Seven centuries ago, 14th-century North African historian Ibn Khaldun posed a timeless observation on dynastic rule in his seminal work *The Muqaddimah*: great powers often collapse after three generations when ruling lines fail to produce capable, steady leaders. Today, that observation hangs over the House of Saud, as questions grow over whether Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has eroded the very dynasty he was positioned to strengthen and secure.
The kingdom now faces converging pressures from both domestic discontent and international instability, with nearly all of the crown prince’s core policy bets unraveling simultaneously. His central strategic gambles – defeating the Houthi movement to install a pro-Saudi government in neighboring Yemen, overhauling Saudi Arabia’s oil-dependent economy through his ambitious Vision 2030 agenda, and relying on a Donald Trump-aligned United States as a steadied long-term ally – have all fallen short of their promised outcomes.
Growing circles of critics both inside and outside the kingdom argue that the only path forward to avoid catastrophe is a transfer of power: replacing Prince Mohammed with a more viable successor, restructuring the kingdom’s failed diplomatic and economic frameworks, and implementing long-delayed democratic governance reforms. Without such changes, observers warn the kingdom could fragment into rival fiefdoms controlled by competing royal factions, dissolving the unified Saudi state that has existed for nearly a century.
External powers eager to access Saudi Arabia’s unmatched energy and mineral wealth – which includes not only the world’s largest proven fossil fuel reserves, but also an estimated 114 million tonnes of rare earth minerals and uranium-bearing ore – stand ready to exploit any internal fragmentation, analysts warn.
Having failed to achieve its strategic goals in Iran, some geopolitical analysts argue Saudi Arabia has become the next, far more vulnerable target for external interference. This assessment is reinforced by the refusal of former U.S. President Donald Trump and Western powers to step up robust support for Prince Mohammed against ongoing Houthi attacks, they add.
Since consolidating de facto power, critics argue Prince Mohammed has done more harm than good for Saudi Arabia’s long-term stability. Most critically, he has accumulated a wide network of enemies both at home and abroad while failing to deliver on his core promise of securing the kingdom. Today, Saudi Arabia spends roughly $83 billion annually on its military, equal to 6.5% of its total GDP and approximately 3% of global military spending. In 2015, when Prince Mohammed served as defense minister, that figure reached 13% of GDP – one of the highest military burdens in the world.
The starkest proof of the kingdom’s vulnerability came in an October 10 Houthi missile strike on Riyadh’s main international airport, which killed at least 13 people and undermined global confidence in Saudi Arabia’s ability to protect critical infrastructure and keep international visitors safe.
It was that same 2015, under Prince Mohammed’s leadership, that Saudi Arabia launched a massive military campaign against Houthi-controlled northern Yemen in coordination with the United Arab Emirates. What was billed as a quick, decisive operation dragged on for eight devastating years. A brutal air bombardment campaign and total blockade created catastrophic shortages of food and medicine, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 700,000 Yemeni civilians, according to global humanitarian estimates.
In total, Riyadh has poured roughly $200 billion into the Yemen conflict, yet it has failed to defeat a low-budget, guerrilla-style adversary whose entire military budget amounts to less than $7 billion. Critics explain this lopsided failure by arguing that much of Saudi Arabia’s military spending has been directed not at securing national borders, but at entrenching Prince Mohammed’s hold on power and suppressing domestic rivals.
Beyond the costly quagmire in Yemen, critics argue the crown prince has squandered billions of dollars of the kingdom’s sovereign wealth on ill-conceived, overambitious economic projects tied to his Vision 2030 plan, which was designed to wean Saudi Arabia off its dependence on oil exports. Billions alone have been spent on international consultancy fees to market the vague, sweeping plan, observers note.
Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident Saudi journalist murdered and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, warned in his reporting that if these massive megaprojects failed, Saudi Arabia could eventually slip into becoming one of the poorest countries in the Middle East.
