Saturday, July 10, 2010

Kings, Emirs, and Shaykhs: The Survival of Traditional Regimes in the Persian Gulf


Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
09 July '10
Posted before Shabbat

During the early 1980s I was asked to give a briefing for the head of the Toyota auto company and other enterprises. It was just after the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat and during the height of the Iran-Iraq war, so regional instability was much on the mind of everyone.

After I finished my talk, Mr. Toyota asked a question in Japanese which was quickly translated. “This is all very interesting,” he responded, “but what we really want to know is the date on which the Saudi monarchy will fall.”

Before I could answer, the head of the delegation said, “We know the date and are willing to tell you but first we would like to renegotiate our fees.” I think he was joking, though it was not the most tactful thing to say.

When I did answer, I explained that the Saudi monarchy was very strong and likely to survive for a long time to come. Almost 30 years later, I see no reason to change that assessment.

If you had told experts in the mid-1960s that a half-century later every king and emir then ruling in the Persian Gulf would still be there, most would have been astonished. After all, these regimes seemed representative of a bygone, even medieval, era. Surely, modernity would sweep them away. Certainly, militant Arab nationalists—backed up generally by the regimes in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq—were eager to do so. After 1979, the radical Islamists in Iran and their local sympathizers worked hard to foment revolution.

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