David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. 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.

Thank you. It's nice to be here.

I have so many questions about Saudi. I mean, 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?

Well, 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. And that's the best case I can make.

Could the Saudi nation have been built without it?

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 Wahhabism purported to be, was essential for state-building in that part of Arabia in the 1700s.

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?

Right. So it is a theological position on how do you define belief. The teachings of the founder of this school of thought, Muhammad bin 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. And therefore, it has an activist impulse towards 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. So 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.

Now Mecca is open to all Muslims, right?

Right.

And how is that then compatible with Wahhabism, or is it just a contradiction that everyone lives with?

Well, it is a contradiction. And 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. And that was, you know, 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. So he actually had a compromise, you would say. On strict Wahhabi doctrine.

And the Shiite Muslims in the eastern provinces, they're just tolerated? Or there's discrimination? Or what's their legal status?

Well, 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.

But just today, you know, 2025.

Today. Well, 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's true because we really don't hear what I regard as reliable information about conditions in Saudi Arabia regarding recent currents of dissent. They've all been silenced.

But you could have an LLM read anonymous posts on social media, right?

You could. You could. I haven't seen that. I haven't seen that. So 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. But I just don't know that. I don't know that as a fact.

Let's say you're a Sunni cleric from Egypt or Iraq. Traditional Sunni establishment. What would be your critique of Wahhabism?

That it is an eccentric, erroneous interpretation of Muslim religious sources, and that it was the product of poorly educated, ambitious preacher from the 1700s. That's what they would say.

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?

They would say it's misreading the Quran to get into the details. And 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 in its position on theology that belief requires action. Not just verbal affirmation and individual conduct.

And 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.

Well, I don't know that the Saudi establishment does dislike Palestinians.

Well, when people talk to me, this is completely anecdotal, but they seem highly skeptical about the Palestinians. Would be my sense relative to, say, many other Arab groups.

Well, this might be true of the current government, maybe. I really don't know. I'm not part of this conversation.

Okay.

I guess my hunch is that any critical attitude towards 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, and technological and military spheres. And 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.

Now, as you know, the senior religious establishment, it's largely Najdis, right? Why does that matter? What's the historical significance of that? Right.

So Najd is the region of Central Arabia. Riyadh is currently the capital. The first Saudi empire had a capital nearby called Diriyah. And Najd 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 Najd for centuries. And 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 consider true belief, began in Najd and was very strongly identified with the towns of Najd ever since the late 1700s.

Would I be correct in inferring that some of the least cosmopolitan parts of Saudi Arabia built the Saudi state?

Yes, that is correct. That is correct. In terms of, if you think of the 1700s and 1800s, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf coast of Arabia were the most cosmopolitan parts of Arabia.

And they're richer too, right? Like Jeddah is a much more advanced city than Riyadh at the time.

Well, much more, somewhat more advanced. Yeah, it is more advanced. It is more cosmopolitan than Najd. And there is the kind of regional identity in Hejaz, that is the Red Sea coast where the holy cities in Jeddah are located, And the townspeople there tended to look upon Najd as a less advanced part of Arabia. But again, that's a very recent historical development.

And 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.

Right. Well, if you take Jeddah, Mecca, Medina, that region of Arabia known as Hejaz had always been under the rule of other Muslim empires. And 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 7th and early 8th centuries, all the way until the Ottoman Empire, Muslim dynasties outside Arabia coveted control of that region, and they were just more powerful than local resources could generate. So Hijaz was always, if you would, a 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. And it was part of the Indian Ocean trade between Iraq and India. But the population there was always, it seems, well, always, for the last 1,000 years has been dominated by Bedouin tribesmen. There was a brief Ismaili Shiite republic, if you might say, in that part of Arabia in medieval times. But 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.

Physically, how do they manage that? Water's a problem. A lot of transport is by camel. There's no real rail system, right?

Right.

How is it they do it? What gets sent where to do what?

Right. 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 outskirts of Riyadh, it took them 30 years to conquer Riyadh. 30 years. So 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. And I think that's an interesting hypothesis, but the evidence for that is pretty thin. So 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 Najd. And to support the Saudis when they were able to get the upper hand over a local ruling family. So yeah, I attribute the success of Saudi power to persistence in leadership and having that religious commonality that some people just did buy into this teaching.

How much is there ever de facto Ottoman rule over parts of Saudi?

Well, almost never. There was an Ottoman invasion that destroyed the very first Saudi empire from 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. But communications from Western Arabia to Central Arabia is so difficult and harsh that it was too difficult to maintain an occupation there. And so after a few years, the Ottomans pulled out.

So there's not even tribute after those years?

