Mohammed bin Salman: The Icarus of Saudi Arabia? 9781626379787, 9781626379800, 1626379785

Table of contents :
Cover
Title page
copyright page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Ch1- The Conundrums of Saudi Arabia
The Saudi Fear of Abandonment
The Quest for Arab Leadership
The Icarus Analogy
Structure of the Book
Notes
Ch2- Mohammed bin Salman’s Meteoric Rise to Power
The Saudi Game of Thrones
A Singular Upbringing
Stepping-Stones to the Throne
The MBS-MBN Rivalry Quickens
MBS’s Vision 2030
MBN Falters
The Trump Factor
A Royal Coup in the House of Saud
Notes
Part 1- The Old Order Crumbles
Ch3- Upending the House of Saud
The End of Consensus in Saudi Governance
MBS Eliminates All Possible Challengers
MBS’s Own Signs of Corruption
Pillars of Royal and Wahhabi Support
Notes
Ch4- King Abdullah: The Surprise Reformer
The Saudi Meaning of Reform
MBS’s Pitch for Reform
Past Political Reforms
Royal Opposition to Reform
The Impact of 9/11 on Reform Efforts
Reform of the Education System
Reform of the Government
Abdullah Unleashes the Media on Wahhabi Excesses
Arab Spring Sets Back Reform
Pressure for Reform Keeps Boiling Up
Activists Turn to the Internet
Abdullah’s Mixed Record of Reform
Notes
Ch5- King Salman: The Daedalus of Saudi Arabia
A Staunch Conservative
Motives for Supporting His Son
Father and Son at Odds
The King-Son Saga
Impact of Khashoggi’s Murder
Rumors of Abdication
Notes
Part 2- The New Saudi Arabia
Ch6- The Kingdom of Mohammed bin Salman
The King’s Dilemma
Citizens or Subjects
Repression Unbound
Dealing with Wahhabism and Its Clerics
Curbing the Royal Welfare State
Suppression of All Activism
Jailing Feminists
Birth of a Saudi Diaspora
The Use and Misuse of Saudi Artists
MBS Launches His Social Revolution
Entertainment Tsunami Evokes Mixed Reaction
Notes
Ch7- The Fourth Industrial Revolution
Oil Giant Saudi Aramco Goes Public
Saudi Arabia’s Gigaprojects
NEOM: Shining City in the Sand
Past White Elephants
Impact of Jamal Khashoggi’s Murder
MBS’s Sovereign Wealth Fund
MBS Reverts to State Capitalism
End of Oil Addiction Still Far Off
MBS as Economic Czar
Notes
Ch8- “Who Will Rid Me of This Troublesome Journalist?”
A Dissident Voice
An al-Saud Family Insider
The Falling Out
Democracy for the Arab World Now
The Assassination Plot Unfolds
MBS’s Icarian Moment
The UN Account of Khashoggi’s Murder
International Reaction
Impact of Khashoggi’s Assassination
MBS’s Police State Strikes Abroad
MBS Targets Bezos
Impact on Vision 2030
MBS Takes “Full Responsibility”
Khashoggi’s Legacy
Notes
Ch9- The Quest for Great Power Status
The Birth of the GCC
The GCC Fails Its First Test
The GCC Rejects the Saudi Bid for Unity
2011 Uprisings Splinter the GCC
MBS Goes to War in Yemen
Saudi Disaster in Yemen
Yemen Splinters
Saudi Arabia and the UAE Part Ways
The UAE Eclipses Saudi Arabia
Analyses of the Saudi Military Failure
The MBS-MBZ Relationship
The Qatar Challenge
Saudi Arabia and Qatar Part Ways
MBS’s Misstep in Lebanon
MBS’s Misstep in Sudan
MBS Faces Isolation in the Arab World
Notes
Ch10- The Saudi-US Relationship: Too Damaged to Repair?
Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Party of the US-Saudi Alliance
Ups and Downs in the Relationship
The Strange Nature of US-Saudi Relations
The Yemen War and Iran Highlight Different Interests
The Israel Option Takes Shape
Gulf Arab States Embrace Israel Warmly
The Biden Era Dawns
The Search for Other Security Partners
The China Option
The Russia Option
The Arab Coalition Option
The Pakistan Option
The Israel Option
Divisions Within the House of Saud
US Commitment Increasingly Doubtful
The MBS-Trump Relationship
Rethinking the US-Saudi Alliance
Notes
Part 3- Conclusion
Ch11- Prospects for Reform . . . and Repression
The Wahhabi Backlash, Past and Present
Official Wahhabi Clerics Line Up
Independent Clerics Silenced
Youth and Women Replace Clerics as Power Base
Other Middle East Reformers
Habib Bourguiba
Gamal Abdul Nasser
King Mohammed VI
Kemal Atatürk
King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi
MBS’s Prospects
Comparison to Nasser
Comparison to Mohammed VI
Comparison to the Shah
Known Unknowns of MBS’s Fate
Notes
A Brief Bibliography
Index
About the Book

