Saudi Arabia faces a strategic choice: To capitulate to AnsarAllah’s demands, or to be pulled into a credibility trap. The trap is that MbS may seek to maintain the credibility of the Kingdom’s professed Guardianship of the Holy Places and as a Sunni Islamic ‘pole’ by refusing to condescend to AnsarAllah’s demands.
The dilemma is that, on the one hand, any concessions risk providing further oxygen to AnsarAllah’s ‘revolution’, which is gaining traction and energising people across West Asia. On the other hand, by insisting on Saudi’s monarchical standing and the perquisites pertaining to it’s system, MbS may energise internal opposition from a different direction -- from the pantheon of Saudi tribes, many of which still harbour a lingering anger at their sidelining, diminished standing and status imposed by the ‘one Family monarchical enterprise’.
Since the outset, the Saudi monarchy has concentrated the country’s financial rewards in one household and called it ‘unity’. Unity built on exclusion, however, is a fracture vulnerable to demands by neglected tribes for due political weight and a fair share of the Kingdom’s revenues.
Westerners today look at the Saudi Kingdom through a different lens; their gaze is taken by its wealth, by its apparent modernisation, and by its professed leadership of the Islamic world, rather than the Kingdom’s fundamental underlying contradictions. They chose to presume that the Kingdom was bending to the imperatives of modern life, and that the management and transformation of Sunni Islam would bend the Kingdom too, to modern life.
Yet the Saudi Kingdom’s position is an oddity -- and is weaker than generally supposed. The inherent contradictions within the country may well dispose Riyadh to escalate the war in Yemen in order to preserve its standing, despite the noticeable lack of support from allies.