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Part ONE of the article is here.
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The monarchies’ external dilemma
Unfortunately for the monarch, the balancing and divide and rule tactics that reduce his domestic vulnerability increases his vulnerability to external centralising powers. Monarchs have to ‘omnibalance’ between these offsetting and competing external and internal needs.
This is so because fragmenting security forces comes at the expense of offensive capabilities against an external threat. According to Huntington, this trade-off hardly posed a problem. To the contrary, he asserted ‘the principle threat to the stability of a traditional society [in Third World states] comes not from invasion by foreign armies but from the invasion of foreign ideas.
External alliances and the persistence of monarchies in the Middle East
To cope with this dilemma, many rulers, particularly monarchies and other Third World states have preferred to enter into enduring alliances with outside powers.
As such, they serve as excellent examples of what Steven David defined as omnibalancing behavior in which ‘leaders consider internal and external threats to the leadership, and, as a result, it fundamentally alters our understanding of why Third World leaders align as they do [. . .]’.68
At first, the European powers bestowed such protection principally on the Gulf principalities. Later the US allied with the monarchies despite the deep seated ideological differences stemming from their radically different regimes.69
Two case studies
A brief description of these alliances in the cases of Saudi Arabia and Morocco bear this out.
Case one - The US and Saudi Arabia are mirror images of each other
Saudi Arabia emerged to turn the theocratic idea into monarchic reality. [...]
An early indication of US’ resolve to maintain the Saudi regime may be seen in the crisis that brewed between Saudi Arabia and Egypt over the Yemen Arab Republic.71 The latter came into being after ‘free officers’ headed by Abdullah al-Sallam, a member of the royal guard, overthrew Imam Muhammad al-Badr to form a revolutionary republic on 26 September 1962.
Jamal Abdul Nasser, who had probably aided the revolutionaries to overthrow the Imam, quickly committed
Egyptian troops to protect the fledgling republic against the royalist opposition who was backed by both Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Both the latter countries, having been the targets of vitriolic attacks at the time by the Egyptian controlled media, felt, not unreasonably, that Egypt was casting them for a similar fate unless
it was checked in Yemen. Egypt, by contrast, eagerly sought a decisive victory in the struggle after its failure to prevent a coup in Syria that dissolved the United Arab Republic a year previously.
The Kennedy administration accepted at face value Saudi Arabia and Jordan’s assessment that Nasser posed a grave danger to them but balked at the idea that their fates were to be decided by the consolidation
of the Yemeni Arab Republic. Kennedy, therefore, presented a plan that called for immediate cessation of external support to the royalists, phased withdrawal of Egyptian troops and assurances from both the YAR and Egypt that they would maintain correct relations with Yemen’s neighbours in return of American recognition of the new republic. Prince Faisal, the real ruler of the kingdom expressed his anger at the plan’s contents. He had to acknowledge, however, that it was only announced after ‘making it obvious by naval and air visits to Saudi Arabia, (already promised by Kennedy to Faisal), that the independence and territorial integrity of the kingdom was vital and a long-established interest of the US.’72
Indeed, when the Egyptian air-force began attacking Saudi territory in February 1963, the US promptly assured the Saudis of a US military presence, provided that Faisal cease completely his support for the royalists.73 This commitment was made good in July 1963 when US Airforce flights deterred a possible Egyptian invasion.74
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Case two - Morocco
Though it would be far-fetched to claim that Morocco’s existence has been threatened by an outside power, its neighbour, Algeria, has been a potential threat. This was particularly true during the oil boom years in the decade following the 1973 war when large inflows of revenue coupled by warm ties with the Soviets changed the local balance of power in favour of Algeria compared to its oil-poor and financially-constrained neighbour. [...]
Deteriorating relations between Algeria and Morocco in the course of the 1970s coincided with increasing US concerns over the strategic placement and wellbeing of Morocco in the face of increasing Soviet involvement in Africa after the breakup of the Portuguese Empire.
Two years after Algeria allowed the Soviets landing and refuelling for its planes in support of the MPLA in Angola in 1975, the Moroccans responded by permitting US planes to refuel in support of pro-Mobutu forces in Zaire.82
Zunes attributes US support for Morocco’s territorial aggrandisement in southern Sahara, which contrasted sharply with the positions of other Western allies, to the strategic importance Morocco possessed in the eyes of key American decision-makers in the 1970s and 1980s. It was hardly surprising then that between 1950–1986, Morocco was the second largest recipient of aid in the Arab Middle East and in Africa.84
But not only US support
In neither of these cases, nor indeed regarding the other monarchies, did US support assure these regimes’ existence.
The dilemma requires two policies – pluralisation, either of society or the armed forces, and maintaining an alliance with the US. This indeed is the lesson of the Shah’s downfall. He allied with the US but embarked on reforms aimed at transforming Iran into a uniform society rather than maintaining its plural traditional character.85
Why in the Middle East
Explaining monarchial survival as a solution to the external-internal security trade-off, also explains why most of the monarchies that did survive, are located in the Middle East.
Few states possess the luxury of super power protection as do Middle East monarchies. The protection accorded by the US is a scarce public good. It is expensive to deliver, the costs of which are typically under considerable domestic scrutiny.
It is therefore limited to states in areas regarded vital to US strategic interests. This is perhaps why absolute monarchies continue to exist only in the Middle East where 70 per cent of proven oil reserves are to be found.86
All the surviving monarchies are regarded as being important to the US national security interests. Six of them are oil-rich states whose oil is vital both for Europe and the US.87
Less important, though significant, have been the massive arm purchases of US military arms and equipment these states have made.88
Conclusion
From the study of the persistence of monarchies in the Middle East, it is clear that Huntington captured the domestic, and in retrospect, ‘easy’ side of the dilemma.
He posited that the monarch by withdrawing support from the traditional elements and by generating a new middle class through his reforms, would result in across-the board opposition to his rule. However, through policies of maintaining and reinforcing social religious and political pluralism, would-be reformers became
just one more group against which the monarch could balance other forces.
Playing the arbiter between liberal and fundamentalist groups has become an increasingly salient phenomenon in the past decade. Thus, by balancing and divide-and-rule strategies, monarchs were successful at fending off potential reformers and solved the internal dilemma, which Huntington identified.
Yet both Huntington and others overlooked the larger dilemma these types of domestic solutions created, namely, increasing external vulnerability to neighbouring centralising states. As monarchs and other Third World states such as Lebanon, divided and balanced society, their political forces, and frequently their
armed forces, they became prey to more centralised neighbours.
Successful monarchs and leaders of other Third World states have ‘omnibalanced’ in order to cope with this trade-off between internal and external vulnerabilities. If they did not play this two-level game wisely they lost their crown as the Iranian Shah learned the hard way.
The history of the Yemeni dynasty mght illustrate the costs of the inability to play the two-level game from the other direction. The dynasty, because it could not count on the protection of powerful outside protectors like the US,had attempted to bandwagon with Egypt in forming the United Arab States, in 1958,to little avail.89 Instead, it succumbed to a revolutionary leadership backed by Nasser’s Egypt in September 1962.
Unfortunately, (for the monarchies that is), the opportunity to play the omnibalancing game is a privilege not a birth right, which not all monarchies in the past, possessed. Yemen, oil poor at the time, could not attract the support of a strong outside power even if it wanted.
The surviving monarchies, however, because of either strategic location (Morocco and Jordan), oil wealth, or both (Saudi Arabia), had the opportunity to omnibalance and made the most of that opportunity in ensuring their survival.
END of partt TWO