Citation preview

Mohammed bin Salman

Mohammed bin Salman The Icarus of Saudi Arabia?

David B. Ottaway

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2021 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com

and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1 5DB www.eurospanbookstore.com/rienner

© 2021 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ottaway, David, author. Title: Mohammed bin Salman : the Icarus of Saudi Arabia? / David B. Ottaway. Description: Boulder, Colorado : Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Sheds light on the conundrums at the heart of any attempt to understand Saudi Arabia—and the man who is poised to rule the country for decades to come”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021015855 | ISBN 9781626379787 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781626379800 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Āl Saʻūd, Muḥammad bin Salmān bin ʻAbd al-ʻAzīz, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, 1985– | Saudi Arabia—Politics and government—21st century. Classification: LCC DS244.526.A4553 O88 2021 | DDC 953.805/4092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015855

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

1 The Conundrums of Saudi Arabia

2 Mohammed bin Salman’s Meteoric Rise to Power

Part 1 The Old Order Crumbles

1

13

3 Upending the House of Saud

29

5 King Salman: The Daedalus of Saudi Arabia

61

4 King Abdullah: The Surprise Reformer

Part 2 The New Saudi Arabia

6 The Kingdom of Mohammed bin Salman 7 The Fourth Industrial Revolution

8 “Who Will Rid Me of This Troublesome Journalist?”

9 The Quest for Great Power Status

10 The Saudi-US Relationship: Too Damaged to Repair?

43

75 95

113

139 165

v

vi

Contents

Part 3 Conclusion

11 Prospects for Reform . . . and Repression

199

A Brief Bibliography Index About the Book

219 221 231

Acknowledgments

This book was written at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, where I have been a Middle East fellow since 2006. I want to thank in particular the center’s stellar library staff, led by Janet Spikes, for all the help it provided before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, which broke out as I was beginning the writing process. A very special thanks goes to John Loessberg, my extremely competent and dedicated research assistant, who helped me throughout this endeavor. I would like to thank the many Saudis who over the years have provided me with their views and assessments of events in interviews and private conversations that were invaluable to understanding the complexities and history of the Saudi kingdom. Chief among them was Jamal Khashoggi, the eminent Saudi journalist and commentator. He was tragically and brutally murdered on October 2, 2018, by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s infamous Tiger Squad inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. His assassination and the arrest of numerous other Saudis for speaking to foreigners have led me to forgo identifying by name so many Saudis whom I would have liked to thank profusely and personally.

