jamal himself, as you said, I knew him. I've invited him to Princeton and he's spoken there, and I've known him since the late nineteen nineties.

And but Jamal was seen as an Islamist by the regime, and he was seen as closer to Erduan in Turkey and to the Kataris, and that he wanted, unlike MBS, for that alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood to be maintained. That Saudi Arabia could not reform politically or socially without that alliance with the Islamists. It's a longer story for

another conversation maybe we can have in the future. People, especially in the US, hear the word Islamist and think that somebody who is a jihadi or a radical, but that's yeah, no, often not the case. It was certainly not the case for yeah, Jamal. He's more of a trend of the last quarter century where many members of the Muslim Brotherhood came to embrace at least some of the goals of democracy, Yes, and wanted to democratize a

place like Saudi Arabias and liked the aspiration. It hasn't worked out so well in Turkey, but the aspiration at least of a democratic regime that was still Islamic and its orientation. Yes, And you know, lots of people thought that's what should happen in Egypt after the Arab Spring. It didn't work out so well there either, But so it's just important to clarify that what might have looked like a threat to Mohammed bin Salman might not have

been a threat when viewed from the standpoint say of democracy. Yes, absolutely correct. And Jamal I mean Jamal basically wanted Saudi Arabia to become more democratic and that clashed with MBS's vision of the strong man who's going to use nationalism and populism and move away from Islamism. Then why to be blunt? Why murder him instead of just letting him become what he already was a vocal critic from the outside,

essentially an exile. My sense is that he was seen as a real threat because he could mobilize all the dissidents around the world against Saudi Arabia. He was very effective at using social media. He had a platform in the Washington Post, and I suspect that people around MBS went to him and said, basically, this guy is, you know, a real menace, a real threat to the order that you're trying to establish, and we should get rid of him. The murder, in addition to being morally reprehensible, was a

gross miscalculation. Yes, it backfired hugely with the international community, especially journalists and academics, the kind of people whom Jamal knew all over the world, really turning on MBS in a way that at an emotional level I experience as hard to get beyond myself. Yes, you know, I myself feel frustrated with him, angry at him because of because

he killed my friend. You know, the people around him were so arrogant because of their success domestically at taming all dissidents in opposition that they felt that they can do this also overseas, and I think that people definitely in the Kingdom around MBS, and he himself feels that it was a mistake visa via the West. I'm not sure though, if you're looking at Saudi dissidents around the world. And if you can show that, you can get one of them in Turkey under the rule of Erduan, who

is the personal friend of that dissident. If you can get to that guy, they can get to almost anyone. So as for the rest of the dissidents is we can get you no matter where you are, you can't

run you. Yeah, it's a kind of putent like message right to dissidents, So you know they might not regret it in that regard, maybe not to blowback, yes, maybe not stay a little bit about MBS himself and you know him, Yes, As I work in Saudi Arabia, I knew a number of people who are around him, around MBS, and one of them once contacted me and said, you know, the Prince has seen a piece that you've written and

would like to meet with you. This was a time when he was trying to cultivate Americans and American elites, and so I met with him, and you know, we chatted in Arabic. And my impression of him is that he, you know, he's very charismatic. He has facts and figures, you know, at his fingertips about all kinds of things. So there's kind of like a you know, a genius like quality in that he can give you, like rattle off numbers and data about almost anything to do with

the kingdom. And then he also pays real close attention to what you're saying, so he gives you the feeling that you know, he really cares. So he's a politician's politician and a skilled one's a very skilled one comes across a very yeah, and he's you know, he's saying,

impress the Trump administry. That's right. And he charmed also, you know, Michael Bloomberg and all kinds of people you know around around the country, Tom Friedman, you know, David Ignatius, all kinds of people were charmed by, many of whom are skeptical people in general. That's right. And you know, I think he had the advantage of the fact that he was so different from these older rulers of Saudi Arabia who just seemed like, um, you know, clones of

these old Soviets. You know, you remember in the old days with Andropoff and Bregnev and all these guys, you know, the Politburo who just seemed like dead men walking, you know, dead men walking. And he is just a breath of fresh air in the sense that he talks and wants to change and wants to liberalize and so on. So there's there's a kind of attractive quality to him because of that. But at the same time, there's a toughness to him, and I think that's actually probably why he

