Mithras Yekanoglu

by Mithras Yekanoglu

The rise of Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has been branded as a generational leap a bold detour from the kingdom’s orthodoxies, and a declaration that Saudi Arabia would no longer be a passive pillar of oil diplomacy but an active designer of regional and global futures; yet beneath the optics of “Vision 2030,” the concerts, the megacities and the performative progressivism lies a deeper algorithm one that reveals not transformation but overwriting not institutional evolution but centralized scripting of a controlled fiction, wherein every symbol of modernization masks a deeper structural fragility that remains unsolved, unspoken and unacknowledged. MBS’s claim to visionary leadership rests on his promise to diversify the economy, modernize society and prepare the kingdom for a post oil world but what is rarely examined is how these ambitions are constructed through an architecture of hypercentralization, where state, identity, economy and narrative are all funneled into the person of the Crown Prince creating a governance model that mimics innovation while depending entirely on personalized autocracy and in this model, success is not systemic, it is performative, dependent on the continuation of one man’s will and the global system’s temporary willingness to accept it as a symbol of stability.

The Vision 2030 doctrine itself, though dressed in the language of reform, functions as a nationalized branding exercise, designed more to capture foreign investment, Western admiration and regional awe than to create a sustainable internal transformation and its projects NEOM, The Line, Red Sea tourism corridors are less about feasibility and more about constructing optical sovereignty, the illusion of modernity strong enough to distract from a reality that remains structurally dependent on oil, geopolitically fragile and politically closed to any genuine pluralism. Beneath the glittering skyline renders and global PR campaigns lies a regime that has intensified repression, consolidated surveillance, criminalized dissent and reengineered loyalty through both fear and spectacle, replacing the quiet traditionalism of previous monarchs with a new regime of digitally mediated authoritarianism, one that tracks allegiance through algorithms, controls dissent through optics, and enforces consensus not by ideology but by eliminating the bandwidth of alternate futures, ensuring that the only visible future is the one designed by MBS himself.

What MBS has perfected is the art of modernist simulation a system that does not modernize power but rebrands it, that does not distribute agency but centralizes aesthetics and through this system, he has created a Saudi Arabia that looks futuristic from a distance but upon closer inspection reveals itself to be a state of re-skinned absolutism, where ministries are rebranded, clerics are retooled and institutions are reformatted not to evolve but to simulate flexibility while maintaining the intactness of core dominance. The technological dimension of MBS’s modernization is designed not to liberate the public sphere but to render it measurable, traceable and programmable, replacing unpredictable public discourse with gamified patriotism and algorithmic loyalty, where apps, social credit incentives and digital ID systems are deployed under the guise of smart governance but serve as invisible architecture for perception management, ensuring that dissent is not just punished but preemptively erased from visibility, producing a society that does not consent but conforms by default.

Tourism, art, and entertainment once anathema to the Saudi political imagination are now deployed not as cultural liberalization but as strategic decoys, creating a bandwidth of distraction calibrated to appeal to the West, absorb the youth and substitute political participation with curated spectacle and in this schema, Formula One races, film festivals, fashion weeks and mega concerts are not indicators of freedom but tools of narrative laundering, in which the image of openness is sold to global audiences while the machinery of repression continues uninterrupted behind the curtain of applause. Economically, the kingdom remains chronically tethered to hydrocarbons with diversification efforts often circular, dependent on oil funded sovereign wealth, oil powered subsidies and oil-linked logistics and while MBS frames Vision 2030 as a roadmap beyond oil in practice, it functions more as an oil to image conversion engine, where surplus revenue is funneled into futuristic facades that impress foreign investors but fail to develop genuine productivity ecosystems, leaving the country’s economic health vulnerable to price shocks, supply disruptions and reputational fluctuations.

Foreign direct investment, long presented as a cornerstone of Vision 2030’s success has proven erratic and risk averse, deterred by legal unpredictability, centralization of authority and a climate where contracts are beholden to royal mood rather than codified rule and this fragility hidden beneath the gleaming conferences and G20 handshakes makes the Saudi economic transformation deeply non contagious, unable to inspire replication or secure enduring credibility among peer economies, thereby isolating it as a uniquely volatile experiment dressed as a regional model. Internally, the population faces a new reality: one where traditional religious rigidity has been replaced not with pluralism but with techno authoritarian consumerism, where freedom is measured in entertainment options, loyalty is gauged through public praise algorithms and political identity is reduced to hashtags, merchandise and emoji reinforced nationalism, producing a youth culture that appears dynamic on the surface but is systematically deprived of ideological agency, intellectual risk or structural voice.

