Alphabet, Google’s parent company and owner of the YouTube platform, is negotiating to
build a technology center in none other than Saudi Arabia.
Sounds incredible...
but the truth is that since Mohammed Bin Salman, the Crown Prince, took over, this country
has changed a lot...
at least much more than anyone would’ve imagined a few years ago.
So, my friends, let's take a look at what’s happening in Saudi Arabia.
To understand what’s happening in Saudi Arabia, we need to take a look at their past,
to see where everything began.
Well, first of all, we need to bear in mind that we’re talking about a particularly
young country...
Saudi Arabia was formally born in 1932.
Then, of course, Saudi Arabia was very different to what it is today.
See, back then, its many oil deposits hadn’t been discovered yet, so it was a very poor
place that still had a sparse, semi nomadic population.
Basically…
Saudi Arabia was still in the Middle Ages...
Well, now that I think about it, a lot of things haven’t changed much.
But... a few years later, in 1938, the first oil deposits were discovered... and since
then...
Well let's say that Saud House, the country’s royal house, has used oil money to make Arabia
look like the United States, at least in terms of aesthetics and leisure.
Allow me to explain myself.
We’re talking, for example, of cities inspired by Dallas, driving American cars and building
huge malls in the middle of the desert.
And that’s exactly what they did for decades.
But... not only that, over the years, the Saudi government, who, thanks to oil, had
begun to have a lot of money, came to a kind of agreement with Washington that has lasted,
more or less, until today.
Check out this agreement:
Saudi Arabia guarantees a huge and relatively cheap oil supply, using the dollar as its
basic currency – have you heard of petrodollars?
- and accumulates all the money it generates in oil sales in US treasury debt or in the
big Wall Street banks.
And if that weren’t enough, the Saudi government is always willing to inject millions into
the powerful US arms industry.
That is, lots of oil, lots of money, and great business for the US military industry.
The question is, in exchange for what?
Well, my friends, basically for protection.
The Saud house bought what essentially amounts to insurance from Washington to protect it
from foreign enemies.
However, in 1979... everything changed.
See, this year, 1979, was a fundamental year for Arabia and for Islam.
On the one hand, the Islamic Khomeini revolution happened in Iran; on the other, the Soviet
Union invaded Afghanistan, and in Saudi Arabia, between November 20th and December 4th, a
group of fanatics took over the great Mosque of Mecca and accused the Saud House, the Saudi
monarchy, of betraying Islam and selling their soul to the West.
Fanatics called for an uprising to overthrow the royal family.
And there, dear viewers, is where everything changed.
The Saud House leaders feared a revolutionary uprising and decided to please the extremists.
The United States could protect them from a foreign enemy, but it would be very hard
for them to do so in a popular uprising like the one that happened that year in Iran.
So, even though Arabia wasn’t precisely a paradise of freedom, from that moment on,
things got a lot, lot worse:
Discrimination against women reached stratospheric levels, the religious guard began an uncontrolled
campaign and Saudi Arabia began to finance all kinds of extremist groups like there were
no tomorrow... both inside and outside the country.
And that’s precisely the Saudi Arabia we all know.
However...
just a moment, because there was another turning point in 2015.
This time thanks to plummeting oil prices and the arrival of a new king, Salman bin
Abdulaziz.
A king, dear viewers, who decided to give almost all the power to his son and now heir,
Mohammed Bin Salman, of whom we already talked about here, on VISUALPOLITIK.
Thus, a new generation took hold of the country.
(“My generation was held hostage by 1979.
I know now that my kids will not be hostages”.
One Saudi banker to New York Times.)
Since then, folks, a new kind of revolution has been launched to modernize the country.
We've already talked about this on this channel, but the truth is that the plan is advancing
at full speed based on 3 pillars:
The fight against corruption, economic change and religious reform.
So, without further ado, let's see what’s happening, point by point.
(THE FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION)
The crown prince has said it both actively and passively, corruption in Saudi Arabia
is a great burden and has to end.
( “Our country has suffered a lot from corruption from the 1980s until today.
The calculation of our experts is that roughly 10 percent of all government spending was
siphoned off by corruption each year, from the top levels to the bottom”.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman)
And you know what?
It wasn’t only said.
It was done.
Last November 2017: princes, businessmen, ministers, ex-politicians… a huge number
of people were invited to dine with the king or to meet with the crown prince.
And they were all arrested and detained.
Of course, in a prison we would only see in a country like this:
The Ritz-Carlton Riyadh, a very, very luxurious hotel.
Of course...
not everything was comfortable...
after all, it became a prison that held such illustrious prisoners as Prince Alwaleed Bin
Talal, grandson of the kingdom’s own founder, known as the Warren Buffet of the Middle East.
A prince who according to Forbes magazine’s calculations, has a fortune of almost 18 billion
dollars and is one of Twitter’s largest shareholders.
Well... not even he managed to escape.
All prisoners were held incommunicado and couldn’t even contact their lawyers.
Rights?
Legal guarantees?
We’re in Saudi Arabia!
But...
What do you think the Saudi government asked for to release them?
