Mohammed Bin Salman named Crown Prince - Saudi civil war now inevitable

Now that Mohammed Bin Salman has replaced his cousin as the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, the odds of civil war rising out of the monarchy have increased exponentially.

Mohammed Bin Nayef and King Salman have a history of cautious decision making in the kingdom, balancing the various powers and religio-political structures through their roles as King and Crown Prince, and in their previous positions as well. By contrast, Mohammed Bin Salman is hopelessly outmatched in every arena.

As Minister of Defense, Mohammed Bin Salman orchestrated the Yemen war, which has led to military failure and stalemate, an Al-Qaeda stronghold and famine in northern Yemen. Mohammed Bin Salman has been pushing for the 2030 Vision, an ambitious project that seeks to modernize the kingdom and take it further away from its roots in Salafi doctrine, to move it towards modernity, to solidify its position as the US' top Arab partner.

ISIS and Al-Qaeda have been already using Mohammed Bin Salman as their personification of everything wrong with Saudi Arabia. From the terror groups' perspective, Mohammed Bin Salman represents the poison of America, staining the land of the two holy mosques with an implicit alliance with Israel against Iran - and, by extension, against the Palestinians.

But with Mohammed Bin Salman's plan of internal modernization to be coupled with curbing of external "Salifization" - the process of making the Sunni Muslim world identify more with the Qur'an and the Sunnah, without modern contextualization, which leads to ISIS ideology - the only place where Salifization would be able to occur would be from within the kingdom of Saudi Arabia against Mohammed Bin Salman in either a civil war or a revolution.

In fact, unlike King Abdullah, King Salman and former Crown Princes Muqrin and Mohammed Bin Nayef, Mohammed Bin Salman is severely handicapped by one thing above all others: age. His age, 31, gives more reason for Saudis to doubt his ability. This is not only linked to a lack of experience - which he has shown - but also to the innate Arabic culture which respects men with white hair and white beards more than any others. Should Mohammed Bin Salman rule Saudi Arabia as king, he will be younger than self-proclaimed Caliph Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. And this matters in Arabic culture.

With Sunni-Shi'ite tensions rising in the Gulf; with the Yemeni war showing no end in sight; with Syria stabilizing; with Iran showing dominance across many countries surrounding Saudi Arabia; with Turkey standing against Saudi Arabia with Qatar; and, most of all, with Mohammed Bin Salman leading the kingdom from one foreign policy blunder to another, civil war in Saudi Arabia now seems inevitable.

The only one who may have been able to stop such a civil war is an older member of the Saudi royal family. A king Mohammed Bin Salman is incapable of such a task - even worse, his life is at risk.