MBS’s alliance with the West is not built on trust, shared values or long term convergence, it is a marriage of strategic tolerance, where the West accepts the fiction of reform in exchange for access to energy, contracts and regional stabilization and in return Riyadh delivers optical progress, incremental social changes and intelligence cooperation but beneath this handshake lies a mutual understanding that neither side truly believes in the other’s narrative and both are merely delaying confrontation by feeding each other curated illusions. For the West, MBS represents a geopolitical convenience: a leader who can centralize command, execute rapid policy shifts and contain Islamist narratives while projecting a palatable modernist veneer and in a world fatigued by failed democracies, endless wars, and unstable partners, MBS offers an illusion of effectiveness the fantasy of a singular figure who can make the desert dance without the inconvenience of parliament or public debate yet this illusion requires constant subsidy, constant PR maintenance and constant crisis management, making the relationship less a strategic alliance and more a calculated indulgence.

In foreign policy, MBS has rebranded Saudi Arabia as a proactive architect of regional balance, intervening in Yemen, warming to Israel, dialoguing with Iran and investing heavily in Africa, Central Asia and the Balkans but each of these moves is less about strategic doctrine and more about narrative rebalancing, designed to project complexity, maturity and sovereignty, while masking the fact that Riyadh remains structurally reactionary, responding to threats with money, optics and coercion, rather than systemic institutional depth. The normalization with Israel for instance hailed as a new paradigm remains fragile, driven more by Western pressure mutual Iran watching and economic opportunism than genuine ideological reconciliation and MBS knows this: which is why every diplomatic breakthrough is accompanied by ambiguity, deniability and performative restraint, ensuring that Riyadh never commits fully but also never closes the door, maintaining a strategic ambivalence that keeps all sides guessing, funding and hoping.

This ambivalence extends to multilateralism as well, where Saudi Arabia under MBS projects commitment to the G20, BRICS+, OPEC+, and various climate platforms, yet in each case behaves as a sovereign exception, cherry picking narratives, avoiding enforcement and using participation as an interface to shape global norms without internalizing them, resulting in a foreign policy that is everywhere and nowhere bold in optics, cautious in substance and perpetually undefined. The notion of Saudi Arabia as a “new middle power” under MBS is a strategic fiction engineered to suggest agility, balance and global relevance, yet lacking the institutional ballast, civic resilience and policy continuity that define true middle powers and while Riyadh mimics the outward signals of such status multilateral visibility, strategic investment and diplomatic choreography the kingdom’s decision making remains hyper personalized, risk-prone and centered around perception management, making its power projection shallow, dependent on spectacle rather than substance.

True middle powers act as stabilizers in multipolar systems, offering predictability, credibility and normative mediation but MBS’s Saudi Arabia behaves more like a strategic amplifier, intensifying regional volatility through impulsive interventions, opaque agendas and erratic positioning and rather than anchoring the region, it often exacerbates its fluidity, seeking to extract advantage from chaos rather than design enduring order thus functioning not as a bridge but as a signal disruptor, destabilizing with one hand while branding stability with the other. This contradiction is embedded in Saudi Arabia’s institutional architecture, where ministries are frequently reshuffled, advisors disappear without explanation, laws are implemented retroactively and long term planning is subordinated to momentary royal calibration, creating a system where foreign partners hesitate, local institutions stagnate and reform becomes a revolving door of announcements, cancellations and relaunches none of which produce a cumulative arc of transformation only iterative branding loops.

MBS’s persona is central to this dynamic: framed as the visionary antidote to a conservative past, he operates more as a perpetual editor in chief of national narrative, rewriting the country’s storyline in real time to match global moods, oil prices or Twitter trends and while this flexibility appears dynamic, it is structurally brittle because it depends on the unbroken flow of attention, admiration and liquidity, none of which are sustainable in a world increasingly allergic to hyper centralized regimes wrapped in modernist cosplay. Indeed, the biggest risk to MBS’s model is not foreign opposition, it is internal fatigue, the slow corrosion of coherence that occurs when citizens recognize the gap between vision and delivery between optics and opportunity and between promised mobility and actual stagnation and as the pageantry of concerts and megacities loses its novelty, and the job market fails to absorb youth and civic space remains void of real participation, the regime may find itself trapped not by dissent but by disinterest, a loss of narrative control that no AI driven PR campaign can recover.

When the narrative breaks and it will, it will not shatter from external pressure but from the cumulative weight of its own contradictions: the unsustainable demand for spectacle, the unfulfilled promises of economic transformation and the relentless centralization of decision making that leaves no space for institutional breathing and when this happens, the kingdom will not descend into chaos but into strategic irrelevance a state no longer feared, admired, or copied but merely tolerated as a regional subcontractor for others’ objectives. In regional geopolitics, MBS’s Saudi Arabia is already exhibiting the signs of a contractor state funding infrastructure in Africa to counter Chinese influence, supporting regional partners to stabilize corridors for European energy supply, participating in normalized trade formats to please American and Israeli interests, all while lacking an independent strategic doctrine that could redefine outcomes on its own terms, and in this posture, Riyadh becomes a programmable presence, responding to incentives, buying time but never shaping futures.

