Central to Saudi Arabia’s challenges is its dependence on oil exports. “We will not allow our country ever to be at the mercy of commodity price volatility or external markets,” says MBS. Yet he also declares that Saudi Arabia has “a case of addiction to oil.” To explain the new policies, he turns to history and his grandfather. “King Abdul Aziz and the men who worked with him,” he says, had “established the kingdom without depending on oil, and they ran this state without oil, and lived in this state without oil.”3 That was certainly true. And yet it was oil, along with Mecca and Islam, that
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