That warning has gained new traction following a leaked Wall Street Journal audit of NEOM, Prince Mohammed’s flagship $500 billion smart city megaproject launched in 2017 in Tabuk Province. The audit found the project is effectively bankrupt, with the crown prince shifting available funding away from its centerpiece development – The Line, a planned 170-kilometer car-free linear city – to cover infrastructure costs for the 2030 World Expo and 2034 FIFA World Cup. Shuttering the partially built project would cost the Saudi government up to $16 billion in write-downs, the report found.
Recent regional conflicts have compounded these economic woes. The U.S.-Israeli escalation against Iran and associated disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz have hit Saudi oil exports particularly hard. Later blockades of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and Houthi and Iraqi militia attacks on Saudi Arabia’s critical East-West oil pipeline have further blocked export routes, draining the kingdom’s single largest source of revenue.
Where the International Monetary Fund initially projected the Saudi economy would grow 4% in 2026, updated projections now point to a 3.3% contraction this year.
Amid rising security threats, separate Wall Street Journal reporting notes that Prince Mohammed frequently rotates his residence between multiple palaces and underground bunkers, a precaution widely interpreted as a measure to avoid assassination attempts by drone. While Houthi forces have not yet targeted his specific location, domestic royal rivals and internal opponents could easily do so, observers warn.
Experts point to historical precedent for regicide within the House of Saud: King Faisal, widely considered one of the dynasty’s most capable and effective monarchs, was assassinated by a member of his own family in 1975, with longstanding rumors of foreign involvement in the plot.
For decades, the House of Saud followed a traditional horizontal system of succession, passing power from brother to brother among the sons of the kingdom’s founder, Ibn Saud, rather than vertically from father to son. That longstanding norm was broken in 2017, when Prince Mohammed, backed by his father King Salman, orchestrated a de facto palace coup to sideline the then-designated successor, former Interior Minister Mohammed bin Nayef, who remains under house arrest to this day.
Critics view the 2017 shakeup as a blatant power grab, and many suspect the move could not have happened without at least tacit backing from the United States – a particularly bitter irony given that Prince Mohammed accused the detained princes of maintaining contacts with foreign powers to stage a coup. What concessions Prince Mohammed may have offered Washington in exchange for its backing remains undisclosed, but analysts widely note that U.S. diplomatic support for such power plays rarely comes without strings attached.
To be fair, Prince Mohammed did shift toward more pragmatic diplomacy in 2021, ending the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar and opening exploratory talks for a peace deal with the Houthis. Before the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel that ignited the ongoing Gaza war, there were unconfirmed reports of a U.S.-brokered deal that would have seen Saudi Arabia formally recognize Israel in exchange for U.S. security guarantees. That deal is now completely off the table amid the ongoing regional war escalation centered on Iran.
While Vision 2030 was marketed as a plan to end Saudi Arabia’s dependence on oil, critics argue Prince Mohammed’s policies have only worsened economic strains, increased Riyadh’s reliance on fossil fuel revenue, and weakened national security. Once counted among the world’s wealthiest nations, Saudi Arabia is now in clear, if not accelerating, decline, with the crown prince’s policies driving the kingdom deeper into sovereign debt.
As Houthi attacks put the kingdom under unprecedented pressure, no Western power has stepped forward to offer meaningful military or political support. Only a handful of Muslim-majority nations have offered backing, but these states operate with competing strategic interests that could lead to infighting, analysts warn, creating a power vacuum that advances the goal of expanding Israeli influence across the Middle East.
Nearly 65% of Saudi citizens are under the age of 27, and observers argue this young majority must look past the crown prince’s rhetorical promises of “freedom” and “modernization” to ask a simple, critical question: do his policies serve the Saudi people, or only his hold on personal power? Never in the kingdom’s modern history has Saudi Arabia faced such clear risks of collapse from internal fragmentation, while also facing intensifying pressure from external powers eager to exploit its weakness.