Prince quest to Americanize Saudi Vision 2030

With Brexit and Donald Trump hijacking the mainstream media, you might have missed stories about Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s quest to find someone who can realize his extravagant vision for the kingdom. And where to look better than the United States, an old-time buddy whose help is not still too costly for the opulent regime to disdain.

During his recent stay in the United States, Prince Mohammad reached out to any and all entities that would help him rid the throne of his father, King Salman, of dependence on oil money, and lay out a high-flying trajectory for the country.

Before you hear about the prince’s hunt for people who may be able to make his dreams of a social and economic overhaul come true in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, you should know more about the alternative the Saudi regime is mulling over, creating a $2-trillion sovereign wealth megafund.

Modernization or PR tactics

A brainchild of Prince Mohammad, the National Transformation Plan, aka Vision 2030, is Saudi Arabia’s nostrum for the looming end of the oil age. It is dubbed the most extensive and jarring economic shake-up of the country in decades, and includes plans to transfer ownership of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company, most popularly known just as Aramco, to the Public Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund that can be used as a war chest for non-oil investments beyond the Saudi borders.

The thirty-year old prince, who is also the head of Aramco’s top decision-making body, says the company’s value is between $2 trillion and $3 trillion, and believes that with Aramco, the country’s Public Investment Fund would eventually even dwarf the four biggest publicly traded companies of US – Apple, Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, and Alphabet.

“We think Aramco’s size is very huge, not just for the Saudi market but even for the international market,” he says.

But there’s always a but in such statements, whether or not the speaker verbalizes it. If Prince Mohammad’s figures are as ill-conceived as other Saudi actions, such as the country’s war on Yemen and support for Takfiris, Riyadh is going to have an arduous job justifying this one.

Oil market gurus have for years argued that the Saudi reserves are far less than what the Saud family advertises, an idea that gained ground when Wikileaks documents disclosed that Saudi reserves could be 40 percent less than what the world thinks.

Rejecting the data, Prince Mohammad has promised that the privatization of Aramco would end the "rumors" and increase transparency about the details of their reserves.

But the prince failed to elaborate on how Saudi Arabia, with almost three-quarters of the government’s budget originating from oil revenues, can oil its economy when it is still deeply vulnerable to crude crunch.

Who will change the kingdom, MIT or Facebook?

Prince Mohammad traveled to the US a few weeks after Riyadh announced the bold – but most probably unrealistic – vision with a clear goal in mind, proving its worth as the seven-decade-long ally of Washington and cajoling the Americans into a deeper engagement.

But who can believe in the vast changes in the Saudi social and economic structure when the monarchy is still chopping heads, not allowing women to drive, and promulgating the same Wahabi ideology held by the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Daesh?

The kingdom’s renaissance, as the prince calls it, needs a driving force, and boosting non-oil revenues with taxes needs time. This formula for change means the plans can only be implemented by the Saudi youth, who are more than half of the nation and most of them are jobless or have no expertise.

During their US tour, Mohammad bin Salman and his retinue of senior Saudi officials held several meetings with anyone that may help the regime seem genuinely eager to change the socioeconomic status of the country, including bigwigs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Khan Academy, etc.

Aramco Chairman Khalid al-Falih, who is also Saudi Arabia’s minister of energy, industry and mineral resources, held an event at the MIT with the university’s president L. Rafael Reif.

It may seem a little orchestrated, but Reif actually called Saudi “a country of the future.”

It is worthy to know that Aramco is a founding member of the MIT Energy Initiative, and Falih is an instrumental supporter of the Ibn Khaldun Fellowships at MIT, which provide support for female Saudi postdoctoral scholars.

According to al-Arabiya , Prince Mohammad, who is also the chairman of his own charity, Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Foundation (MISK), signed a cooperation deal with Bill Gates, the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Saudi outlet says the agreement includes training Saudis in the field of charity and helping develop the social work for charity in Saudi Arabia. Charity! Seriously?

The deputy crown prince also met Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Apple’s CEO Tim Cook. A number of memorandum of understandings was also inked with MIT, Microsoft, Dow Chemical Company, materials manufacturer 3M, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, Cisco Systems, and several others.

One of the other so-called achievements of the visit was the launch of the Prince Mohammad bin Salman College for Management and Entrepreneurship to develop business leaders and entrepreneurs, a partnership between King Abdullah Economic City in Riyadh, MISK, Global Babson College and Lockheed Martin Saudi Arabia.

Prince Mohammad also held meetings with President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and a number of Democratic and Republican senators as well as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

“The vision doesn’t need high oil prices. We can live without oil in 2020,” the brash Saudi prince says.

Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, “It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” Hopefully, you will see how the future unfolds for the Saudi monarchy but it is also common sense that when a regime -- like that of the Saudi Arabia -- wants to blaze the path of modernization and democracy, it is better it stops killing civilians in neighboring countries, supporting terrorists around the globe, and teaching an ideology that justifies bloodshed.

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