BY DAVID IGNATIUS, DAILY TIMES, LEBANON

Summary

Saudi Arabia, which often confounds outsiders with its slow and opaque governance, has moved surprisingly quickly under King Salman, its new monarch, to streamline government and purge officials who were seen as underperformers.

The architect of the Cabinet shake-up has been Mohammad bin Salman, the king’s aggressive, Western-oriented, 34-year-old son, who has taken the positions of defense minister and chief of the royal court.

The message, in simple terms, seems to be that the Saudi inner circle recognized the kingdom was developing governance problems under its aging leadership and moved in a decisive, perhaps un-Saudi way to fix them.

Salman and his son seem to have balanced royal family equities enough to keep most princes happy, and forestall dissent from any who aren’t.

Salman’s reforms continued with a series of royal decrees issued last week that purged some senior princes and pruned the unwieldy Saudi bureaucracy.

Mohammad bin Nayef’s control over Saudi intelligence was reinforced by the firing of Prince Khaled bin Bandar, who had struggled to improve the kingdom’s weak foreign spy service.

– See more at: http://dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Columnist/2015/Feb-05/286426-what-was-behind-the-smooth-saudi-transition.ashx#sthash.ntIVitn4.dpuf