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1 The Conundrums of Saudi Arabia I must confess at the start of this endeavor to an insatiable careerlong fascination with the “secret kingdom” of Saudi Arabia. I first wrote about it in October 1972, a year after I started working for the Washington Post. Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Saudi oil minister, had come to Washington, DC, to make a surprising offer: his country would assure an unlimited supply of oil to the United States if Richard Nixon’s administration would grant it duty-free access to the US market.1 The offer came a year after the United States had ceased being self-reliant in the production of oil and begun importing it in everlarger quantities. My second article about Saudi Arabia appeared the following April, when Yamani in an interview with me and another Post colleague warned that his country would use its newfound “oil weapon” against the United States if its leaders didn’t change their negative attitude about the Palestinian quest for a homeland.2 No one in Washington paid any attention either to Yamani’s offer or threat because of the general conviction that Saudi Arabia needed the United States a lot more than vice versa. This blasé attitude changed abruptly, however, after the Saudis indeed wielded their oil weapon to lead an Arab embargo of the United States for supporting Israel after Egypt and Syria attacked that country in October 1973. Ever since, I have found myself repeatedly drawn into writing about the politics and economics of the Saudi kingdom as well as the USSaudi relationship. The United States has never been able to quite decide if that relationship is characterized more by friendship or enmity. This ambivalence has been particularly pronounced since the hijacking of three civilian US airplanes, destruction of the World Trade Center, and attempt to destroy the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, resulting in nearly 3,000 deaths. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were 1

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Saudi nationals and the mastermind another Saudi, Islamic fanatic Osama bin Laden. Making matters worse, the Bush administration had allowed Saudi nationals present in the United States to fly home at a time when Americans were still grounded. Writing about the bittersweet relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia over the lifetimes of five Saudi kings—Faisal, Khalid, Fahd, Abdullah, and Salman—led me repeatedly to these questions: What makes the ruling House of Saud tick, and what are its aspirations, worldview, core preoccupations, and innermost fears? My first visit to the “secret kingdom” took place in May 1978, when the Saudi monarchy extended a rare invitation to the Washington Post to cover the changes taking place as a result of Saudi Arabia’s oil bonanza. So it was that I broke off from my primary responsibility at that time of reporting on Africa to accompany the foreign news editor, Peter Osnos, on an eye-opening visit to the kingdom. By then, Saudi Arabia had become irritating to the US public and fascinating to the media because of the 1973 Saudi-led Arab oil embargo. One result had been long lines at gasoline stations across the United States. Another was the sudden, shocking realization that denizens of this country had become dependent for their well-being on the diktat of a secretive family of Arabian Bedouin royals bearing the collective name of al-Saud and beholden for its survival and power to another unknown family of Islamic Wahhabi fundamentalists. My first visit to Saudi Arabia amounted to a double take on a country undergoing a great leap forward in economic development while still bound in a social straitjacket by eighteenth-century Islamic precepts forbidding all forms of entertainment, alcohol, and mixing of genders in public and requiring the interruption of work for prayers five times daily. The oft-used word “opaque” was insufficient to describe the politics of the al-Saud family. The king held court in the desert city of Riyadh, on the Arabian Peninsula, which, though the kingdom’s capital, was still off-limits to Western embassies. Ambassadors were kept 600 miles away in the Red Sea port of Jeddah, and diplomats needed government permission for even brief visits to Riyadh. Interviews with the king or crown prince for Western reporters were unprecedented, and those with government ministers required days of negotiations with questions submitted in advance and finally hours of drinking tiny cups of sweet tea in waiting rooms overcrowded with Saudi petitioners. The king and senior princes dealt with the public at their weekly majlis, an open-door meeting in which they listened to complaints and

