This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
Guest Post: Oil Kings - The House Of Saud's Uncertain Future
When 90-year-old Saudi King Abdullah was hospitalized two weeks ago, the local stock markets crashed and oil volatility expectations surged as we noted at the time, a new king could do almost anything he wants (including changing oil policy). As Reuters' Mohammad Bazzi explains, Abdullah's 79-year-old half-brother has his own health issues and leaves larger questions over the line of succession in one of the world’s most important oil producers remain unanswered.
In his annual “state-of-the-kingdom” address on Jan. 6, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah hoped to reassure the world that his country is prepared to absorb the economic shock of plummeting oil prices and to deal with the worsening conflict in its two neighbors, Iraq and Yemen. The message might have been more effective had the 90 year-old king delivered it personally, but Abdullah has been hospitalized since Dec. 31 for pneumonia.
Instead, Crown Prince Salman delivered the speech on the king’s behalf. That image — of an aging heir with his own health troubles standing in for a nonagenarian king — did little to address concerns about whether Abdullah is still fit to lead. Larger questions over the line of succession in one of the world’s most important oil producers remain unanswered.
The 79-year-old Salman, a half brother of the king and his designated successor, has taken on a larger public role in recent months, standing in for Abdullah at a summit meeting of Persian Gulf leaders in Qatar last month. But Salman himself is in poor health, and reportedly suffers from dementia. If Abdullah dies or is incapacitated, and Salman ascends to the throne, he might not be king for long. It’s also unclear who Salman would designate as his crown prince — and that crucial decision could destabilize the royal family.
Prince Muqrin, 69, who has served as head of Saudi intelligence and in other senior positions, was installed last year by Abdullah into the newly created post of deputy crown prince, making him second-in-line to the throne. But any new king has the right to choose his own crown prince. If Muqrin is passed over by Salman, that could set off a succession battle within the House of Saud at a time of regional crisis and instability in the global oil markets.
Beyond Salman’s expected ascension to the throne, the Saud dynasty faces a larger challenge over succession within its system of hereditary rule. The kingdom was founded in 1932 by Abdulaziz al-Saud, and he left behind a system where the throne is passed from older son to younger son (the king had 35 surviving sons when he died in 1953). With the old generation of Abdulaziz’s sons dying off or passing into senescence, the kingdom has no clear plan to hand power to the “new” generation of royals — Abdulaziz’s grandsons, of which there are at least 30 who could be in line for the throne.
Muqrin is the youngest surviving son of Abdulaziz who is still in the running for the throne (he has several older siblings who have been passed over). If Muqrin becomes king, he would have to appoint a crown prince from the third generation of royals. Muqrin does not have strong enough support within the royal family to appoint one of his sons to the post. One theory is that Abdullah positioned Muqrin as second-in-line so that he would be beholden to Abdullah’s sons, one of whom could become king once the generational shift takes place.
Aside from the king’s illness and questions over succession, Saudi Arabia is faced with a series of regional and economic threats.
Most prominently, the kingdom must cope with plunging oil prices. On Jan. 7, Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell below $50 a barrel for the first time since May 2009 — a drop caused in part by Saudi’s refusal to cut high production levels. At the last OPEC meeting in late November, the Saudis led the charge to prevent the cartel from cutting production, which would have driven prices up. Instead, the kingdom is trying to gain more control over the global market, and to drive out U.S. shale oil, which requires higher prices to remain competitive.
So far, Saudi leaders have been able to withstand the economic shock by increasing oil production to make up for falling prices, or by accessing some of the kingdom’s $750 billion stashed in foreign reserves. But those are not long-term solutions.
The other challenge for Abdullah’s successor will be containing Iran, the kingdom’s regional rival. Saudi Arabia is engaged in proxy battles with Iran in several arenas: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. The kingdom is using oil as a weapon to punish Iran, and Russia, for their support of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Facing Western sanctions and economic isolation, the Iranian regime is dependent on oil remaining at $100 a barrel or more to meet its budget commitments.
The proxy war has played out most intensely in Syria and Iraq. After the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, neighboring Sunni regimes backed Sunni militants, while Iran supported the Shi’ite-led government and Shi’ite militias. When various Middle Eastern regimes realized that the United States would — in their view — lose its war in Iraq, they began maneuvering to protect their interests and to gain something out of the American withdrawal. Saudi Arabia, which saw Iraq as a bulwark against Iranian influence, tried to destabilize the Shi’ite-led government in Baghdad.
