David Commins, author of the new book Saudi Arabia: A Modern History, brings decades of scholarship and firsthand experience to explain the kingdom’s unlikely rise. Tyler and David discuss why Wahhabism was essential for Saudi state-building, the treatment of Shiites in the Eastern Province and whether discrimination has truly ended, why the Saudi state emerged from its poorer and least cosmopolitan regions, the lasting significance of the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure by millenarian extremists, what’s kept Gulf states stable, the differing motivations behind Saudi sports investments, the disappointing performance of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology despite its $10 billion endowment, the main barrier to improving its k-12 education, how Yemen became the region’s outlier of instability and whether Saudi Arabia learned from its mistakes there, the Houthis’ unclear strategic goals, the prospects for the kingdom’s post-oil future, the topic of David’s next book, and more.
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Recorded August 22nd, 2025.
Read the full transcript
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I’m chatting with David Commins. David is one of the leading scholars on Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Wahhabism. He has a new book out, which I enjoyed very much and learned a lot from. It’s called, Saudi Arabia: A Modern History. David, welcome.
DAVID COMMINS: Thank you. It’s nice to be here.
COWEN: I have so many questions about Saudi. Let’s take Wahhabism, which gets a very bad reputation in the Western press. If you were to steelman it for me, make the best case for it, that it’s not just something crazy and extreme, what does that case look like?
COMMINS: The case looks like it is a very strong conviction for a specific theology and a specific definition of true belief in the Islamic tradition. That’s the best case I can make.
COWEN: Could the Saudi nation have been built without it?
COMMINS: I would argue no, and I would also qualify that by saying that our sources for the early history of Saudi political expansion are so few and partisan, we can’t reach a firm historical conclusion about that. But it seems to me that this religious purification movement, which is what Wahhabism purported to be, was essential for state-building in that part of Arabia and the 1700s.
COWEN: If you were to define Wahhabism, pull it out of the Saudi context, but just theologically, what is distinct about it compared to other forms of Sunni Islam?
COMMINS: It is a theological position on how you define belief. The teachings of the founder of this school of thought, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab — so it’s named after him — argued that it is not enough to affirm that you believe in one God. You must also actively negate any deviation from correct belief in God. Therefore, it has an activist impulse toward what it regards as heresy or unbelief.
Whereas in the Sunni tradition, theology had evolved different schools of thought that were, I would say, mutually tolerant. They didn’t persecute each other for what they regarded as incorrect religious practice based on incorrect theology.
It really is a theological conviction that was new in the history of Muslim societies and would probably have not made much of an impact had it not gained the support of the Saud family in the 1740s.
COWEN: Now, Mecca is open to all Muslims, right?
COMMINS: Right.
COWEN: How is that then compatible with Wahhabism? Or is it just a contradiction that everyone lives with?
COMMINS: Well, it is a contradiction. One of the political achievements of the early 20th-century Saudi leader, Abdulaziz, was to annex Mecca to his kingdom, which was based in Riyadh, and do so in a way that imposed what you might call a qualified Wahhabi regime, because in its original homeland in central Arabia, the Wahhabi clerics purged the entire region as thoroughly as they could, of any religious dissent, that is, of other Sunni Muslims. That was in the 1700s, 1800s.
When Abdulaziz annexed Mecca, at the end of 1924, he realized that it was a globally significant annexation and that if he tried to impose a strict Wahhabi regime that purged other Muslim traditions from the holy city, he would alienate Muslims in the rest of the world. So, he did put Wahhabi clerics in charge of religious institutions in Mecca, but he chose clerics who were willing to work with Muslims in other Sunni traditions. He actually had to compromise, you would say, on strict Wahhabi doctrine.
COWEN: The Shiite Muslims in the Eastern Provinces — they’re just tolerated? Or there’s discrimination? What’s their legal status?
COMMINS: Their legal status today in Saudi Arabia is as Saudi citizens, none of whom have very many legal rights, be they Sunni or Shiite. Over time, they have endured periods of persecution. A number of Shiites moved out of their home provinces in the 1790s, the very first time Saudi forces annexed it. The Saudis lost control of that region. They regained control again. Most recently, in 1913, there was another exodus of 100 or so Shiites to other parts of the Gulf region. So, there is a history of persecution and discrimination.
COWEN: Just today, 2025.
COMMINS: Today, Tyler, that is, for me, very difficult to know, because what we hear from the Saudi government is that there is no more discrimination against Shiite Muslims. Personally, I don’t know if that is true or not. It might be true, but I do not know that it is true because we really don’t hear what I regard as reliable information about conditions in Saudi Arabia regarding recent occurrence of dissent. They’ve all been silenced.
COWEN: You could have an LLM read anonymous posts on social media, right?
