August 15, 2018
Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, does not like being told what to do (hasn’t that always been the trouble with princes?). In response to a recent tweet by Canada’s foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, calling on the Gulf kingdom to release a number of human rights activists that it had imprisoned, Riyadh briskly and publicly cut relations with Ottawa. Within a matter of days, it froze new trade and investment, expelled Canada’s ambassador and recalled its own, suspended air travel to and from Toronto, told thousands of students studying in Canada that they would need to relocate, suspended educational exchange programs, and even told its citizens receiving medical care in Canada they would need to leave the country.
Such an excessive response could have easily been avoided, especially if it was merely an impulsive overreaction to fairly common rhetoric from a Western capital. It is more likely, however, that Riyadh was sending a message to the international community about what Saudi Arabia will tolerate in the era now helmed by Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman—a dispatch surely being heard in capitals across Western Europe and beyond.
Riyadh may calculate that such a message is important as it seeks to implement a social reform agenda in which it feels the means, which are not always pretty, justify the ends. Here it wants the international community to stay out of its way while it takes care of business as it sees fit. Yet at the same time, Riyadh is soliciting heavy international investment to finance its economic reform agenda. This requires cultivating an image of a safe, secure, and stable place to do business. No investor wants to risk their capital in a country where the rule of law is not respected, and where the government is not concerned with its appearance abroad.
Multiple times over the last two years, Riyadh has jeopardized that image by acting recklessly, appearing either not to understand the linkages between the two tracks of its reform agenda or dismissing them as irrelevant. It has driven a wedge in the Gulf Cooperation Council by leading an economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar; waged a catastrophic military campaign in Yemen; effectively kidnapped the prime minister of Lebanon, Saad Hariri; rounded up prominent businessmen and members of the royal family on opaque corruption charges; and, most recently, jailed women’s rights activists—which led to the confrontation with Canada.
While business opportunities in Saudi Arabia may be a dish too enticing to pass up, it is more likely investors will just pass altogether if they find the restaurant distasteful. As a colleague recently wrote: “For private sector growth to take place, capital needs to feel safe, and investors need legal guarantees to protect them.”
The spat with Ottawa smacks of volatility at a time when Riyadh is trying to convince the international business community that it is a safe and stable place to invest their money. That would be tragic for a government in Riyadh that appears earnest about shifting its economy away from oil.
Certainly, Riyadh could have chosen to do nothing, and few would have noticed the rather pro forma comments made by the Canadian foreign minister. Indeed, the Canadians must have been caught off guard by the Saudi response. Western officials have criticized Saudi Arabia’s human rights record for decades with little impact to diplomatic relations (they are often made as much for domestic consumption as for influencing politics in the Gulf). Responding in the manner Riyadh did, however, ensured that the feud garnered significant international attention, despite the underlying issue being damaging to Saudi Arabia’s image. The jailing of domestic rights activists, at a time when Saudi Arabia and the crown prince are essentially on an international public relations campaign to solicit foreign investment interest, would not appear like a matter the kingdom would want to highlight. It is counterproductive.
Does that mean Saudi Arabia needs to conform to the standards of a liberal democracy?
Any serious analyst should have a degree of empathy for Saudi Arabia—no matter where they stand on its politics or human rights record—and the unique political and social environment in which the crown prince is operating. Undergoing this degree of change in a region as volatile as the Middle East, and with a domestic culture and history as conservative and illiberal as Saudi Arabia’s, requires that the means to the end will not always be praiseworthy. Muhammad bin Salman is 32-years old, the first prospective ruler outside the generation of his father since the 1950s. That by itself means a precarious transition that requires him to be assertive and demonstrate to his rivals that he is not to be trifled with. Add to that the enormity of the transformations the crown prince is trying to implement, and the reactionary contingency of the public he is up against, and you get the gist of the messages he needs to send to his people. There are many that want to see him fail.
One can deduce a certain logic to the government introducing progressive changes like allowing women to drive while simultaneously jailing activists that pursue those same changes—it sends a message to the domestic public that all changes will be top down, not bottom up. Clearly, Riyadh is attempting to manage domestic public expectations and control the pace and direction of reform by demonstrating who will and won’t be the engine of change. But what expectations are they setting abroad? The perception is not positive.
The crown prince should not unnecessarily be shooting himself in the foot by tarnishing his image and undermining that agenda in the process. He should also be cognizant that there are linkages between the different tracks of his reform agenda, and that he might not be able to have it his way on both. Successfully carrying out this agenda will require better balance than has been demonstrated so far if he is to inspire confidence from those he seeks to court.
Saudi Arabia is fortunate to have an administration in Washington (depending on how you see it) that is not going to hold its feet to the fire on human rights issues. So why pick a fight with Ottawa and give critics fodder for tarnishing your reputation? I cannot find one article in the mainstream Western press that praised Saudi Arabia’s reaction to Canada. And that is where business leaders get their information.
Riyadh may indeed silence some international critics at the government level, but it will likely prove more costly in the process, while bringing an unsympathetic and unnecessary disruption to the lives of Saudi students, doctors, and patients receiving care overseas—not to mention those unjustly put in prison to serve a point.