Well, nothing less than giving part of their fortunes and companies as compensation for
all the corruption they were involved in.
And...
here’s a question.
Do you know how much the Saudi government raised with this trick?
Listen up, because this is an astounding number:
It wasn’t 1, nor 5, nor 10 billion but approximately an eye-popping 107 billion dollars.
You heard that right!
Of course, a few detractors have accused the crown prince of carrying out this campaign
not with the intention of fighting corruption but with the aim of strengthening his power
and, for example, seizing control of foreign-based media.
Yes, the detainees included important media businessmen.
But my friends, this doesn’t end here, not at all.
(THE ECONOMIC CHANGE)
As we mentioned on VISUALPOLITIK, Saudi Arabia wants to emulate Dubai and leave their oil
dependence behind.
And they want to do it hand in hand with private capital.
Just as we saw in Google’s case.
Of course... on the other hand, Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is also very fond of big Pharaonic
projects.
The last one he publicized was NEOM, a macro-city that the Riyadh government wants to build
in the Red Sea, next to Jordan and Egypt.
And check out these numbers,
500, 500 billion dollars!
in public and private investment to urbanize and build a city in an area that is larger
than El Salvador, a 10,000 square mile space which will have its own laws, its own courts
and its own taxes.
A new city that the crown prince wants to turn into a great transport hub and a huge
international business center.
So basically, a much more modern and much, much bigger Dubai.
And, this isn’t his only project…
(“Saudi Arabia Plans a Huge Red Sea Beach Tourism Project.
The project will cover 50 islands and 34,000 square kilometers -- an area bigger than Belgium”
Bloomberg)
There’s a few more.
The prince’s idea is to get all these cities to have laws and standards different from
those in the rest of the country.
Laws that can attract investors, tourists and entrepreneurs...
The question is: will Riyadh really be able to make all these projects work in a country
that is so anchored in the past?
( “Saudi Arabia to build five royal palaces in NEOM”.
Arabia Watch)
With news like that...
it doesn’t seem easy at first, but we’ll see.
So far, people like Richard Branson support this strategy.
(THE RELIGIOUS CHANGE)
Lastly, there’s the religious change, the prince’s latest great obsession is the struggle
against Islam’s fundamentalism or its most radical interpretations.
See, Saudi Arabia is a country of restrictions, I think we all know that, and it may never
cease being so.
However, just a few years ago nobody could’ve imagined we’d see so many changes, and so
quickly, in this country.
Concerts and movies, which had been banned, have returned to the country.
The religious guard has lost almost all its power, women can now attend sports stadiums
and since June, can also drive.
Without going any further, on December 6th, 2017, the Lebanese singer Hiba Tawaji, starred
in Saudi Arabia’s first all-woman concert in this country..
Yes, the audience was entirely made up of women...
but this was a step we couldn’t have imagined just 3 years ago.
Listen to the reflection a young man from this country shared with the NYT:
(“We are privileged to be the generation that has seen the before and the after.”
The previous generation of Saudi women, she explained, could never imagine a day when
a woman could drive and the coming generation will never be able to imagine a day when a
woman couldn’t”.
A 30-year-old Saudi woman social entrepreneur to New York Times.)
The person in charge of this entire process, Mohamed Bin Salman;
(“We are ‘restoring’ Islam to its origins, and our biggest tools are the Prophet’s
practices.
At the time of the Prophet Muhammad there were musical theaters, there was mixing between
men and women, there was respect for Christians and Jews in Arabia.
The first commercial judge in Medina was a woman!
So if the Prophet embraced all of this, do you mean the Prophet was not a Muslim?”
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.)
For a Saudi Arabian leader to say something like that... wow.
And, by the way, my friends, don’t think that Saudi Arabia was always the place it
was in the past.
Of course, it was always a very, very conservative country, too conservative, but not the hell
it became since 1979.
In short, as you can see, even though there’s still a lot to change… things seem to be
on the right track...
Although of course there are also dark areas.
The Qatar blockade failure, the Yemen war, and the prince's obsession with Tehran:
( “Iran’s supreme leader is the new Hitler of the Middle East.
But we learned from Europe that appeasement doesn’t work.
We don’t want the new Hitler in Iran to repeat what happened in Europe in the Middle
East.”
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.)
Yes, this prince is a take-charge kind of man… but, to tell the truth, so far his
international attempts have been resounding failures, as we saw with Yemen.
Another problem is that Arabia's economy is going from bad to worse.
See, in 2017, they suffered their first recession since 2009 and public deficit is still skyrocketing,
with more than 50 billion dollars per year.
And of course that can make it hard for the prince to carry out his plans.
In any case, my friends, having seen this, I think we can say that the oil fall was some
of the best news for everyone, especially for Saudi Arabian women.
( "We are returning to what we were before, a country of moderate Islam that is open to
all religions and to the world.
We will not spend the next 30 years of our lives dealing with destructive ideas.
We will destroy them today.
We will end extremism very soon”.
Mohammed bin Salman)
Anyway, that's how things are.
But now it’s your turn, do you think Saudi Arabia will manage to change itself?
Leave your answer in the comments as well as in the survey.
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