Brezhnev in the Hejaz.

• Author: Riedel, Bruce

The Saudi royal family is afraid. Very, very afraid. A crisis of leadership is brewing. The king is ailing and his successor, Crown Prince Sultan, is in even worse health. Their hard-line brother, Prince Nayef bin Abdel Aziz, is set to take the throne. One of the last absolute monarchies, the Saudi family seems to represent all that the Arab Spring is fighting against: closed societies with unequal wealth distribution; repressed minorities living within manufactured boundaries; strong Islamist sympathies across its lands; a latent Sunni-Shia power struggle embedded in the country's fabric--not to mention a string of surrounding states struggling to stave off revolutions that could easily have a contagion effect.

We should be careful not to count the al-Sauds out. They are among the world's most proven survivors. Their first kingdom lasted from 1744--when they made their alliance with the founder of Wahhabism, Muhammad ibn-Abdul Wahhab--until 1818, when an Ottoman-Egyptian army crushed it. A second kingdom controlled the Nejd, located in the center of the Arabian Peninsula, from 1824 to 1891. The current kingdom began with Ibn Sand's taking of Riyadh in 1902 and was consolidated in the 1930s after a war with Yemen. The al-Sauds are comeback kids.

They also outlasted the Arab revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s. The monarchies in Egypt, Iraq, Libya and Yemen all collapsed, but the Kingdom fought back, ultimately bogging down Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt in a bloody insurgency in Yemen. They outlived Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi threat in the 1990s. The Saudi royals are skilled at playing inter-Arab civil wars.

As the end-of-an-era grim reaper approaches Saudi Arabia's door, Riyadh is prepared for battle. Whether the U.S.-Saudi alliance can survive the clash of American values and sympathy for the Arab Spring with the monarchy's ambitions is another question entirely.

Riyadh has become the de facto leader of the counterrevolution in the Middle East. It is shoring up its borders and tamping down neighboring unrest. And to prevent rebellion inside Saudi Arabia, Riyadh is creating an alliance whose sole purpose is to quell any revolutionary movement in the six Arabian Peninsula monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Saudi Arabia's mettle has already been tested; its commitment to stifling any protests in surrounding countries can no longer be in question. In early spring, Bahrain was facing a crisis. It looked as though the majority-Shia population on the tiny island

was on the verge of forcing the Sunni Khalifa dynasty to accept a transition to a constitutional monarchy. For Saudi royals, who do not differentiate between Shia and Iran, that meant an Iranian-dominated challenge to absolutism just across the causeway from their own restive Shia. Worse, the United States was actively encouraging a political process in Manama that the palace in Riyadh judged to be an existential threat.

To preempt a deal, over one thousand Saudi troops with a contingent of police from the UAE publicly and visibly crossed the causeway in armored vehicles to help the Khalifa hard-liners crush the rebellion on March 14. The Saudis have been practicing this maneuver for years (one of the key reasons the causeway was built was to provide an emergency invasion corridor), but never before had the Kingdom actually used its own forces to help crush a popular rebellion in a Gulf Cooperation Council state. The Saudi press dismissed American and European criticism of the operation, including President Obama's May speech on the Arab Spring, as "drivel." And as a further bond between the two royal families, King Hamad of Bahrain's son is now engaged to King Abdullah's daughter.

With the Saudis making it clear they also will stand behind the Hashemite king in Jordan as his regime resists reform, a club of royals under the...