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requests for help from subjects who had come to plead their cases and hand over their scribbled petitions for succor. I recounted in an article three years later my visit to one such majlis held by then governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman, who became king thirty-seven years later, in 2015. “As long as we pray and go out to meet our people, then we will be in good shape,” Salman explained to me through an interpreter. “If you hear we have lost these two things then you know we are in trouble.”3 This quaint practice of “desert democracy” persisted well into the twenty-first century and is only now fading out as e-government takes its place as the primary channel for communication between the Saudi public and the royal family. Even on my first visit in 1978, I saw that Saudi Arabia was busy building an oil industry of gigantic proportions and well on its way to becoming an indispensable source of this black gold for the entire Western world, particularly the United States. Saudi officials had taken me to see the world’s largest oil field, at Ghawar, stretching for tens of miles across the Eastern Province.4 It was pumping 5 million barrels a day, 70 percent of the kingdom’s total production of 7 million at that time. But even then, Saudi Arabia had the ability to pump 11 million, almost as much as it does today (12.5 million). The officials told me then that whether the kingdom would increase its production was purely a political decision depending on the state of the US-Saudi relationship, which at that point was rather tense. Saudi Arabia had already taken a more than 60 percent interest in the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), a consortium of four US oil giants—Standard Oil of California, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco. Standard Oil had been responsible for the discovery of the first deposits in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s and then for building that oil empire with the other three US stakeholders. The end of the US domination of that empire came in March 1980, when the Saudis forced Aramco to sell the other 40 percent. The only blessing for the United States was that the Saudis paid for this takeover of the oil consortium rather than nationalizing it outright as the Iranians, Iraqis, and Libyans had done to the British and other foreign companies exploiting their oil wealth. On subsequent visits to Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s, I wrote about the spectacular changes taking place inside the kingdom in other sectors financed by its gushing oil wealth. It was then launching its third five-year plan, having just spent $142 billion initiating basic road infrastructure, government ministry buildings, hospitals, and schools nationwide. The new five-year plan called for spending far more, $237 billion ($805 billion in 2021 dollars.)

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Upon rereading my early articles, I am struck by the similarities in Saudi strategic goals at home and abroad then and now. The Saudi kingdom has striven mightily and, so far, unsuccessfully to break its addiction to oil as the elixir for all its economic needs. This has proven a Sisyphean task. In the early 1980s, the monarchy had established a number of basic industries in two new poles of development, one on the eastern coast at Jubail on the Persian Gulf and the other on the western flank at the Red Sea port of Yanbu. These industries consisted mainly of chemical and petrochemical plants. Hisham Nazer, the planning minister in 1981, told me with no shortage of pride and hyperbole that Saudi Arabia was building “the most modern, efficient city in the world” in Jubail. The total of nine petrochemical, fertilizer, and steel plants planned for Jubail and Yanbu, he asserted, would “lay the foundation for an advanced technological economy which the country hopes will eventually replace its total dependence on oil exports.”5 Saudi Arabia, he boasted, was already in the twenty-first century when it came to industrial development.6 Thirty-six years later, a young upstart prince by the name of Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) became the kingdom’s crown prince, proclaiming the very same vision for Saudi Arabia with the very same hyperbole. In 2017 it remained just about as far from fruition as in 1981. Then and now, the kingdom’s dependence on foreign labor to make any of these dreams come true was a major security and social preoccupation. In 1981, 1.7 million foreigners—43 percent of the entire workforce—lived among a Saudi population of just 5 million. Nazer was well aware of the acute shortage of Saudis educated in the skills needed to run a modern economy, and the kingdom had earmarked nearly 20 percent of its third five-year plan for training them. The shortage of skilled Saudi labor is every bit as problematic today, and foreign workers now number around 10 million out of a total population of 35 million. Saudi Arabia is presently in the third cycle of building brand-new industrial cities and still seeking to break its dependence on oil and foreign workers to make its promised great leap forward into what economists refer to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, underway today in the West and China.

The Saudi Fear of Abandonment Abroad, too, the crux of the Saudi foreign policy conundrum has remained the same: assuring as close an alliance as possible with the United States for its security while simultaneously searching for

