Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) can no longer plead youth or inexperience, that time has passed.
What you see is what you get. The misrule, blunders and war associated with him as crown prince will only continue with him as king.
The full repertoire of the crown prince’s statecraft was on display in a stormy telephone call he made to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the eve of an Opec meeting last month which ended in a calamitous price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia.
A big mistake
Mohammed bin Salman can see for himself just how big a mistake that call was. The price of oil has collapsed, storage will rapidly run out, and oil companies face the real prospect of having to cap wells. The oil and gas sector accounts for up to 50 percent of the kingdom’s gross domestic product and 70 percent of its export earnings. This has just disappeared.
As anyone who has met Putin will tell you, you can bargain as hard as you like with the Russian president. You can even be on opposing sides of two regional wars, in Syria and Libya, and still maintain a working relationship, as the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to do.
But what you must not do is back Putin into a corner. This is what the Saudi crown prince did by giving Putin ultimatums and shouting at him. Putin just shouts back, knowing that the Russian balance of payments is in better shape to play that game of poker than the Saudi one is.
MBS is finding out now how weak his cards are. To be fair, before he made that call, he took advice from someone as arrogant and unthinking as he is. US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East advisor Jared Kushner listened to what the Saudi crown prince was about to do and did not object. Read Full Story
No comments:
Post a Comment