Yet condemnation without understanding is futile. It is not enough to say that this is simply the result of the ascendancy of a new set of inexperienced senior princes. The reasons for Saudi – and Iranian – actions are structural.
.. Consider the context. Saudi Arabia feels with good reason more threatened than at any time in its modern history, at least since the subversive Kulturkampf of the 1950s and 1960s from Nasser’s Egypt.
This stems from five sources: first, the challenge of Sunni and largely Salafi jihadism; second, the sustained ideological and material challenge of the Islamic Republic of Iran; third, the collapse of large parts of the Middle East state system following the Arab spring; fourth, a sharp fall in global energy prices; and fifth, a sense that historical alliances – notably but not only with the United States – are fraying.
.. The Saudis liked it when pragmatists such as Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami became president in Iran. But experience confirmed that security policy remained in the hands of hardliners. And the apocalyptic populism of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad brought back the threat of an exported revolution.
.. Now the Saudis face a period of sustained low energy prices at a time when the costs of a newly interventionist and expeditionary foreign policy are rising dramatically and when the need to restructure the economy to create perhaps an extra four million new jobs by 2020 has become urgent.
.. To Iran it was: Saudi citizens owe loyalty in tribal fashion to their king, not to foreign religious leaders or to some ideal of transnational Islamism, and we shall not tolerate interference.
.. If we think that a large part of the reason for states lashing out is the fear in which they exist, then doing something to address that fear is a large part of the answer. In this case, that principally demands showing that we mean to enforce the Iranian nuclear deal rigorously – not hold off on additional measures against provocative missile testing (for instance)
Bad Writers with Self Confidence
But the problem is that bad writers tend to have the self-confidence, while the good ones tend to have self-doubt. So the bad writers tend to go on and on writing crap and giving as many readings as possible to sparse audiences. These sparse audiences consist mostly of other bad writers waiting their turn to go on, to get up there and let it out in the next hour, the next week, the next month, the next sometime.