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other allies to offset that troublesome dependence on this country. Threats to the US-Saudi “special relationship” have become common since the Saudi-led 1973 oil embargo, particularly over US arms sales to the kingdom and Saudi export of Islamic extremist ideology and jihadists across the world. In 1978, I was writing about the crisis over the Saudi request to purchase US-made F15 fighter jets and in 1981 the US Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft. Israel strongly opposed both sales, and its lobby in Washington campaigned feverishly to block them. The Saudis were making clear that their willingness to pump more for the United States would depend on its willingness to sell them F15s and the AWACS. Oil minister Yamani and his aides were talking openly about an oil-for-arms quid pro quo to sustain the US-Saudi relationship when I visited Ghawar in 1978. US arms were then, as they are today, the symbol of the larger US security umbrella over the kingdom. “We may be rich in money,” I quoted one Saudi official as saying, “but we have only 5 million people, no real means to defend ourselves, and little of our own technology to develop. We are really a very small country.”7 The Saudis’ underlying sense of insecurity in a region of rivals, competitors, and enemies remains just as strong today as does their military—and, even more, their psychological—dependence on the US security umbrella. “It is perhaps not fully understood in the United States that the Saudis, for all their billions of dollars and barrels of oil, still feel very weak and vulnerable,” I wrote in reflecting on my Ghawar visit.8 This is still true today. The Saudi fear of abandonment by the United States is also just as true today. One article I wrote in February 1981 explained, under the headline “Saudis Cultivate European Link to Offset U.S.,” how the Saudis were developing a European option for buying sophisticated military aircraft if Ronald Reagan’s administration was unable to convince Congress to sell Saudi Arabia the AWACS. I remarked that the Saudi royal family had been signaling “its serious intention to shift away from its primary dependency on the United States for security and arms if the new [Reagan] administration is not forthcoming.”9 The Saudis had given credibility to their threat by awarding a $3.4 billion contract to France for naval ships and by opening negotiations with Germany to purchase tanks. In the end, Congress narrowly approved the sale of the AWACS after a bitter fight won by the White House only after President Reagan staked his prestige on the outcome and personally lobbied a score of senators to vote in

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favor of it. In 2019, a frustrated President Donald Trump faced a majority of Republicans and Democrats just as hostile to selling arms to Saudi Arabia, albeit for different reasons.

The Quest for Arab Leadership Part of the Saudi quest for security options other than the United States involved mobilizing neighboring Arab states on its behalf against its enemies, primarily Shiite and Persian Iran claiming primacy over the Persian Gulf and actively expanding its influence over Saudi Arabia’s Arab neighbors. Ever since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, its leaders have periodically voiced their desire to overthrow the six Arab monarchies on the other side of the Persian Gulf. I was present in Riyadh when Saudi Arabia and the five other Gulf Arab monarchs banded together in May 1981 to form the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) specifically to counter the Iranian threat to their survival. I have watched other bursts of Saudi diplomatic activism as well, most surprisingly toward Israel even though that country has long been viewed as the bête noire of the Arab world because of its refusal to grant Palestinians their own state. In August 1981, Crown Prince Fahd astounded friends and enemies alike by putting forth the first Arab proposal for making peace with Israel. It was adopted over the objections of radical Arab leaders a few months later at the Arab League’s summit in Morocco to become thereafter known as the “Fahd Plan.” Israel immediately rejected it out of hand, but the main news was that Saudi Arabia had done it at all. I highlighted in my story at the time this “new activist Saudi diplomacy” marking a sharp break from “the long Saudi tradition of backroom maneuvering rather than risky public diplomacy.”10 It was the Saudis’ first concerted, multipronged effort to project themselves on the world scene, starting with the Arab and Muslim worlds. That same year, the Saudis also took over leadership of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)—then forty-two nations—and flexed their muscles to force the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to lower oil prices to a level dictated by Riyadh. The Fahd Plan was dead on arrival in Israel, but the Saudis did not give up. In 2002, they convinced the twenty-two members of the Arab League to endorse unanimously a new Saudi plan for resolving the Palestinian issue and making peace with Israel. As I shall discuss in Chapter 9, the Saudi bid for domination of the Arab world and