The Saud dynasty views itself as the rightful leader of the Muslim world, but Iran has challenged that leadership for several decades. Although Saudi Arabia has a Sunni majority, its rulers fear Iran’s potential influence over a sizable, and sometimes-restive, Shi’ite population concentrated in the kingdom’s oil-rich Eastern Province.
Any new leader is unlikely to change the larger contours of Saudi foreign policy — or the kingdom’s use of oil to enforce its interests and try to keep Iran at bay. But the new king and his inner circle will face decisions on succession that could reshape the ruling family and the monarchy’s future for generations to come.
- 13214 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -



Saudi needs some freedom and democracy. The Russians and the Chinese can give them some.
Good piece.
Glad to see we are getting consistent attributions of material.
Say, what do you call 10,000 Saudi "princes" in chains at the bottom of the sea?
A) A set-back for American foreign policy.
B) Justice.
C) Progress.
D) Tons o' Fun.
E) All of the above.
somebody gonna step in sum shiite
Let Prince Alltheweed take the camel reins....That guy's hilarious!
and I thought my family was fucked up.
How about free and democratic elections? Oh that's right, God says this family of dictators shall rule the lands til' the end of time or some shit. Shouldn't 'Merca be delivering them some freedoms via drone attacks and nation destroying/building?
The king is US backed just like the Shah of Iran. They keep control thru secret police. Keep the sheep scared. Coming soon to America, thanks to your friends at Homeland Security.
"How about free and democratic elections?"
In the case of the House of Saud, the question could come up. There is a very small chance that because of the whole succession to the throne being so clogged with extremely old men, they could switch to something like the Venetian "Noble Republic" system, and have all descendents of Saud - and only them - becoming Electors of some mixture between Monarchy and Oligarchy with elements of limited democracy through the Electors
after all, just to keep track of all descendents of King Saud they already do need something like the "Golden Book" of Venice
There's an old saying that it takes all kinds to make a world.
These fucks are the kind the world would be better off without.
A succession war in Saudi Arabia, now THAT would be entertainment.......
There is an inevitable chaos and hilarity with camel cavalry.
one thing for sure, the old guy's (al saud) sure had the right DNA to produce male offspring. however, the graph robably does not count females since they don't really count.
NoVa
Instead, the kingdom is trying to gain more control over the global market, and to drive out U.S. shale oil, which requires higher prices to remain competitive.
Many would disagree with your analysis. The main reason many propose for the sudden collapse in oil prices is the economic war being waged by the US against Russia with the aid of its puppet, Saudi Arabia:
“We all see the lowering of oil prices. There’s lots of talk about what’s causing it. Could it be an agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to punish Iran and affect the economies of Russia and Venezuela? It could.” – Russian President Vladimir Putin
Are falling oil prices part of a US-Saudi plan to inflict economic damage on Russia, Iran and Venezuela?
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro seems to think so. In a recent interview that appeared in Reuters, Maduro said he thought the United States and Saudi Arabia wanted to drive down oil prices “to harm Russia.”
Bolivian President Evo Morales agrees with Maduro and told journalists at RT that: “The reduction in oil prices was provoked by the US as an attack on the economies of Venezuela and Russia. In the face of such economic and political attacks, the nations must be united.”
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said the same thing,with a slightly different twist: “The main reason for (the oil price plunge) is a political conspiracy by certain countries against the interests of the region and the Islamic world … Iran and people of the region will not forget such … treachery against the interests of the Muslim world.”
US-Saudi “treachery”? Is that what’s really driving down oil prices?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/did-the-u-s-and-the-saudis-conspire-to-push...
Maybe Vlad should stick to chess ;-)
Maybe we all should. Is there anything left that isn't in the shitter or about to be?
Such defeatism ;-)
Was it over when the French attacked Pearl Harbor? No. Was it over when the Germans invaded Normandy? No. Was it over when the Indians false flagged the British in Boston? No.
Who's with me!?....Charge!!!!....aaaaahhhhhhh!!!!
Ibn Saud might just be my new hero.
The bubble to the lower right of that chart kills me: 34 other sons and 16 other wives. Sheesh man. Nice work.
I mean, seriously dude: HOLY FUCK!