was chosen by his dad. How do you, as someone who's an observer of the region, a scholar of the region, how do you internally balance and find your own ethical compass in dealing with somebody who is in many ways dynamic, extraordinary, a genuine reformer and also capable of you know, dropping a diamond killing somebody. So you know, he he's an

object of researcher for me. I mean it's like, you know, I go to the Middle East, and I go to Saudi Arabia, and I talk to people who hate him inside the royal family, dissidents, you know, EXTI hottest journalist, liberals, women, And he's just one of the many people that I engage with to learn as much as I can about the country. And so I think of my engagement with him inasmuch as it will continue as just part of research.

You know, now, if he asks me, you know, what do I think about x or Y. I just tell him what I think, you know, So I haven't sort of held back on telling him that, you know, killing Jamal is a terrible thing and a crime, and someone should pay for it. I haven't stopped from telling him that, you know, if he tries to build an alliance with the Chinese or the Russians and move away from the West, that that would be a terrible strategic error for the

for his country. I tell him that, you know, the dissidents should be released, all dissidents, not just the women, because you know, writing in social media criticism is not criminal and will never be understood as criminal in the West. And I mean, I've had this experience myself, so I'm not asking you something that I wouldn't I haven't asked

myself a thousand times as well. But what do you say when people tell you, Look, that's all well and good to think of someone as an object of research, But if you're in conversation, you know, if you're having a late night text exchange with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, you know you're helping him in some way. You're engaged with power. And if you're giving him a good advice. That's good advice that he'll use to achieve

his ends, whatever they are. And so that that line drawing, which is very hard for any any engaged scholar to do, is is too hard to defend against and better to better to keep a distance. What do you what do you say when people people say that too? I mean, I think that as long as I feel that I haven't done something wrong or helped him do something wrong, which I haven't done, yeah, I don't feel compromised. Yeah. I mean if he asked me to do something, that's

a different that's a different matter. I mean I should say for myself, I have felt compromised. You know, leave aside Muhammed bin Sama. You know, I worked with the US government in Iraq working on the constitutional process there, and you know I had then and still have lots of criticisms of the way the United States government operated. But I was, you know, I was fully part of a US occupation regime and the the ethical errors and the crimes that that you know, government backed, you know

that the United States committed there. I have to bear some ethical obligation and responsibility for that. But that's a little different because that's my own country and you're you're talking also you accept I mean you also agreed to you know, formal capacity to take a job, right, So I'm not taking really different Yeah, I'm not taking job. I mean for me, it's a way of understanding the system so much more in the country, so much better. Yeah. Yeah,

Just to close, where's it all going? You know, revolutions look impressive when they're going well. So this revolution seems to be succeeding. What are the risks and what are your predictions about whether it will ultimately succeed? Right, So for me, the idea of success here is whether Saudi Arabia will be able to transition to an economy that is prosperous and that delivers for its people beyond the

age of oil. That is a very difficult thing to do because essentially what you have in Saudi Arabia is a nanny state that uses the oil revenues and then redistributes it to the population. And that's an unsustainable model, and it also creates certain pathologies in terms of people expecting jobs from the government, not wanting to work in

the private sector, and so on. So I think the economic challenge is the most serious one, and I'm doubtful as to whether that's possible insider Arabia or anywhere else, given the volume of money that gets generated and gets redistributed. I should add one last thing, which is that if he doesn't deliver, if MBS doesn't deliver on his promises of economic reform and eventually of political reform, there will

be social mobilization. The people will mobilize in the streets like they have in Egypt and in other places, and will make demands for more, greater accountability, greater participation in the government. Well, when that starts to happen, we'll have you back and we'll talk about it. Bernie, thank you so much for a fascinating, fascinating conversation. I look forward to talking more with you about these things, and I hope you'll come back and talk to us on de

background again. Thank you. What does it mean for the future of US Saudi relations that the United States has deployed troops to Saudi Arabia for the first time in years. Does that decision increase the chances of our broader war in the Middle East? Well, one thing is for certain, US Saudi relations close for more than half a century are getting closer by the day. Donald Trump sees Saudi Arabia as the lynchpin in a broader regional alliance against Iran.