The Conundrums of Saudi Arabia

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recognition as a world power has remained their primary objective in foreign policy since the early 1980s. Over the years of writing about Saudi Arabia, I have repeatedly asked myself why that country has had such a difficult time projecting its power and leadership in the Arab world, even over its closest Arab allies, the five other Gulf monarchies. The Saudi kingdom has tried and repeatedly failed to establish its primacy even though Cairo, Egypt; Damascus, Syria; and Baghdad, Iraq—the Arab world’s three historic power centers—have ceased to be contenders. Saudi Arabia leads the Arab world in gross domestic product (GDP), foreign reserves, and financial heft, and it is the birthplace of Islam and custodian of the religion’s two holiest mosques, in Mecca and Medina. Nonetheless, Saudi Arabia has never succeeded in putting together these unmatched assets to exercise a commanding influence. I will argue later in this book that the answer to this conundrum lies partly in the Saudi inability to project military power without US backing. The kingdom’s reliance on the United States to achieve that goal is only slightly less today than it was during the 1990– 1991 Gulf War, which required the dispatch of 500,000 US soldiers to defend it and liberate Kuwait. In retrospect, that war marked the apogee of US-Saudi cooperation over the seventy-five years of the two countries’ “special relationship.” Since then, the ties have steadily frayed, first because of neglect during the eight years of the Clinton administration (1993–2001) and then because of the shock of Saudi involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001. This led to countless conferences in Washington under the title “Saudi Arabia: Friend or Foe?” devoted to analyzing whether the US-Saudi relationship was “too important to let fail.” The debate over this issue continues to this day. The Saudis, too, saw reason to ask the same question, particularly after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 opened the door for the vast expansion of Iranian political and military presence on the Saudi kingdom’s northern border. For the Saudis, that event transformed the United States from its historic role as guarantor of the kingdom’s security into a major cause of its insecurity. This was only made worse by the monarchy’s own decision in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq to demand that the US military stop using Saudi bases and move all its planes, soldiers, and operations to neighboring Qatar, which it did in April 2003. The strain in US-Saudi relations only worsened during the Obama administration (2009–2017) as it negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran and called upon the Saudis to

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“share the neighborhood” with their Iranian enemies. Added to this was Saudi Arabia’s own invasion of neighboring Yemen in 2015. This resulted in the US Congress demanding an end to US support of that operation along with its arms sales to the kingdom as the invasion turned into a terrible humanitarian disaster. The arrival of Trump at the White House in 2017 led to a revival of Saudi hopes that the United States would return to its traditional role of security blanket for the kingdom because of Trump’s fierce rhetoric against Iran and promise to curb its expansionism in the Arab world. The Saudis, who had kicked the US military out of the kingdom in 2003, welcomed it back wholeheartedly in 2019. This was particularly true after that September, when Iran attacked with impunity the monarchy’s strategic oil facilities, exposing Saudi inability to protect the crown jewels of the kingdom. But then came Trump’s defeat in November 2020 to Obama’s former vice president, Joe Biden, who had called MBS a “pariah” for his role in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018 and promised a reassessment of the whole US-Saudi relationship. The emergence of MBS as heir apparent in June 2017 provoked the greatest challenge yet to the rationale for that relationship, which dates back to the end of World War II and is the oldest US relationship with a Middle Eastern country. MBS quickly showed himself to be impulsive and reckless in his foreign policy, acting against US interests time and again. He also proved ruthless against his critics, activists, and even reformers at home. He almost immediately raised serious doubts in the US Congress, the media, and human rights groups about his fitness to rule. Yet, because of his young age—only thirty-one when he became crown prince—it became clear he might very well rule Saudi Arabia for the next half century.

The Icarus Analogy MBS brings to mind the tragic Greek mythological figure Icarus, who suffered from an excess of youthful recklessness and hubris and wanted to escape the island of Crete. His father, Daedalus, had made his flight possible by designing his wings of feathers held together by wax, which melted when Icarus flew too close to the sun. Icarus’s high-flying audacity ended in his drowning in the sea. Like Daedalus, King Salman has enabled his son to escape the political confines of the House of Saud, traditionally requiring years of government experience and proven ability to qualify for leadership. The king figuratively, and