COMMINS: You could. I haven’t seen that. It’s possible that there is a completely new climate. They claim there is a completely new climate, and I’ve been told by colleagues there is a completely new climate for Shiite Muslims. I just don’t know that. I don’t know that as a fact.
COWEN: Let’s say you’re a Sunni cleric from Egypt or Iraq, traditional Sunni establishment. What would be your critique of Wahhabism?
COMMINS: That it is an eccentric, erroneous interpretation of Muslim religious sources, and that it was the product of a poorly educated, ambitious preacher from the 1700s. That’s what they would say.
COWEN: So, it’s making up claims that are not in the Quran. It’s not that it’s ignoring what is in the Quran. Is that correct?
COMMINS: They would say it’s misreading the Quran, to get into the details. Just as you have very strong disagreements in Christianity between different denominations, there have always been strong disagreements between Muslims over theology. The Wahhabi movement made them matter more than they did before because of this activist impulse and its position on theology, that belief requires action, not just verbal affirmation and individual conduct.
COWEN: Why do the Saudis seem to dislike the Palestinians so much? Is that theological or some other set of reasons? Because the Palestinians are not a direct threat to the Saudi establishment.
COMMINS: Well, I don’t know the Saudi establishment does dislike Palestinians.
COWEN: Well, when people talk to me — this is completely anecdotal —
COMMINS: Okay.
COWEN: — they seem highly skeptical about the Palestinians, would be my sense, relative to, say, many other Arab groups.
COMMINS: Well, this might be true of the current government, maybe. I really don’t know. I’m not part of this conversation. I guess my hunch is that any critical attitude toward Palestinians on the part of the Saudi government would be that they’re inconvenient, because I think what the Saudi government wants is a very neat, seamless integration with Western economic, political, technological, and military spheres. The Palestinians get in the way of that. They might say that. I’m not sure that’s true, but that might be how they see it.
COWEN: Now, as you know, the senior religious establishment is largely Nejd, right? Why does that matter? What’s the historical significance of that?
COMMINS: Right. Nejd is the region of central Arabia. Riyadh is currently the capital. The first Saudi empire had a capital nearby, called Diriyah. Nejd is really the territory that gave birth to the Wahhabi movement, it’s the homeland of the Saud dynasty, and it is the region of Arabia that was most thoroughly purged of the older Sunni tradition that had persisted in Nejd for centuries.
Consequently, by the time that the Saudi government developed bureaucratic agencies in the 1950s and ’60s, the religious institution was going to recruit from that region of Arabia primarily. Now, it certainly attracted loyalists from other parts of Arabia, but the Wahhabi mission, as I call it — their calling to what they considered true belief — began in Nejd and was very strongly identified with the towns of Nejd ever since the late 1700s.
COWEN: Would I be correct in inferring that some of the least cosmopolitan parts of Saudi Arabia built the Saudi state?
COMMINS: Yes, that is correct. That is correct. If you think of the 1700s and 1800s, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf coast of Arabia were the most cosmopolitan parts of Arabia.
COWEN: They’re richer, too, right? Jeddah is a much more advanced city than Riyadh at the time.
COMMINS: Somewhat more advanced. Yes, it is more advanced, it is more cosmopolitan than Nejd. There is the regional identity in Hejaz, that is the Red Sea coast where the holy cities and Jeddah are located. The townspeople there tended to look upon Nejd as a less advanced part of Arabia. But again, that’s a very recent historical development.
COWEN: How is it that the coastal regions just dropped the ball? You could imagine some alternate history where they become the center of Saudi power and religious thought, but they’re not.
COMMINS: Right. If you take Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina — that region of Arabia, known as Hejaz, had always been under the rule of other Muslim empires. They were under the rule of other Muslim powers because of the religious value of possessing, if you will, the holy cities, Mecca and Medina. From the time of the first Muslim dynasty that was based in Damascus in the seventh and early eighth centuries, all the way until the Ottoman Empire, Muslim dynasties outside Arabia coveted control of that region. They were just more powerful than local resources could generate.
Hejaz was always, if you were, to dependency on outside Muslim powers. If you look at the east coast of Arabia — what’s now the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf — it was richer than central Arabia. It’s the largest oasis in Arabia. It is in proximity to pearling banks, which were an important source for income for residents there. It was part of the Indian Ocean trade between Iraq and India. The population there was always — well, always — for the last thousand years has been dominated by Bedouin tribesmen.
There was a brief Ismaili Shia republic, you might say, in that part of Arabia in medieval times. It just didn’t have, it seems, the cohesion to conquer other parts of Arabia. That’s what makes the Saudi story really remarkable, is that they were able to muster and sustain the cohesion to carry out a conquest like that over the course of 50 years.
