MBS chose fear, now Saudi Arabia is paying for it

In this episode, Iyad El-Baghdadi is in conversation with Abdullah Alaoudh of the Saudi opposition NAAS Party. Abdullah's father, the scholar Salman al-Odah, has spent nine years in solitary confinement. Mohammed bin Salman once told him he would rather be feared than loved, because fear can be controlled and love can't. Abdullah traces how a young prince who watched the Arab Spring took apart the checks on royal power: the balance between branches of the family, tribes, clerics and the public sphere.

Picking up from Iyad's article Blood Without Representation, they cover the bargains the Saudi state was built on, the concessions MBS offered Jared Kushner, the purges of 2017 and 2018, and the stalled push to normalise ties with Israel. They also discuss why the Saudi army was designed to be weak, why the Mecca Pact won't change the fight with the Houthis, and the NAAS Party's People's Vision for Reform, the alternative it has drafted for what comes after MBS.