Although to be fair he had a maximum of 4 wives at any one time. He had a lot of divorces to hit those numbers. Important nuances about the 'pedigree' of Saudi royal family wives. Former Saudi embassador to the US, Bandar bin Sultan is a descendent of Abdul Aziz through a black woman and so is automatically passed over as a potential inheritor of the crown, as are all Saudi sons of black women. This is why he tried to take power through a coup a few years back.
All of that without any mention of the Wahhabi alliance with the House of Saud?
For shame.
/////
Nuthin?
No Atlantic Slave Passage from the west coast of Africa to Boston or Jamaica, no Zanzibar, Kenya or Sahara route crossing to the east to Medina?
Oh yeah, that latter "business". I don't blame you for not commenting ;-)
U is raysciss an nt-symetric!!! ... 4 real!!!
lol...its like some of these people look at the world and its entire history through a toilet paper roll.
"Cuz, only white amairc-e-cuns can be greedy power mad raaayzists, so there!!!" ;-)
17 ugly wives?
One wife can be one too many.
I count 24. And I'll bet he could come up with enough brown paper bags for the ugly ones.
I got up to 3 at one point and it's been interesting. On one occasion they all conspired to lock me out of all the 'family' homes and I had to sleep in a Nissan Micra for a full weekend. Also, UK government refuses to recognise them as wives and refers to them only as mistresses. These bigotted spazzes even recognise pooftah and lesbo marriages now (vomit) but not heterosexual marriage if polygamous. Oh yes, I enjoy my freedom of lifestyle choice in the West.
Matriarchal society is a bitch!
Arab wives, as in good ol' fashioned chattel. Not western wives, as in high priced call girls. I wouldn't trade one camel faced Arab for two American wives of any vintage. One's an asset, the other's a huge liability.
Man, I heard THAT!
None of those dorks know a bit from a water barrel.
Never met a single one of them,
and I'm quite sure you're right;)
Jump Fuckers
Holy shit a power vacuum coming and just in time for ISIS to fill it....
This would assure a huge kill off of Saudi welfare recipients, thereby lowering their gov. expenses and need for high oil prices. So, it's guaranteed.
why bother trying to be king when you can be richer than Shi’ite anyway and not have to do a damned thing?
Well..maybe if he would stop attacking the Shi'ites.
those would be the Arab ones actually.
Then of course you have "the Persians" and "Egypt.". I have no idea what the difference is. I did watch a movie once that had the " Pyramids" in it.
That was cool.
They had like...the wheel and fire and crossbows...and then there were these Greek dudes...and they had a "phalanx" thingy which this blinged out dude thought was pathetic because they only had spears and an attitude problem.
Heck they couldn't even do numbers!
Turned out their math was good though. They understood "ratio's" quite well actually. Eventually Numbers won the day...or I should say the week...but by then I had fallen asleep on the couch.
beheadings...
Much better than Siberia and re-education camps, short, sweet and not as many beatings and the starvation that goes along with forced labor.
Hey...who's up for steaks!?
With the money I saved from switching to Geico-Bakken, I can afford T-Bones again! ;-)
No worries. After the king dies he'll be replaced by whoever the U.S. and GB have selected.
who cares about the camel jockeys. the reason saudi arabia and the emirates are ground zero for american oil conquest is that unlike the persians, the desert arabs are incapable of throwing the yolk off themselves.
the persians are a great people. cleric's aside, they will one day rise again .
the desert arabs will be subsumed into a storm of self destructive violence. they do not know how to build their own univerisites. and every time they try to wesernize , the west stops them if they fail to stop themselves first.
extremism is the friend of the west. as it keeps the arabs backwards . the japanese and chinese modernized. asian cultures generally attempt to immitate and surpass western progress. arab cultures had their chance many hundreds of years ago. the turks put an end to that.
they are all OUR BITCHES NOW. and its a good thing to. would you rather the pre-eminent world empire balance tip in favor of the chinese ? or the desert arabs?
DIVIDE AND CONQUER BITCHES.
just watch lawrence of arabia. and then watch it again.
then watch it again.
and again
and
again.
and then watch it again.
get the picture ;)
Fuck the House of Saud.
The more sons a king has, the more likely one of them will be dissatisfied with the succession plans, and the more likely there will be internal mayhem and civil war.