COWEN: Physically, how did they manage that? Water is a problem, a lot of transport is by camel, there’s no real rail system, right?
COMMINS: Right.
COWEN: How is it they do it? What gets sent where to do what?
COMMINS: I would say it was accomplished almost inch by inch. It took 30 years for the first Saudi principality, I would call it, in their original home, Diriyah, which is now an outskirt of Riyadh. It took them 30 years to conquer Riyadh. Thirty years. It was, I would say, more a matter of persistence and willpower than resources or strategy.
Now, there is one thesis out there, which really doesn’t have tremendous amount of evidence to support it, that the spread of firearms has something to do with the success of Saudi expansion. I think that’s an interesting hypothesis, but the evidence for that is pretty thin.
I really think it was a matter of persistence, and then the ability of the Wahhabi mission to gain a following to form, if you would, a Wahhabi party in different towns in Nejd, and to support the Saudis when they were able to get the upper hand over a local ruling family. I attribute the success of Saudi power to persistence and leadership and having that religious commonality. Some people just did buy into this teaching.
COWEN: How much is there ever a de facto Ottoman rule over parts of Saudi?
COMMINS: Almost never. There was an Ottoman invasion that destroyed the very first Saudi empire, 1811 to 1818. They were able to destroy the first Saudi empire. They captured and deported the Saudi ruler to Istanbul, and he was executed in public in Istanbul. Communications from western Arabia to central Arabia is so difficult and harsh that it was too difficult to maintain an occupation there, so after a few years, the Ottomans pulled out.
COWEN: There’s not even tribute after those years?
COMMINS: No. You do get tribute, it seems, starting in the 1840s. After a second Ottoman invasion, there are reports of tribute. I have not really seen a year-by-year account of when the Saudis rendered tribute and when they withheld tribute, but there are some moments when they paid tribute. Then, in 1913, right before World War I, when the Saudis conquered the Eastern Province, the heavily Shiite region, they promised some tribute, but World War I broke out, and the Ottomans were too preoccupied to enforce that. So, there had been a few moments, but it was never really part of the Ottoman’s sphere.
COWEN: No real Ottoman cultural traces?
COMMINS: No, not in central Arabia. You have that in eastern Arabia, and you have that in Hejaz, for sure — very strong Ottoman traces, but not in central Arabia.
COWEN: To fast forward to more recent times — 1979, the Grand Mosque in Mecca is seized. Who does it and why?
COMMINS: Right. This is carried out by a band that broke off from a puritanical band that had broken off from mainstream Saudi society. They’re called the Salafi group, or they call themselves the Salafi group. They formed in the mid-1960s. They were alarmed at the arrival of certain customs they considered immoral, like television, like retail stores that would have mannequins with ladies’ dress. They didn’t like paper currency because it had the face of the king on it. Supposedly, they would only carry bags of coins weighing 20 pounds instead of carrying paper currency with them.
So, you had this puritanical group form in Medina in the mid-1960s. They were able to establish themselves in other parts of Arabia among people who disapproved of any sign of Western cultural influence.
COWEN: They’re not Wahhabis or they are Wahhabis?
COMMINS: Theologically, they are definitely Wahhabis. They considered the Saudi family to have betrayed fidelity to true Wahhabi principles. Now, they were under the supervision of the official Saudi religious establishment, which is Wahhabi, and some of them broke away from that supervision. The leader of that breakaway faction was a man named Juhayman al-Otaybi. Juhayman was apparently a very strong, charismatic personality. He alienated some people in the group. Other people thought that he was speaking the truth to power, if you will.
In late 1978, there was an attempt to arrest him. He was tipped off, it seems, by a relative in the police, and he escaped. He fled into the desert, as they say, and he was a fugitive for a year. During that year, members of his group started having dreams of the Muslim messiah. They came to believe that one member of their breakaway faction was indeed the Mahdi, or the Muslim messiah. They believed that November 20, 1979, was the day that the Muslim messiah would appear. That was really the thinking behind the takeover of the mosque in Mecca.
It was a millenarian movement, in a way. It was a phenomenon that Wahhabism had never generated before, this kind of millenarianism. It was very much more like a David Koresh movement than a mainstream evangelical movement.
COWEN: Is that still a traumatic event for Saudi rulers, or it’s mostly forgotten?
COMMINS: Well, I think Saudi rulers like to say that their country had what they call a moderate form of Islam until 1979. Then, in response to that traumatic moment in Mecca, the Saudi government adopted the agenda of extremists, what they call extremist Muslims. They claim that they want to go back to how things were before 1979. I think that is a convenient, concocted narrative, but that’s what they say. They like to point to 1979 as a turning point. That in response to that event, the government adopted a policy that fostered extremism. Again, I don’t think that’s true at all, but that’s what they say.