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almost literally, catapulted his son over far-more-qualified rivals to reach the pinnacle of royal power. Like Icarus, MBS has shown unbridled ambition to become the founder of a new futuristic Saudi kingdom and a renowned world leader. But already MBS has taken an epic fall because of his unbounded ambition, hubris, and recklessness. The Greek myth has given rise to what is known as an “Icarus complex,” which one medical dictionary describes as the gap between “a person’s desire for success, achievement, or material goods and the ability to achieve those goals.”11 Saudi Arabia’s forthcoming king might well be suffering already from such a complex, and this would help to explain his often erratic and self-defeating behavior. MBS has set as his goal becoming the greatest Saudi king since the founding father of the Third Saudi Kingdom in 1932, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud (king until his death in 1953). It sometimes seems MBS is bent on carrying out as radical a secular transformation of Saudi society as Atatürk did of Turkey’s. MBS has already set in motion a social revolution, curbed the Wahhabi establishment’s powers and radically changed the way Saudi Arabia is ruled. He has set his sights on making his kingdom a world economic powerhouse at the leading edge of technological innovation. He exhibits all the high-flying ambition of Icarus and has already taken an epic fall in his standing on the international scene, if not at home, because of his early misdeeds and missteps. If he has not drowned like Icarus, he is flailing in a roiled sea at the start of a long quest. Whether one admires or excoriates him, the central question remains whether MBS will prove the necessary agent of change to transform his tethered kingdom into a truly dynamic global power.

Structure of the Book In this book I intend to use MBS’s rise to power to tell a larger story of the kingdom’s decades-long quest for domestic reform and global leadership. I am a journalist, albeit one who holds a PhD from Columbia University in comparative politics (with the Middle East as one focus of my studies), so the reader will find the style distinctively journalistic. My hope is that the book will appeal to generalists as well as to a scholarly audience and specialists in Saudi Arabia, whom I sometimes refer to as “Saudiologists” (akin to the term “Kremlinologists”). The text is interspersed with my own personal recollections of many visits to the kingdom that together with my academic background have provided the basis for my assessments.

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I have divided the book into three parts, plus two initial chapters aimed at introducing the reader first to the mysteries of Saudi Arabia, with its numerous conundrums outlined above, and then to MBS, explaining how he was able to accomplish his extraordinary rise to power so quickly and so totally unexpectedly. Part 1 (Chapters 3–5) deals with the crumbling of the old Saudi order and describes the surprising number of reforms already underway before the iconoclastic arrival of MBS onto the Saudi political landscape. Part 2 (Chapters 6–10) covers the making of a new, modernized Saudi Arabia as imagined by MBS. I detail in Chapter 6 the radical changes he has already introduced in the governance of the kingdom and in society. Then in Chapter 7, I outline his dreams for a new Saudi Arabia embracing the digitalized economy and social life associated with what has come to be called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. I follow this in Chapter 8 with the account of MBS’s dramatic fall from international grace, his “Icarian moment,” as I have called it, as a result of his engineering the assassination of his chief critic, Saudi journalist Khashoggi. I weigh the consequences for him both at home and abroad, which I argue are quite different. Then I turn in Chapters 9 and 10 to MBS’s foreign policy, covering first his quest for global power, and how it has been severely set back by the dramatic deterioration in Saudi Arabia’s relations with the United States and even its neighboring Arab allies. In Chapter 9, I also seek to answer perhaps the central conundrum of Saudi Arabia: why, despite its enormous oil wealth and religious authority, it has had such a difficult time projecting military power as reflected in its dismal performance in the Yemeni civil war. Saudi Arabia has even been unable to exercise much political influence over its closest and far smaller allies, the other Gulf Arab monarchies. I argue that these striking shortcomings in power projection have only become more acute and obvious since MBS came to power. In Chapter 10, I examine whether Saudi Arabia and the United States will be able to rescue their seventy-five-year relationship, or if they have finally reached a parting of the ways or at least come to the point where a fundamental reassessment of its basis and purpose has become imperative for both. In Part 3, my conclusion, I seek to place MBS in the wider context of past notable Middle East reform leaders, from Atatürk in Turkey and Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia to Gamal Abdul Nasser in Egypt and the shah in Iran. I look at the similarities and dissimilarities in their tactics, particularly repressive ones, for bringing about

