Toby Jones, history professor at Rutgers and expert on Saudi Arabia, assesses King Abdullah’s cabinet shakeup of last week in Foreign Policy. Jones argues that the King’s sacking of the head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice - i.e. the morality police, or mutawa’een - and his appointment of a woman, Noura al Fayez, as deputy minister for girls’ education should be understood not as expressing any urgent or radical desire for reform, but as an effort on his part to consolidate central power with the monarchy.

Maybe. It would certainly be a cold day in hell if the Saudi monarch took steps that he thought would actually erode his power in a significant way. What interests me about Jones’ column is not his argument that these steps are not transformative. I am interested in the idea that, since these steps are not transformative and constitute only an incremental shift toward curbing the rabid religiosity that restricts life in the Kingdom and incorporating women into the political system, that they should not be called reform. What, then, should we call them? Could it be reform of a non-representative cabinet? Certainly it constitutes a reform of the gender-discriminatory trend of not having women in government. I can understand how it could be understood as a failure with respect to reforming the undemocratic nature of the Kingdom’s government - having a King, after all, is the very essence of undemocratic - but is Jones then seriously adopting as his ideal the toppling of the Saudi monarchy? That seems a somewhat lofty standard by which to evaluate governance there.

I would be hesitant to adopt that sort of attitude. Without making any value judgments, I would say that, given that separation of religious institutions and state institutions and equal (or at least ostensibly equal) opportunities for participation in government regardless of gender are both meaningful elements of liberal democracy as the United States defines it, the idea that a monarch sees each of those paths as helpful in consolidating his power means that U.S. policy has had an impact. If the King thinks that enfranchising women is beginning to carry weight, and disenfranchising the religious establishment, however incrementally, is less risky, then perhaps U.S. foreign policy is actually making progress toward achieving its goals. (Whether those goals are intelligent or practical is a question for another day).

Jones’ complaint, it seems, is not that the King’s actions do not constitute change, but that the change they represent is not radical. That seems rather obvious. The fundamentally undemocratic monarchy has not been weakened by these changes. But it’s possible that the strategies of the monarchy have fallen more closely in line with the ideals of Western liberalism. Does that not constitute a radical change?