No, you do get tribute, it seems, starting in the 1840s after a second Ottoman invasion. And there are reports of tribute. I have not really seen a very year-by-year account of when the Saudis rendered tribute and when they withheld tribute. But there is some moments when they paid tribute. And 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 have been a few moments, but it was never really part of the Ottoman sphere.

And no real Ottoman cultural traces? No.

No, not in Central Arabia. You have that in Eastern Arabia, and you have that in Hijaz for sure, very strong Ottoman traces, but not in Central Arabia.

Fast forward to more recent times, 1979, the Grand Mosque in Mecca is seized. Who does it and why?

Right, so this is carried out by a band that broke off from a puritanical band that had broken off from mainstream Saudi society. So this group is, they're called the Salafi group, but 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, 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, that supposedly they would only carry bags of coins weighing 20 pounds instead of carrying paper currency with them. And 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. And then—

And they're not Wahhabis or they are Wahhabis?

Theologically, they are definitely Wahhabis and 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. And the leader of that breakaway faction was a man named Juhaiman al-Otaibi. And Juhaiman 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. And in late 1978, there was an attempt to arrest him. He was tipped off, seems, by a relative in the police, and he escaped and 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. And they came to believe that one member of their breakaway faction was indeed the Mahdi, or the Muslim Messiah. And they believed that November 20th, 1979 was the day that the Muslim Messiah would appear. And that was really the thinking behind the takeover of the mosque in Mecca. It was a millenarian movement. And in a way, and it was a phenomenon that Wahhabism had never generated before, this kind of millenarianism. It was very much more like a Da'wa Quraysh movement than a mainstream evangelical movement.

And is that still a traumatic event for Saudi rulers, or it's mostly forgotten?

Well, I think Saudi rulers like to say that their country had what they call a moderate form of Islam until 1979. And then in response to that traumatic moment in Mecca, the Saudi government adopted the agenda of extremists, what they call extremist Muslims. And so 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. So they like to point to 1979 as a turning point, and 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.

Now, I know it's hard to tell in autocratic societies, but how complete has Saudi nation-building been? So 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?

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 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. So yeah, I do think that they are a nation. I think that if by some totally unexpected event, which of course unexpected events happen, that 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. But 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.

Now, the greater stability of many of the Gulf states, not just Saudi, to me is quite striking as an outsider. If you were to boil that down, to an abstract an explanation as possible. To what do you attribute that? Again, this is not only Saudi, but a number of other places.

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. And what allowed the smaller Gulf states to remain independent was a Western strategic intervention. The British established a truce, if you will, in the Persian Gulf in the early 1800s. And 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 and the Nixon administration didn't think the American public would go for a new strategic commitment at that time. So of course the United States did become strategically committed to the Gulf after the Iranian Revolution and after the Iran-Iraq War. But I would say what accounts for the stability of these small principalities is fear of annexation by larger neighbors.

Why is Riyadh so ugly as a city?

I'm from Los Angeles, Tyler. I take exception to that.

I love Los Angeles. I think it's beautiful.

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 the early 1980s, and I really loved Damascus because it was really a walkable city. But Riyadh does have great modern architecture. So yeah, I wouldn't say it's ugly. That's not my view.

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? Or how do you model that?

I do see it as a mix of both. I think that, you know, the term of critics is sportswashing, right? You've probably heard that term. Like, yes. Yeah. So, you know, Qatar is hosting the World Cup and Saudi Arabia's sort of takeover of the PGA. People look at that as an attempt to whitewash their image by hosting prestigious global sporting events. So 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 2 days before 9/11. And I was living downtown in an apartment building, 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 and 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. So 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.

Now, if you drive around North Macedonia, you'll see some number of Saudi-funded mosques, and 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, right? Or they want to raise their status in the Islamic world?

Well, I see that in at least 3 different frames. One frame is that Islam or Christianity is a proselytizing religion. And Muslims have 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. And it was a total failure at proselytizing. The teachings of Wahhabism were rejected completely by almost every Muslim society that encountered it. For, well, from the 1740s until probably the late 1800s. But they never stopped trying. And so I think that there's that. And then the third is that for the Saudi monarchy, it is a form of soft power. So democracy promotion for the United States, exporting communism for Fidel, marketing Wahhabism for Riyadh.

Do they get soft power from it?

I think they do. I think they do. And my sense is that the scholarship on Saudi Wahhabi soft power is beginning to sharpen the focus on particular case studies in Nigeria, in Indonesia, in Central Asia. And the finding so far is that the Wahhabis are in competition with other Muslim religious tendencies from Iran. From Turkey, even from Kuwait. So just as Catholic and Protestant missionaries competed around the world for converts to what they regarded as true Christianity, the Wahhabis are competing. Of course, they've had a ton of money behind their proselytizing from the, I would say, from the early 1980s until about 2015. And it seems that King Salman has really put the lid on that. And 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.

