"From afar, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia appears immune from the turmoil and uncertainty engulfing nations such as Syria, Egypt and Libya. But rather than being an oasis of stability in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is nearing its own crisis point.....
.... domestic challenges are compounded by external ones including Middle East turmoil, the nuclear ambition of the radical regime in Iran and a fraying alliance with the United States.
The three historic pillars of Saudi stability are cracking. Massive oil revenue, which has bought public passivity, is threatened by peaked production and sharply increased domestic energy consumption. A supportive Wahhabi Islamic establishment that bestowed legitimacy on the House of Saud is increasingly fractious and is losing public credibility. And now, the royal family is in danger of division as it is forced to confront generational succession.
Whether by the choice of the royal family sooner, or by the will of Allah a bit later, the crown is going to pass to the new generation. This entails risk as well as opportunity.............. the risk is that the diffuse and divided royal family will dither or, worse yet, splinter. The issue is not merely which new prince would wear the crown, but the fear among the royals that his branch of the family would pass it on to its sons and grandsons in perpetuity, precluding other branches from ever ruling again....
Saudi Arabia these days is all too reminiscent of the dying decade of the Soviet Union, during which one decrepit leader succeeded another, from Leonid Brezhnev to Yuri Andropov to Konstantin Chernenko, .... As President Ronald Reagan famously said of those old Soviet leaders, and as the next U.S. president may say of the Saudis, “They keep dying on me.”...
Many Saudis fear that the Allegiance Council process will die with King Abdullah — and with it the hope of a smooth generational succession..."
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