COWEN: Now, I know it’s hard to tell in autocratic societies, but how complete has Saudi nation-building been? You still have the Shiites, you have some radical groups, you had al-Qaeda. We’re not sure what’s going on now, but is it a truly solid here forever nation-state in terms of the borders and who rules?
COMMINS: Well, I would say yes. I think that there are definitely groups that would like to dismantle the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but my impression is that generations of Saudi kings and princes and technocrats have succeeded at integrating the population into a nation that looks to certain institutions, looks at outsiders and sees them as different from themselves, which is an essential part of being a nation, and thinks of themselves as sharing common values.
Yes, I do think that they are a nation. I think that if by some totally unexpected event, which of course, unexpected events happen, the kingdom were to fall, I don’t think the country would disintegrate. I think that the different parts have too much at stake in each other to stick together to disintegrate. I don’t see it at all similar to Syria or Iraq, I’ll put it that way, or Lebanon, which do have much stronger tendencies pulling those countries apart.
COWEN: The greater stability of many of the Gulf states, not just Saudi, to me, is quite striking as an outsider. If you had to boil that down to as abstract an explanation as possible, to what do you attribute that? Again, this is not only Saudi, but a number of other places.
COMMINS: I would say it’s fear of annexation by larger neighbors. Iran has a claim to Bahrain. Iraq has a claim to Kuwait. Saudi Arabia, at times, has tried to take over Qatar and the Emirates in their history. What allowed the smaller Gulf states to remain independent was Western strategic intervention. The British established a truce, if you will, in the Persian Gulf in the early 1800s. That evolved into a series of treaties whereby London guaranteed the independence of the different Emirates that eventually formed the United Arab Emirates, and of Qatar, and of Bahrain, and of Kuwait, and of Oman, for that matter. Of course, the British left in 1971.
There was a great deal of concern who would fill that position. London wanted the United States to do it, but the United States was quite involved in Vietnam. The Nixon administration didn’t think the American public would go for a new strategic commitment at that time. Of course, the United States did become strategically committed to the Gulf after the Iranian Revolution and after the Iran-Iraq War. I would say what accounts for the stability of these small principalities is fear of annexation by larger neighbors.
COWEN: Why is Riyadh so ugly as a city?
COMMINS: I’m from Los Angeles, Tyler. I take exception to that.
COWEN: I love Los Angeles. I think it’s beautiful.
COMMINS: Right. Actually, Riyadh has really fantastic modern architecture. Now, it’s hard to appreciate because, like Los Angeles, it’s an automobile city. You can’t really walk there. In that regard, I really didn’t like living there very much. Whereas I lived in Damascus in early 1980s, and I really loved Damascus because it was really a walkable city. Riyadh does have a great modern architecture. So, I wouldn’t say it’s ugly. It’s not my view.
COWEN: Why are the Saudis so interested in either funding or owning sports teams, sports leagues, top sports athletes under contract? Is that a political thing, or it’s just how they enjoy spending their money, because they love the sport? Some mix of both? How do you model that?
COMMINS: I do see it as a mix of both. I think that the term of critics is “sports washing.” You’ve probably heard that term?
COWEN: Yes.
COMMINS: Qatar is hosting the World Cup, and Saudi Arabia’s takeover of the PGA. People look at that as an attempt to whitewash their image by hosting prestigious global sporting events. Many people look at this as part of a political agenda. To my mind, there’s no doubt that it’s extremely popular with Saudis. Saudis love sports, Tyler. When I was there, I was there in the fall of 2001. I arrived actually two days before 9/11. I was living downtown in an apartment building, and right after the Americans started bombing Afghanistan to chase out the Taliban and try to apprehend bin Laden, one evening I heard a crowd coming down the main boulevard.
I was a little nervous about it. That it was some anti-American demonstration. It turned out they were celebrating Saudi Arabia’s victory in the Gulf soccer cup. That’s what was on their minds that evening. Not politics. It’s extremely popular, especially with young Saudis, and they are the main constituency of the monarchy today.
COWEN: Now, if you drive around North Macedonia, you’ll see some number of Saudi-funded mosques. They’re quite large and elaborate. It’s not obvious that the demand for them is so strong. How do you model why the Saudis do that? Is it some kind of kickback scheme, or they just want to proselytize, or they want to raise their status in the Islamic world?
COMMINS: Well, I see that in at least three different frames. One frame is that Islam or Christianity is a proselytizing religion. Muslims are proselytized from the very beginning of the founder of Islam, prophet Muhammad. The Wahhabi mission has been a proselytizing movement ever since its founding in 1740. It was a total failure at proselytizing. The teachings of Wahhabism were rejected completely by almost every Muslim society that encountered it from the 1740s until probably the late 1800s, but they never stopped trying. I think that there’s that. The third is that for the Saudi monarchy, it is a form of soft power. Democracy promotion for the United States, exporting communism for Fidel, marketing Wahhabism for Riyadh.