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?

Well, I do think that the Saudis have rebranded themselves as Salafis, which has more— So Wahhabism has an association with Saudi Arabia. And if they call themselves Salafis, which says that they are following the ways of the founding fathers, right? So 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 has a very high profile, but I don't know that it's dominant, and I don't really know how to measure that. I haven't seen public opinion polls, for instance, that asked 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 busybody 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 Muslim, but I've lived in several Muslim countries. Most Muslims I've met regard Salafis as, you know, kind of busybodies and intrusive and sort 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.

To what extent should I think of Saudi as a nation of immigrants? As you know, bin Laden family has roots in Yemen. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who I think is still number 2 owner at Twitter, has Armenian and Lebanese descent. Overall, how many of the Saudis are actually Saudi in origin?

I have no idea. I'll just say that. But that also tells you something. So if you take away the one quarter of the population that are foreign workers, all right, of the 75% that remain, I would say probably a very small number are descended from people outside Arabia. Because the, certainly the royals and wealthy Arabian families in general had a long history of marrying or having children with slaves. And that was legal until the early 1960s. So it doesn't seem that the majority of, or even close to a majority of Arabs owned slaves in Arabia over the centuries. It was a small number of, you know, better-off Arabs. But, you know, in terms of immigrants, you know, 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, you know, 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, from Java, from Bukhara in Central Asia. So, but, you know, Central Arabia, the Saudi homeland, very little, very little.

But one reads of these families who maybe came over from Yemen. They're then in Saudi. They whitewash the origins a bit, pretend they're longstanding Saudis. Is that common?

Well, it's certainly, it's pretty common if you're from a poorer country. And you want to have the benefits of Saudi citizenship. But yeah, 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.

What's the best food in Saudi Arabia?

Well, I had Najdi food and I didn't care for it. It was camel and wheat grain, you know, 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. But I don't know the culinary traditions of Hijaz or of other parts of Arabia. I just know the Najdi culinary tradition and it was, you know, pretty basic. Pretty basic.

And in Jeddah, is the food more, I don't know, Red Sea, more Ethiopian, more Yemeni, or?

I was only in Yemen, Jeddah, for a weekend. I'm not familiar with Jeddah to say.

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?

Well, my understanding is that it's not going all that well, that the intention was to provide sort of a global-level postgraduate education in STEM, and most of the students are foreign students.

The main problem is just the demand side? Saudis don't want to go there?

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-12 education there. 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. And 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, which is It's like their Texas A&M. It is an excellent university. And from there, they tend to go to American graduate schools and then come back and work in the petroleum engineering fields. But it just seems that the K-12 level has not been solved much. I mean, here we are in the United States talking about that, right?

Yeah, but what's the main barrier to improving the Saudi system? Because they do have money, right?

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, they just don't have a cadre of teachers that they can put into the schools and replace people who are there already.

What is the chance Qatar survives as an independent nation, say 50 years from now? Like, I would bet against that, but do you have an opinion?

I don't have an opinion. Why would you bet against it?

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.

That's a reasonable scenario. That's a reasonable scenario. I mean, you know, one of the big questions— I won't be around for it— 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? And 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.

Is the UAE stable? So 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.

Right. Right. Well, that would be— 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, we would be swallowed up probably by Oman or Saudi Arabia. I mean, I think they stick together because of fear of annexation and then subjugation to a neighbor, one or another neighbor. And I think the UAE is stable. Yeah, I don't see any threat to the UAE on the horizon, but I could be blind to that.

Do you think of Bahrain and Yemen as historically the most advanced or cosmopolitan parts of that region of the world?

Well, 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. And Yemen's future as sort of a cohesive country is a big question mark. It seems to me that the strong secessionist movement in the south— Bahrain, will probably be, as long as there's 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 a Western strategic interest in the Persian Gulf that goes back to about 1820, yeah, it would change everything. It would change everything. It did change everything in 1820 when the British exercised gunboat diplomacy to suppress sort of low-level warfare. They called it piracy. So here we are 200 years on, still sort of an outpost of Western security interests.

And why is Yemen so unstable when the rest of the region looks really quite stable?

Well, 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. And that political compromise, of course, has been exploded by a number of different factors, among which is, you know, 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. And 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. So it's a lot like Lebanon was for 15 years from 1975 to 1990.

And they never had this period of nation-building analogous to what the Saudis had? From the Najdis?

No, they didn't really. They didn't really. Yemen, you know, 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. They haven't had that. And because of the weakness of the state, you know, 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.

Is there still any residual sense of cultural inferiority in Saudi vis-à-vis Yemen, which has a much grander civilizational tradition? Right?

