You mentioned in a Foreign Policy article that Saudi Arabia is an easy call if oil falls by $30 a barrel. Now, it is more than $50. How do you see Saudi Arabia going forward?

I know that Saudi Arabia is a very, very fragile country, probably the one that’s most fragile for a lot of reasons. They are more robust to oil revenue to Iran and other countries but not other things. They say oil is x percent of GDP, around 50% but the rest is also linked to oil. It is untenable. You see here in India you do not have governance problems, it is a democracy and that makes you a lot more robust than other countries, definitely more robust than China.

Maybe it doesn’t allow you to do as many things as the Chinese can do but Saudi Arabia is a country started by a family based on a mission of some kind of puritan version of Islam, Wahhabi Islam. And two things have happened — the first thing is that they have continued promoting the version of Islam which is completely intolerant compared to other versions of Islam.

They have promoted their own version and jihad has been nothing but a spillover of that. There is no difference between ISIS and Wahhabis. This is how they started, the Wahhabis. And beheadings have been a regular affair in Saudi Arabia and they are one order of magnitude ahead of ISIS.

The second one is the internal contradiction. Here you have a family that owns a country and I do not know in history of any family that has kept owning a country forever. Can you see how fragile that is?

via ET GBS: Democracy makes India more robust than China, says Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Economic Times.
HatTip to Pradeep