King Trump and the Arab Gulf Monarchies
When should we start reading American politics through the Middle East Studies literature?
Donald Trump stirred controversy yesterday by referring to himself as a “king” on his social media after intervening to kill a wildly popular, remarkably effective New York City congestion pricing program. He certainly has been trying to rule like a king since retaking power, ignoring Congress, the Constitution and the courts as he rules by executive order and strip mines state capacity with the wholesale firing of federal employees, shuttering of vital agencies, and criminalization of civil rights. He might not actually be a king, in the sense of dynastic succession or a mandate from heaven — though the brazenness of his assault on constitutional order suggests that he is probably hoping for a Supreme Court ruling to effectively make him one. At what point should we start asking scholars who specialize on Middle Eastern monarchs what to expect?
We didn’t plan such an irresistable hook for this week’s podcast conversation with Kristian Ulrichsen, one of the leading scholars on the Gulf monarchies, but that’s the world we live in these days. I had been thinking about Trump more in relation to Erdogan’s Turkey, a competitive authoritarian regime with the deck stacked to ensure that the ruling party always wins, the ruler for life bends the constitution to his whim through compliant courts and parliament, civil society faces constant legal and extralegal pressures, xenophobic manufactured panics over refugees keep supporters on board, and individual opposition leaders are constantly at risk of arrest or harrassment. But if Trump says he’s a king, let’s talk about kings.
This week, I talk to Kristian Coates Ulrichsen about his fantastic recent Hurst book, Centers of Power in the Arab Gulf States. Listen here:
There’s a large literature on Arab monarchies, of course, much of asking whether its institutional particularities or different legitimation makes monarchy systematically different from other autocratic forms. It’s one of those areas in comparative politics where Middle East scholars do have an advantage, unfortunately. That long-running debate came to a head a decade ago around the allegedly greater resilience of monarchy as a form of government compared with republics and military regimes. One of the very first issues of our POMEPS Studies journal surveyed this “Arab Monarchies Debate”, considering arguments for and against a monarchical advantage.
That debate remains unresolved, in my view. Supporters of the argument point to the inescapable fact all the Arab monarchies survived the Arab uprisings, while many non-monarchical regimes (Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Sudan and now Syria) did not. I tend to think that there are non-monarchical reasons for that, such as oil wealth, US military and political backing, and monarchical solidarity (the wealthiest of the monarchies intervened directly and indirectly to help their poorer kingly cousins in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Jordan and Morocco ride out the storm). There’s also survivorship bias, as plenty of monarchies never made it to 2011 — monarchies in countries such as Egypt, Iraq, and Libya were overthrown long ago. I’m cynical enough that I can’t help but note how flattering to the monarchs the ‘monarchical advantage’ thesis is — and how convenient to their own survival strategies by making their survival seem both inevitable and appropriate at a time when all regional regimes are under constant challenge. But that’s just me.
Ulrichen’s book doesn’t revolve around that debate, but aims instead to probe deeply into the actual mechanisms of rule in the monarchies — challenging some of the assumptions of the rentier state literature and puncturing some myths about the autonomy and absolute power of Arab monarchs. He focuses on the six Arab Gulf states - Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Drawing on the remarkably rich literature produced by both Western and Arab scholars in recent decades (his bibliography is a model in this regard, as he makes a point of citing a wide range of Gulf scholars), he digs deep to explore both the similarities and the differences in the ruling strategies of these monarchies. He convincingly argues against the idea that there is any singular effect of oil on politics, noting that there is “no binary division between the pre-oil and the oil era”, instead focusing on the long processes of change between the 1930s and 1970s which produced distinctive institutional configurations.
The Gulf monarchies do have a lot of similarities, of course, but the differences among them are real, both in the size, role and patterns of succession of royal families (as Michael Herb laid out years ago) and in the degree of autonomy they enjoy from society and from external forces. The extreme wealth and small citizen population of Qatar and the UAE create quite different conditions from the larger and more diverse Saudi Arabia and the less wealthy (though still living quite nicely) Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman. And the nature of governance in each country has changed significantly over time: Kuwait recently suspended its parliament after many years of being an exception in the Gulf; Abu Dhabi has been centralizing its power over the other emirates in the UAE; Mohammad bin Salman has been centralizing power and neutralizing competing power centers in Saudi Arabia.
Ulrichsen sees multiple competing power centers and avenues for political engagement in these monarchical systems. They are very much authoritarian, of course, and most of them are increasingly draconian in their repression of potential challengers. But he warns against seeing them as monolithic, or about discounting the importance of public opinion and competing power centers. His admirably clear account shows how these systems were shaped not by “the passive receipt of oil rents but rather the active decisions on how and for what ends to use them.” Those decisions created path dependencies which shaped each of the Gulf monarchies in distinctive directions. With no illusions about the reality of autocracy, he offers a detailed account of the many informal and formal mechanisms by which societal power centers could consult with the monarchies, from petitions to diwaniyas to occasional elections.
His observations about patrimonial rule in these systems does make for interesting reading in the context of Trump: “power was centralized in a ‘state’ which essentially was a set of institutions whose core ministries functioned as a bureaucratic outgrowth of ruling family control.” That sounds close to what the Trump team currently eviscerating the American state has in mind — not a Weberian state of independent, non-partisan bureaucrats at the service of whatever leaders come to office, but a set of people, tools and rules loyal only to himself for use in the advancement of his personal self-interest. Ulrichsen notes that in this system, “proximity to the ruler was vital, and royal advisors became significant gatekeepers.” Think about the role Mar-A-Lago plays in shaping who Trump sees or who Trump talks to on the phone, and the whole array of pay-to-play corruption which surrounds everything he does. It’s easy to see Elon Musk as this kind of royal advisor — not because of any formal institutional role but because of his proximity to and public backing from the ‘king’.
To be clear, I don’t actually think that it makes sense to analyze Trump as a monarch. At least not yet. I still think Erdogan is a better comparison. But it always struck me that Trump felt far more comfortable in the world of kings and princes than most other American politicians (or academics, for that matter - we aren’t invited to those parties). Even before becoming president, he moved in those circles and fit in well with an ultra-wealthy world of impunity, corruption, personalistic power, and contempt for those not inside those elite circles. Trump may not be planning a dynastic succession (yet), and the ‘king’ remark likely remains more of a provocation than a real aspiration (at this point). But his actions over the last month - from the remaking of the bureaucracy to the brazen challenge to both Congress and the courts — make it less of a joke than it should be.
As they say, every time a Middle East academic wishes for more public relevance, a monkey’s finger curls…