This subcontracted status is not accidental, it is the logical outcome of a model built on visibility rather than depth on narrative rather than structure and on royal charisma rather than civic capability and as the region reconfigures, and as great powers adjust to multipolar complexity, the Saudi model under MBS offers neither deterrence, nor inspiration, nor institutional scalability, rendering it incapable of occupying strategic space without external scaffolding. And that is the final paradox of MBS’s reign: a leader who promised to make Saudi Arabia indispensable has made it conditionally relevant, whose global partnerships rely not on trust but on tolerance and whose domestic progress is measured more in light shows than labor laws more in influencers than institutions and while the kingdom may continue to attract applause in curated spaces, its strategic gravity will decline not in a crash but in a soft fade out, the kind reserved for illusions too costly to maintain and too hollow to resist collapse.

So the question is no longer whether MBS can modernize Saudi Arabia but whether he can prevent it from becoming a cautionary tale, a case study in what happens when modernization is attempted through command rather than coalition, through aesthetics rather than architecture and through velocity rather than vision, and if the answer is no then what follows will not be a revolution, nor a rebellion but something far more dangerous: a silent disengagement both at home and abroad, where no one believes the future anymore not even the man who promised it. The political architecture MBS leaves behind, regardless of how long he rules is one of deliberate institutional incompleteness ministries without autonomy, courts without independence, media without investigation and academia without intellectual sovereignty, all carefully designed to respond to a single center of gravity that cannot be replicated, and in this vacuum, no succession model, no contingency framework and no adaptive governance structure exists, making the entire system post leader fragile, doomed to disorientation the moment his personal grip slips.

This fragility is compounded by the regime’s reliance on symbolic hypervisibility, where progress must be constantly performed to maintain legitimacy, leaving the state trapped in a loop of announcements, unveilings and launches that must escalate in scale to outpace public fatigue and global skepticism and eventually, the kingdom runs out of spectacles to unveil before it runs out of problems to solve, exposing the model as a political entertainment complex rather than a sovereign modernization blueprint. Externally, allies may continue to invest, applaud and engage with MBS but behind closed doors, they prepare parallel futures diversifying their energy dependencies, recalibrating security partnerships and hedging against potential volatility in Riyadh, because while MBS offers access, he offers no certainty, and in a global order increasingly defined by resilience not spectacle, Saudi Arabia becomes a volatile asset, too visible to ignore, too fragile to rely on and too artificial to build upon.

Ironically, the centrality of MBS to every reform, every narrative, every structure, means that his exit whether planned or abrupt will not be an ordinary succession crisis but a systems collapse as decision flows halt, loyalties fragment and the simulacrum of progress is revealed for what it is: a series of centralized commands held together by optics, money and silence, none of which will survive the absence of the figure who embodied them. And when that day arrives, when the lights dim on the NEOM towers, when the hashtags stop trending and when the music fades the world will remember not the concerts, not the vision boards not the slogans but the structural silence that underpinned it all: a nation rebranded not rebuilt; a future promised not prepared; and a ruler who mastered the art of strategic illusion, only to be overtaken by the one thing he could never outmaneuver: the unsimulated truth.

MBS did not build a new Saudi Arabia, he choreographed a temporary illusion, architected from algorithms, optics and silence. It was not reform but regression in high definition. And when the lights of spectacle finally flicker, what remains will not be the fiction of a new middle power but the memory of a state that mistook momentum for meaning.

In Honor of King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud

He was the last anchor of classical kingship in a rapidly shifting Middle East a sovereign whose leadership embodied not only the institutional memory of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia but also the silent discipline of a generation that built authority not through spectacle but through presence; King Salman bin Abdulaziz was the custodian of continuity, a figure who combined tribal wisdom, Islamic legitimacy and political calibration into a single statesman and while the world turned faster and the region fractured deeper, he held Riyadh’s center intact steady, deliberate and sovereign without noise; for decades as Governor of Riyadh and later as Defense Minister, Crown Prince, and finally King, he nurtured the foundations of the state with vigilance and foresight and when he ascended to the throne in 2015, it was not as a disruptor but as a guardian of coherence, ensuring that Saudi Arabia’s transformation would never outpace its soul; in an era of exaggerated personalities and transient leaderships, he reminded the world that true monarchy is not merely inherited, it is endured, and in that endurance lies a dignity that no algorithm, no spectacle, and no megaproject can replicate.