COWEN: Do they get soft power from it?
COMMINS: I think they do. I think they do. My sense is that the scholarship on Wahhabi soft power is beginning to sharpen the focus on particular case studies in Nigeria, in Indonesia, in Central Asia. The finding so far is that the Wahhabis are in competition with other Muslim religious tendencies from Iran, from Turkey, even from Kuwait. Just as Catholic and Protestant missionaries competed around the world for converts, what they regarded as true Christianity, the Wahhabis are competing. Of course, they’ve had a ton of money, behind their proselytizing, from I would say from the early 1980s until about 2015.
It seems that King Salman has really put the lid on that. I’ll be curious to see the follow-up studies that were really based on research in the period, roughly 2005 to 2015. I haven’t seen a lot about recent developments, but I think that by curtailing financial support for at least Saudi religious institutions to proselytize, that Saudi influence will diminish. It’ll leave a residue for sure, but it will diminish.
COWEN: In general, who do you think has been winning that ideological competition of the different branches of Islam? Which would have greater soft power today than say 20, 25 years ago?
COMMINS: I do think the Saudis rebranded themselves as Salafis. Wahhabism has an association with Saudi Arabia. If they call themselves Salafis, it says that they are following the ways of the founding fathers. Americans like to say, “We follow the way of the founding fathers.” Sunni Muslims like to say they follow the ways of the founding fathers, which is the Salaf. Salafism became extremely popular around the Muslim world, in Muslim diasporas, and is still extremely influential.
Is it dominant among Muslim populations? It is very high profile, but I don’t know that it’s dominant. I don’t really know how to measure that. I haven’t seen public opinion polls, for instance, that ask Muslims in different countries, “Do you favor Salafism over other versions of Islam?” I can cite an anecdote for one of the downsides of this puritanical form of Islam, is that in Iraq, when David Petraeus engineered the surge in 2006/2007, one of his assets was that Iraqi Sunni Muslims were fed up with the busy-body intrusion into their personal lives of the Salafis.
They told men they couldn’t just wear a mustache, they had to grow a beard. They punished people for smoking cigarettes. I don’t think that most Muslims around the world, not that I’ve met [most] Muslims, but I’ve lived in several Muslim countries, and most Muslims I’ve met regard Salafis as busy bodies and intrusive. I don’t think they’re going to win the battle for hearts and minds in the long run. They had a very strong run in the ’90s and early 2000s. I think al-Qaeda did a lot to discredit that.
COWEN: To what extent should I think of Saudi as a nation of immigrants? As you know, bin Laden family has roots in Yemen. Prince Al Waleed bin Talal, who I think is still number two owner at Twitter, has Armenian and Lebanese descent. Overall, how many of the Saudis are actually Saudi in origin?
COMMINS: I have no idea. I’ll just say that. I’ll say that. Yes, if you take away the one quarter of the population that are foreign workers, of the 75% that remain, I would say probably a very small number are descended from people outside Arabia, because certainly, the royals and wealthy Arabian families in general had a long history of marrying or having children with slaves. That was legal until the early 1960s. It doesn’t seem that the majority, or even close to majority of Arabs, owned slaves in Arabia over the centuries. It was a small number of better-off Arabs.
In terms of immigrants, people moving to Arabia, very few people moved to Arabia from other parts of the Middle East because it was very poor. The largest site of immigrant settlement was Mecca and Medina, and that would have been from pilgrims who journeyed months overland from West Africa, or weeks through the Indian Ocean from Southeast Asia, and once you got there, a lot of them stayed. So that you did have permanent colonies from Java, from Bukhara in Central Asia, but central Arabia, the Saudi homeland, very little.
COWEN: One reads of these families who maybe came over from Yemen, they’re then in Saudi, they’ve whitewashed the origins a bit, pretend they’re long-standing Saudis. Is that common?
COMMINS: Well, certainly, it’s pretty common if you’re from a poorer country and you want to have the benefits of Saudi citizenship. But out of 30 million people, how many people are like that? I couldn’t put a number on. I’m sorry. I just couldn’t.
COWEN: What’s the best food in Saudi Arabia?
COMMINS: Well, I had Najdi food, and I didn’t care for it. It was camel and wheat grain. Ranch food, I guess I would say. When I was in Riyadh in the early 2000s, you had every kind of foreign cuisine you could imagine: Chinese, Persian, Mexican, Cheesecake Factory. Saudis love American food. I don’t know the culinary traditions of Hejaz, or of other parts of Arabia. I just know the Najdi culinary tradition, and it was pretty basic.