Right.

It's evident when you go there. Sure. Wow, this is amazing. And you're in Saudi and it's like, here's some new buildings.

Well, they're very proud of the new buildings, and it's a little bit like the United States and Europe. Right? People come to the United States from Europe and they think it's a fabulous country, but we don't really have, you know, medieval cities. So you would say that Europe has a much deeper, richer cultural history. The United States is a great commercial and military power, producer of popular culture. But I think Europeans might feel that, you know, the United States is still parvenu on the world stage. Maybe that's how they look at it.

How serious are the Saudis about building a wall or really finishing a wall on the border with Yemen?

Well, it's going to take them a long time to achieve that. But if they want to—

But do they want to do it?

Well, some of them certainly do. It would enhance their security against smuggling. I mean, in the early 2000s, there was a lot of weapons 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 it was, it was a lot of families were worried about them.

I hear there is, right? Yeah, I hear there is.

I hear there is a topic of conversation in 2001, 2002 when I was there, and, you know, conversations about, you know, teenage or somewhat older children having to go to rehab. And 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. I mean, the world does seem to be moving in the direction of greater surveillance capabilities by states. So I don't think it's as far-fetched as it was 10 years ago. But yeah, to the extent that the monarchies seek certainty, for suppressing any challenge, yeah, they might build a wall. They might.

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?

Did they screw it up? Well, I don't know if they screwed it 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 the, what they regard as strategic threat, than pursue the elimination of a strategic threat, which seems to have backfired for them.

Now, as you know, in 1962, Egypt is bombing parts of Yemen. They have some involvement in that war. And 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?

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. And 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.

Is there still a meaningful historical memory of the 1934 Saudi-Yemen border war, or is that just forgotten?

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. And there's a long tradition of trade across that border. When you try to control that trade, it becomes smuggling. But that line was impose on a territory where people on both sides were accustomed to dealing with each other. It'd be like building a wall between Pennsylvania and Maryland. So, you know, people between Baltimore and York, between Frederick and Gettysburg would find that appalling. But—

And how would you model what you think the Houthis want? What's their strategy or their game, so to speak?

That's a great question. And 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. But right now, it seems that they do not want to have any power sharing in the part of the country that they control. And 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. So 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. But I don't— to my mind, they don't really have a clear strategic goal other than staying in power where they are.

How optimistic are you about Saudi Arabia?

Optimistic? Well, I have to say that I think that for many Saudis, the opening of social freedoms is wonderful. And I know that many Saudis are extremely happy to have the religious police off their backs, that they don't have to close stores 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. And, you know, they're free to take creative initiatives in music, in theater, in film, in literature in a way that they never have been. And in that regard, I do think that, you know, the changes since 2015 for many Saudis have made their lives a lot better.

How deeply rooted or sustainable do you think that is?

I think that's very deep.

You said yourself it's never been the case before.

I think it's very deep. I really do believe that the country has turned away from that puritanical religious legacy. And I do believe that. And 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 in Jeddah. And that the very logic of state-building nurtured that tendency. And yeah, 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. And 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 and how oil-producing states will manage that. Will they become big data centers because they have all this energy? I have no idea.

Yes is my answer. I think they will. Okay, right.

And that might be their new resource. So I don't know, Tyler. You probably have a much better sense of that than I do.

What's your fondest memory from Saudi Arabia?

Well, I have to say that, you know, I was there during a time of high tension between the United States and Saudi Arabia. As I said, I arrived there September 9th, 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. And I was invited to many people's homes and hometowns. And 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, 1, 2 o'clock in the morning. And I was trying to keep a daily work and research schedule. So that's my fondest memory. It really is, you know, tremendous warmth and hospitality. From the people I met there.

If one of our educated listeners wants to visit a place in Saudi, where would you send them? So say they're going to land in Riyadh.

Right. They're going to land in Riyadh.

The big city, but it doesn't count. Where should they go?

Where should they go? Well, if you're not a Muslim, you can't go to Medina or Mecca.

Right. So they're not a Muslim.

I would urge them to go to Jeddah and see what's happening in Jeddah with the new cultural scene there. Yeah.

Before my last question, let me just plug your recent book again, Saudi Arabia: A Modern History by David Cummins. I enjoyed it very much, learned a great deal from it. Final query, what will you do next?

Well, I'm leaving for Prague in a week and a half, and I'm teaching there next semester for Dickinson College. But 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. And I chose 1940 as the terminal date because after World War II, the United States has the rise of globalism and its image and reputation in the Arab world becomes something very different. So 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. Should be refreshing.

Sounds great. David, thank you very much.

Thanks, Tyler. It's a pleasure.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen, and the show is @CowenConvo. Until next time. Please keep listening and learning.