New clear agreement?

Preventing rogue Islamic states from getting nuclear technology sounds like a good idea.

A Middle Eastern state with a large, rapidly growing, youthful population facing economic uncertainty, a history of attacking its neighbours, refusing to make peace with the State of Israel and responsible for fomenting and supporting radical Islamist movements across the region and worldwide. This is not the sort of country you want to give access to nuclear technology. Which is presumably why Donald Trump feels that “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon”. So sure is he of this point that there is a whole page on the White House website devoted to all the times he has restated this view. You don’t have to be a fan of Donald Trump to find it easy to agree that a nuclear armed Iran would be a bad idea. But I wasn’t describing Iran. I was describing Saudi Arabia.

You don’t have to think for very long to conclude that giving Saudi Arabia access to nuclear technology is also a very bad idea. Under Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS), Saudi Arabia has invaded Yemen and imposed an extreme embargo on Qatar. It has kidnapped the Prime Minister of Lebanon and attempted to bring about a coup in Jordan. The fact that Saudi Arabia created the ideological basis for both Al-Qaida and the Islamic State is not in any doubt, by poisoning the well of traditional Sunni Islam through its aggressive sponsorship of an intolerant, ultra-orthodox Wahhabism, frequently targeting Shi’a and other minorities.

Those that argue that MBS has put an end to state-sponsored religious extremism are missing the point: Saudi Arabia may have altered its social freedoms and allowed a measure of liberalism in private behaviour. But the issue is not the ideologies themselves (as toxic as they are, both in their denial of gender and political freedoms), but the inherent instability that has been created by decades of promoting extremism. In earlier times, the Saudi royal family had a deal with the Wahhabist clerics: the preachers had control of the Kingdom’s society, via an extremist religious movement, in return for which the clerics preached loyalty to the royal family, in spite of the family’s own debauched, unIslamic behaviours.

MBS has destroyed the power of his own family, arresting many senior princes and concentrating authority in himself alone (his demented father dribbling and nodding along in the background). At the same time he has brought the clerics to heel and made superficial changes: allowing women to drive and hosting music and sporting events. But MBS’s changes don’t mean that all Saudis are happy with the new situation. Plenty of Saudis actually subscribe to the Wahhabist perspective and are dismayed at the changes wrought by MBS. Then there are those that have lost out from the arrests of royal family members and their associates, including all those business leaders targeted in the Ritz-Carlton purge.

Does this have anything to do with a Trump plan to give Saudi Arabia access to nuclear technologies that it wouldn’t event share with a stable, reliable ally such as South Korea? It does. MBS presides over an unstable, unpredictable kingdom in a part of the world that is ever more dangerous. As a young man who isn’t going to give up power to anyone else, MBS has to survive for decades against numerous enemies, both domestic and foreign. He has a track record of aggression against neighbours and of making poor decisions on strategy and tactics. And he has spoken openly of a desire to have nuclear weapons. All of these factors are the reasons that Saudi Arabia is one of the last places on earth that should be allowed access to nuclear technology. At a time when Russia makes nuclear threats almost daily and when countries such as Poland, South Korea and Germany are publicly debating whether nuclear weapons are a necessary part of their security architecture, the risks of a wider arms race are clear.