The black swan won't be oil prices. It will be the oil price after and during the fall of the House of Saud, from both internal and then external forces.
Let it all burn.
the fact this piece is from Reuters gave me enough doubts about subject bias
did a quick google of the author: Mohamad Bazzi, a Lebanese-American, immigrated to US at age of 10, and an adjunct senior fellow at the "Council on Foreign Relations".
so he's just an establishment mouthpiece from "CFR" that has a coviniently Arab sounding name to lend legitimacy and authority to the subject.
Brutal and craptastic the house of Saud may be, but I wouldn't bet on them "teetering with problems" just because a few establishment mouthpieces(journalists) said so.
>>> did a quick google of the author: Mohamad Bazzi, a Lebanese-American, immigrated to US at age of 10, and an adjunct senior fellow at the "Council on Foreign Relations".
I up-voted you, but you could have predicted Mr. Bazzi's background, and allegiances, quite well just from his text.
I wonder who the sperm donor was? The camel jockeys are always in the desert away from the women.
Is one of the Skeksis dying off?
(Sad a Mystic has to go too though.)
The sooner these pricks go back to tending sheep the better.
Die you evil old bastard. May a thousand Charlie's haunt you and your kingdom.
The Saudis have more problems besides succession. As Iraq is turning into Irans Vietnam the spill over is going into Saudi Arabia.
http://www.debka.com/article/24340/ISIS-kills-Iranian-elite-al-Qods-unit...
The Islamic State’s elite unit wiped out the forward command group of the a commando force belonging to Iran’s Al Qods Brigades early Monday, Jan. 12, killing its commander, Gen. Mehdi Norouzi, DEBKAfile’s exclusive counterterrorism and military sources report. The attack took place at Hashimiyah, a small town 125 km north of Baghdad. It was the most striking feat of the ISIS’s new tactic, which is to go for the top commanders of enemy forces in order to throw them into disarray and undermine their morale.
Norouzi was the second Iranian general fighting in Iraq to succumb to this tactic.
Last week, an ISIS sniper took down Brig. Gen. Hamid Taghavi at his command post in Samarra, central Iraq. Tehran tried claiming he was only a military adviser attached to the Iraqi army. However, his real mission was far more active: commanding officer of the Iranian and Iraqi Shiite militias and the Revolutionary Guards forces fighting ISIS in the central region of Iraq.
The late Gen. Norouzi no sooner arrived to take over from Taghavi when he too was taken down.
The new ISIS tactic was last week demonstrated on another front, when on Jan. 5, a jihadi force conducted a raid across the Iraqi border into northern Saudi Arabia near Suwayf in the Arar region. Among the three Saudi guardsmen killed was Gen. Odah al-Balawi, commander of the Saudi border guard in that sector. The Al Qaeda-ISIS force was made up entirely of Saudi jihadis.
When these three episodes are examined in context, the Islamic State’s current modus operandi takes shape, as outlined here by DEBKAfile’s military analysts:
It starts with the detailed tracking of the movements of targeted commanders and staff, followed by the penetration of spies, usually locals converted to the jihadist philosophy, to their staffs. These moles keep their bosses in ISIS abreast of the targeted commanders’ movements, time tables, staff aides and the forces assigned to their security.
ISIS tacticians use this information to fix on the means and timing of assassinations.
For taking out Taghavi in Samarra, they chose a sniper unit, which was apprised in advance of the visit he had scheduled to his command center there.
Following this blow, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards moved this command cemter from Samarra to Hashimiya, and appointed his successor.
Less than two weeks later, the new chief was cut down. This time, the means chosen by ISIS was a unit of armed men, some of them suicide killers, who blew themselves up in the midst of Gen. Norouzi’s Al Qods forward command group and his aides.
According to our military and intelligence sources, ISIS forces have been able to wipe out 555 Iranian officers in the four months since last October, most of them by means of jihadist hit squads.
The only effective person The Saudis have is..Prince Bandar
Tyler
Dude's pumping Debka ... get the blunderbuss! ...
Dude's pumping Debka ... get the blunderbuss!
You don't wage peace by simply talking to your friends. Learning is pretty much the same process.
You should understand that about two years ago Tyler swore that the next person be saw quoting Debka Files was going to get banned.
You don't 'learn' from Debka, you get counched in anti-think and advanced-bullshit techniques.
If you're still in here I wouldn't do it again.