Israel agrees with that position, and Donald Trump has worked hard to try to bring the Saudias and the Israelis closer together again on the access of being against Iran. Saudi oil remains crucial to the economy of Europe and therefore, by extension, to the broader oil markets. Even as the amount of oil the US produces has gone up, and as long as the world remains dependent on oil, Saudi

Arabia is going to remain a crucial strategic player. That means the US Saudi relationship is likely to stay close even if someone else replaces Donald Trump as President of the United States. Over time, if Saudi Arabia actually reforms under Muhammad bin Salman, that is likely to bring the

Saudis and the Americans closer still together. Of course, closeness between countries like the US and Saudi Araba is not necessarily the same thing as the United States going to war on behalf of the Saudi Right now, we know the Saudis don't want warorth Iran. The Israelis don't want warworthy Iran, and Donald Trump doesn't want war worth Iran. So for the moment, expect the relationship between the Saudist,

the Israelis, and the Americans to get deeper. But watch closely to see if Saudi Arabia is able to make the internal reforms that will strengthen its ties to United States. Now for our very remarkable sound of the week, the actions of the Trump presidency revealed dishonorable fact of the President's betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security, and betrayal of the integrity of our elections. Therefore, today I'm announcing the House of Represents moving forward with

an official impeachment inquiry. That, of course, was how Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday announcing that an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump is going to go forward. There's no way to avoid the sense that we are at a historic moment in the history of the United States. It's not that we haven't had impeachment inquiries before. Andrew Johnson was impeached but ultimately not convicted by the Senate. The same was true for Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon never got

to the point of being impeached because he quit. But that is a tiny number of instances where the House of Representatives has come to the point where it is preparing to issue articles of impeachment against a sitting president. What's most remarkable about this instance and what differentiates it from the previous three examples, is at this time it's all about interactions between the president of the United States and foreign powers. That's how it started with the Muller investigation.

But it seemed when that investigation came to an end that Donald Trump had somehow dodged the bullet that he had managed to emphasize the part of the Muller report that said there was not sufficient evidence of collusion in the twenty sixteen campaign between him and the Russians, and to de emphasize the parts of the report that emphasized

obstruction of justice. What's changed is the revelation that a phone conversation occurred between Trump and Voladimir Zelenko, the president of Ukraine, in which Trump actively requested, as a favor Trump's word, for the President of Ukraine to commence an investigation of Joe Biden, who, not by coincidence, is Donald

Trump's leading opponent going into the twenty twenty campaign. What would it mean in historical terms for the House of Representatives to impeach a president for effectively asking the assistance of a foreign power to subvert our democratic elections. The answer is that, if proven, such allegations amount to a serious attempt to undercut the independence and sovereignty of the United States as a republic of its own. To be very clear, we are not talking here merely about an

attempt within the United States to distort electoral outcomes. We're not talking about breaking into the Democratic National Committee's headquarters the way Richard Nixon had the Watergate burglers do. No, we are talking about calling on an outside power to take some role in attempting to effect the outcome of

the US election. Remarkably and astonishingly, the current allegation is that Donald Trump in fact attempted to do using Ukraine what there was not evidence that he did with Russia, namely, to collude with them in a process design to effect the outcome of a US election. And this time we're finding out about it before the elections even taken place. Now there's a lot more to find out about the details, and they're sure to be denials by Donald Trump and

by Republicans. There's no guarantee that Trump will be impeached, and there's no guarantee that if he is impeached, he will be removed by the Senate. Indeed, that seems like it would be a very tough road to travel. Nevertheless, the mere fact of the allegations, coupled with the opening of the impeachment inquiry, signals that we are at a remarkable, unusual, indeed astounding moment in US history. If you ask me,

what would the founding fathers have said? I think they would have looked at us and said, we warned you this could happen. We gave you an impeachment process in order to deal with it. The future of the Republic is in your hands, not ours. If we mess it up, we won't be able to blame people who lived two hundred and fifty years ago. It'll be on us. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Gene Coott, with engineering by Jason Gambrell and

Jason Rostkowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R Feldman. This is deep background