COWEN: In Jeddah, is the food more, I don’t know, Red Sea, more Ethiopian, more Yemeni.
COMMINS: I was only in Jeddah for a weekend. I’m not familiar with Jeddah to say.
COWEN: Now, take KAUST, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. It has, I read, a $10 billion endowment. Will that be a successful research university? How’s that going?
COMMINS: My understanding is that it’s not going all that well. That the intention was to provide a global-level postgraduate education in STEM and most of the students are foreign students.
COWEN: The main problem is just the demand side? Saudis don’t want to go there?
COMMINS: Or they’re not qualified for that. I think if we were to start talking about plans to transform the Saudi economy, I think that the huge hurdle is improving K through 12 of education there. They just have not been able to succeed at changing their public education, the mass public education, to prepare students for challenging college, let alone postgraduate-level STEM subjects. I think it’s still the case that families who want their students to excel in STEM typically send their children to private schools and then to the Engineering Petroleum University. It’s like their Texas A&M. It is an excellent university.
From there they tend to go to American graduate schools and then come back and work in the petroleum engineering fields. It just seems that the K through 12 level has not been solved much. Here we are in the United States talking about that, right?
COWEN: Yes. What’s the main barrier to improving the Saudi system? Because they do have money, right?
COMMINS: They have money. I think that you would have to probably replace most of the teachers. They would have to find a way to train up teachers to improve the quality of STEM education in the public schools. They’ve reduced the religious content quite a bit already. My understanding is, they’ve taken out a lot of the, I would say, xenophobic religious teachings that were part of their education system for about half a century, but they just don’t have a cadre of teachers that they can put into the schools and replace people who are there already.
COWEN: What is the chance Qatar survives as an independent nation, say 50 years from now? I would bet against that, but do you have an opinion?
COMMINS: I don’t have an opinion. Why would you bet against it?
COWEN: Because without US protection, which I do not think will endure forever due to our own energy independence, someone will swallow them, probably Iran, but it could be Saudi as well, or they become a pawn of either side. Right now, they can play different sides off against each other, but maybe that just won’t last.
COMMINS: That’s a reasonable scenario. One of the big questions I won’t be around for, is what will happen to the entire Gulf political alignment when the global appetite for their one really valuable resource diminishes? That’s a big question, but I have no idea. Between extreme heat and autocracy, how are they going to manage without billions in oil revenue every year? I think that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to diversify their economies, but I don’t think they have the technical skills to do that.
They’ve rented it now, for many decades, by paying high salaries to qualified people from other countries. Maybe they’ll get there. Maybe they don’t need that many people if AI can replace a lot of technically qualified people in this country. I hear coders are losing their jobs. Maybe countries won’t need a large pool of technically qualified manpower.
COWEN: Is the UAE stable? There’s both external threats, as you know, they’ve fought over territory with Saudi. But just internally, if the smaller places start to resent the rule of Abu Dhabi, they might want to split off or disagree about how much autonomy they’ll have.
COMMINS: Right. Well, I don’t think it would be like the Velvet Divorce between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, they can both survive. I think if Ras Al-Khaimah broke away, it would be swallowed up probably by Oman or Saudi Arabia. I think they stick together because of fear of annexation, and then subjugation to a neighbor, one or another neighbor. I think the UAE is stable. Yes, I don’t see any threat to the UAE on the horizon, but I could be blind to that.
COWEN: Do you think of Bahrain and Yemen as historically the most advanced or cosmopolitan parts of that region of the world?
COMMINS: Yemen has a history of kingdoms going back a few thousand years, although, in terms of the modern global economy, it’s the poorest part of Arabia. Yemen’s future as a cohesive country is a big question mark. It seems to me the strong secessionist movement in the south. Bahrain will probably be, as long as there is American forces there, an independent country. It’s the biggest American naval base in the Persian Gulf. If there were to be a withdrawal of Western strategic interest in the Persian Gulf, that goes back to about 1820, it would change everything. It would change everything.
It did change everything in 1820 when the British exercised gunboat diplomacy to suppress low-level warfare. They called it piracy. Here we are, 200 years on, still sort of an outpost of Western security interest.
COWEN: Why is Yemen so unstable when the rest of the region looks really quite stable?
COMMINS: I think a Yemen expert could give a better answer than I could, but my understanding is that the Yemen Arab Republic that formed in 1990 from the union of North and South Yemen was stable because of a very delicate political compromise between powers in different parts of the country. That political compromise, of course, has been exploded by a number of different factors, among which is this phenomenon of Zaydi revivalism represented by the Houthis, which represents a very strong regional religious tendency that is different from the rest of the country.
