The interior minister’s office was imposing: dark-wood paneling, gold-plated sprinklers on the ceiling, and square-shaped chairs, in a Riyadh government building that instilled fearin people who lived in the city. On that day several years ago, the interior minister, Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, a stocky man with a neatly trimmed mustache, greeted a group of American scholars.

“He’s the kindest, warmest man I’ve ever known,” recalls one of the visitors, Jon Alterman, a senior fellow with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “That’s a line from The Manchurian Candidate, right?”

Alterman is joking, sort of. Nobody would accuse Nayef of being as icy as the sergeant in The Manchurian Candidate, or as diabolical. And yet despite the differences between them, it is also true that, like the sergeant, Nayef has a reserved manner: “He didn’t show a need to be liked,” Alterman says.

He also keeps odd hours. Charles W. Freeman, Jr., a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, says he used to visit Nayef at the Interior ministry at one or two in the morning, which was his preferred time for meetings. “He was known as the prince of shadows because he was in charge of the secret service,” Freeman recalls, “and he was operating at night.”

Middle East experts say that Nayef is a hardliner, even by local standards, in a place where people are sentenced to beheadings, floggings, and eye-gougings.  And now, after serving as interior minister for more than three decades, Nayef has been named the next crown prince, replacing Crown Prince Sultan, who had been suffering from cancer for years and died on Oct. 22. As crown prince, Nayef, who is in his late seventies, becomes heir apparent to the throne, and his ascension has important implications for people in Riyadh, Washington, and other cities around the world.

White House officials want a stable group of leaders in Riyadh because of the role they play in global markets—Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s top exporters of oil—and also in fighting terrorists in the Middle East. The Arab Spring has shown that even the most authoritarian leaders can lose their hold over a country, however, and administration officials are watching events in Riyadh closely and hoping that the transition from one prince to the next will occur just as it has in the past—in an orderly manner.

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Reading this article was like a déjà vu as if I read something similar about Saddam Hussain and Qaddafi!  These royal monarchs don’t realize that it is just a matter of time or change in political environment when a general popular uprising will bring their rule to an end.

I often wonder how the Saudi government can be our allies as their wahaabi brand of Islam is the fuel to radicalism all around the world!  Moreover if we cannot persuade our allies to embrace democracy, what give us the right to force our enemies to implement it!  If our friends do not want what we cherish, doesn’t it imply that democracy is flawed as a concept? Or does it mean that our friendship can be brought at the expense of human rights and human dignity?