Our foreign policy needs to take into account these realities. Because the Iranian government is fairly uniformly anti-American, we need to undermine it and try to reach out to people with a stake in changing it.

To the contrary, we need to support the royal family because if they were to fall, the result would probably look a lot like ISIS with a hell of a lot more oil fields under their control (and that would be probably one of the only things that would cause the oil price to spike back to 2007 levels).

While the royals were "aware" of extremism and its potential consequences for quite some time, they seemed to think that they could deflect it for a long time. In the 1980s they sent people to fight the atheist USSR in Afghanistan. In the 1990s Bosnia and Chechnya were popular destinations to send people to keep them from attacking the Kingdom.

When 9/11 happened, I do believe that the King realized that they needed to make changes, but the problem was that by that point an entire generation had been radicalized. Private individuals with massive accumulations of wealth were funding ultraconservative groups, and by focusing on al Qaeda for a while, the Kingdom was intentionally ignoring the Wahhabi ideology that was underpinning everything.

Not only has Saudi Arabia's position become more precarious due to unrest (much of it in Shia areas), but Western governments are less and less inclined to defend the Kingdom with the US pumping out oil at a historically high level and undermining OPEC. The rise of Iran (a natural consequence of the invasion of Iraq) has also made the Saudis extremely nervous, not only because of their own Shia populations, but the Shias in neighboring countries like Yemen, Qatar, Bahrain and Iraq. Not only that, but the ISIS project is now a complete failure (though I'm sort of surprised - ISIS intentionally went out of its way to say it wanted to fight the "near enemy" and we could have just let them fight it out for 10-15 years).

Their money is running out, their friends' patience has worn thin, their enemies are multiplying within and without, and so finally they have started taking action. Note the Mutawwa no longer have the authority to chase, stop, or arrest people or demand or take ID. Foreign women are no longer required to wear hijab. Women will likely have the right to drive very soon.

You may want to take a cheap shot at President Trump for dancing with the guys with swords for about 15 seconds, but I think he has the ability to actually force some change because people know he is going to act on his promises (perhaps not with an incredible amount of specificity or accuracy, but generally and with tenacity).