Then, of course, outside intervention has made it difficult for Yemenis to see that, look, we have to live with each other. We can’t reach out to one power or another to clobber our local rival. It’s a lot like Lebanon was for 15 years, from 1975 to 1990.
COWEN: They never had this period of nation-building analogous to what the Saudis had from the Najdis?
COMMINS: No, they didn’t really. They didn’t really. Yemen has some oil and gas, but not very much. Not enough to set up the kind of national social welfare system that gets people to a certain standard of living and education, so they haven’t had that. Because of the weakness of the state, outsiders like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, Iran, Saudi Arabia, they’ve been able to intervene and make a mess of things. Much like happened in Lebanon for 15 years.
COWEN: Is there still any residual sense of cultural inferiority in Saudi vis-à-vis Yemen, which has a much grander civilizational tradition, right?
COMMINS: Right.
COWEN: It’s evident when you go there.
COMMINS: Sure.
COWEN: Wow, this is amazing. You’re in Saudi and it’s like, “Here’s some new buildings.”
COMMINS: They’re very proud of the new buildings. It’s a little bit like the United States and Europe. People come to the United States, from Europe, and they think it’s a fabulous country, but we don’t really have medieval cities. You would say that Europe has a much deeper and richer cultural history. The United States is a great commercial and military power, producer of popular culture, but I think Europeans might feel that the United States is still a parvenu on the world stage. Maybe that’s how they look at it.
COWEN: How serious are the Saudis about building a wall, or really, finishing a wall on the border with Yemen?
COMMINS: Well, it’s going to take them a long time to achieve that.
COWEN: Do they want to?
COMMINS: If they want to? Well, some of them certainly do. It would enhance their security against smuggling. In the early 2000s, there was a lot of weapon smuggling, a lot of drug smuggling happening through Yemen, and also through the northern border. There was a serious drug problem in Saudi Arabia. I don’t know if there still is or not, but a lot of families were worried about it.
COWEN: I hear there is.
COMMINS: Right. It was a topic of conversation in 2001, 2002, when I was there. Conversations about teenage or somewhat older children having to go to rehab. They had a whole cadre of therapists trained at American universities in drug rehabilitation. Now, would building a wall on the Saudi-Yemeni border — I imagine at some point there will be the technology to conduct surveillance on that border. The world does seem to be moving in a direction of greater surveillance capabilities by states, so I don’t think it’s as far-fetched as it was 10 years ago. To the extent that the monarchies seek certainty for suppressing any challenge, yes, they might build a wall. They might.
COWEN: If the Saudis look back on their earlier policies toward Yemen, do you think they have regrets? Do they regret having rooted for so long for a weak Yemen and now it’s come back to bite them in the bum, so to speak? Did they just screw it all up?
COMMINS: Did they screw it up? Well, I don’t know if they screwed up. I have no idea how they look at it. I know that the current leadership thinks that they needed to adopt a more activist foreign policy, and in the very early years of King Salman’s reign, a lot of that backfired. They seem to have adopted, I would say, a more cautious approach in dealing with Yemen, and Iraq, and Lebanon, and Syria, and that is more in line with traditional Saudi diplomacy.
It’s the difference between deciding to invade and bomb Yemen, and deciding to try to negotiate with Houthis and renew relations with Iran. Of course, brokered by China a couple of years ago, and see if there’s a way to manage what they regard a strategic threat, then pursue the elimination of a strategic threat, which seems to have backfired for them.
COWEN: Now, as you know, in 1962, Egypt is bombing parts of Yemen. They have some involvement in that war. Some of the bombs, it seems, even fall on the Saudi side of the border. Is there a historical memory of that? Does it matter, or is it just forgotten, that was some mistake in the past and who cares?
COMMINS: I don’t think Yemen has forgotten about it, and I don’t think everybody in Saudi Arabia has forgotten about it. I think the men around Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, are quite aware of the history of relations between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. I think that they may have been responsible for tempering some of the adventurous foreign policies. If anything, what the Saudis did by intervening in Yemen in 2015, was similar to what Nasser did, when he intervened. He sent 40,000 Egyptian troops to Yemen, eventually, in the 1960s. That was a terrible mistake for Nasser. It fatally weakened his regime.
I think some Saudis may not have read what they did, in terms of what Nasser did, but looking at it from the outside, it was a comparable mistake. It just reminds me that foreign policy is always a matter of experimentation and seeing what works. I hear a lot of talk about grand strategy. It’s hard to think of a case where grand strategy really worked out. There’s a lot of luck involved in achieving foreign policy success, no matter what country we’re talking about.
COWEN: Is there still a meaningful historical memory of the 1934 Saudi-Yemen border war, or is that just forgotten?
COMMINS: I think that’s forgotten. I think that’s forgotten. Again, some people in Yemen might remember it, especially in the border region, because they’re right up against the Saudi border. There’s a long tradition of trade across that border. When you try to control that trade, it becomes smuggling. That line was imposed on territory where people on both sides were accustomed to dealing with each other. It’d be like building a wall between Pennsylvania and Maryland. People between Baltimore and York, between Frederick and Gettysburg, would find that appalling.
COWEN: How would you model what you think the Houthis want? What’s their strategy, their game, so to speak?
COMMINS: That’s a great question. The people that I think are informed about this, see the Houthis as evolving in their aims, and becoming more ambitious and perhaps overreaching, as rising movements have a habit of doing. Right now it seems that they do not want to have any power-sharing in the part of the country that they control. I don’t see how they imagine a unified Yemen with any other political force. I have no idea how they see that. They can’t conquer the rest of Yemen; the rest of Yemen doesn’t seem capable of conquering them, but they don’t seem to be interested in sharing power.
It could be the case that they’re concerned with control day-to-day, and they’ll see what other Yemenis come up with in the way of an offer to run the country. To my mind, they don’t really have a clear strategic goal other than staying in power where they are.
COWEN: How optimistic are you about Saudi Arabia?
COMMINS: Optimistic? Well, I have to say that I think that for many Saudis, the opening of social freedoms is wonderful. I know that many Saudis are extremely happy to have the religious police off their backs. That they don’t have to close doors and be harassed if they don’t go to the mosque. Of course, women have much greater freedom than they’ve ever had, under the modern Saudi regime. They’re free to take creative initiatives in music, in theater, in film, in literature, in a way that they never have been. In that regard, I do think that the changes since 2015 for many Saudis, have made their lives a lot better.
COWEN: How deeply rooted or sustainable do you think that is?
COMMINS: I think that’s very deep. Yes.
COWEN: You said yourself, it’s never been the case before.
COMMINS: Right. I think it’s very deep. I really do believe that the country has turned away from that puritanical religious legacy. I do believe. One of the things I try to do in my book is I try to show that the, what I call the modernist or cosmopolitan current in Saudi Arabia, is not recent. It goes back 100 years, to the annexation of the holy cities and Jeddah. That the very logic of state-building nurtured that tendency. I’m sure that you have a lot of Saudis, particularly in the older generation, who are furious with the new social reality, but I don’t see them regaining power ever again.
Now, when it comes to their economic future, and will they be able to transition to a post-petroleum economy, that’s an open question. I have no idea, because, to my mind, the future of the global economy is so up in the air because of technological changes and political changes. How oil-producing states will manage that, will they become big data centers, because they have all this energy? I have no idea.
COWEN: Yes, is my answer. I think they will.
COMMINS: Okay. Right.
COWEN: Yes.
COMMINS: That might be their new resource. I don’t know, Tyler. You probably have a much better sense of that than I do.
COWEN: What’s your fondest memory from Saudi Arabia?
COMMINS: I have to say that I was there during a time of high tension between the United States and Saudi Arabia. As I said, I arrived there September 9, 2001, and I was there until the end of February the next year. Even so, I was really amazed at the hospitality that I found. I was invited to many people’s homes and hometowns. It was just the hospitality that people showed to me. It got to the point that I had to start turning down invitations, because they stay up very late when they have company.
One, two o’clock in the morning, and I was trying to keep a daily work and research schedule. That’s my fondest memory. It really is. Tremendous warmth and hospitality from the people I met there.
COWEN: If one of our educated listeners wants to visit a place in Saudi, where would you send them? Say they’re going to land in Riyadh anyway, in the city.
COMMINS: Right. They’re going to land in Riyadh.
COWEN: Where should they go?
COMMINS: Where should they go? Where should they go? If you’re not a Muslim, you can’t go to Medina or Mecca.
COWEN: Right. They’re not a Muslim.
COMMINS: I would urge them to go to Jeddah and see what’s happening in Jeddah with the new cultural scene there. Yes.
COWEN: Before my last question, let me just plug your recent book again. Saudi Arabia: A Modern History, by David Commins. I enjoyed it very much. Learned a great deal from it. Final query. What will you do next?
COMMINS: I’m leaving for Prague in a week and a half. I’m teaching there next semester, for Dickinson College. My next writing project is actually going to be something completely different. It’s going to be about Arab travelers to the United States between 1876 and 1940. I chose 1940 as the terminal date because after World War II, the United States has the rise to globalism and its image and reputation in the Arab world becomes something very different. I’m going to be going to Buffalo, New York; Long Beach, California; El Paso, Texas, with Arab tourists in those 70 years and seeing what they saw. That’s it.
COWEN: Sounds great.
COMMINS: Should be refreshing.
COWEN: David, thank you very much.
COMMINS: Thanks, Tyler. It was a pleasure.
This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.