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reform. Finally, I offer the pros and cons of MBS’s chances for success of one day joining the ranks of these major historical figures in the modern-day history of the Middle East. 1. David B. Ottaway, “Saudi Arabia Offers U.S. Big Oil Deal,” Washington Post, October 2, 1972. 2. David B. Ottaway and Ronald Koven, “Saudis Tie Oil to U.S. Policy on Israel,” Washington Post, April 19, 1973. 3. David B. Ottaway, “A Touch of Desert Democracy: Saudi Princes Receive Petitioners,” Washington Post, November 28, 1981. 4. David B. Ottaway, “Visiting the Heart of an Oil Empire,” Washington Post, May 14, 1978. 5. David B. Ottaway, “Despite Troubles, Saudis Go Ahead with Industrialization Plan,” Washington Post, March 5, 1981. 6. Ibid. 7. David B. Ottaway, “Saudis Are Investing U.S. Plane Deal with Important Political Significance,” Washington Post, May 4, 1978. 8. Ibid. 9. David B. Ottaway, “Saudis Cultivate European Link to Offset U.S.,” Washington Post, February 25, 1981. 10. David B. Ottaway, “New Saudi Activism, Fahd Plan Faces Test at Arabs’ Summit,” Washington Post, November 24, 1981. 11. “Icarus Complex,” Segen’s Medical Dictionary, quoted in the Free Dictionary, https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Icarus+complex.

Notes

2 Mohammed bin Salman’s Meteoric Rise to Power On March 20, 2014, Saudi King Abdullah (who died in 2015) and Crown Prince Salman, Mohammed bin Salman’s (MBS) father, signed a historic family pact. They agreed the next heir apparent would be Prince Muqrin and formally anointed him deputy crown prince. The pact aimed to end the bitter rivalry among the few surviving sons of the kingdom’s founding father, King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, over the line of succession to the throne. Muqrin, then sixtyeight and the kingdom’s former intelligence chief, was the youngest. With Crown Prince Salman nearing eighty, King Abdullah might well have assumed Muqrin would eventually take over and rule possibly for longer than a decade. King Abdullah was so determined to make sure his choice of Muqrin would stick after his death that he made the pact public on March 27, 2014, together with a highly unusual disclosure: a majority of the thirty-five members in the Allegiance Council of senior alSaud princes had approved his choice. “Nobody would be allowed to change [his] appointment,” the king intoned, asserting that his decision would ensure the unity and stability of the kingdom.1 The import of all these seemingly obscure maneuverings inside the House of Saud was enormous. First, it meant postponing for many years the divisive choice of who among Ibn Saud’s grandsons would be the first to sit on the throne. Furthermore, Muqrin, like King Abdullah, was not one of the powerful “Sudairi Seven,” the sons of Ibn Saud who shared the same mother and had dominated al-Saud family politics. At first, it seemed King Abdullah’s grand design was on track. Upon Abdullah’s death on January 23, 2015, the reins of power passed smoothly to Crown Prince Salman, and Muqrin moved up to become the new heir apparent. Hardly three months later, however, 13

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the new king abruptly dismissed Muqrin, unleashing the long-delayed struggle over royal succession among Ibn Saud’s grandsons. King Salman deliberately provoked the rivalry by naming one grandson, Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN), the highly respected interior minister, then only fifty-five, his heir apparent. At the same time, however, King Salman appointed his twenty-nine-year-old son, MBS, a totally unknown entity on the Saudi political landscape, deputy crown prince in addition to defense minister.

The Saudi Game of Thrones If curriculum vitae had been the decisive factor for becoming king, MBN would have won hands down. He had a long, star-studded record of government service dedicated to keeping the kingdom safe from its enemies. In addition, he had had the backing of the second most powerful figure in the House of Saud: Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz, his own father. One of the Sudairi Seven, Nayef had been minister of the interior for thirty-seven years and then crown prince until his death in 2012. MBN was also definitely Washington’s favorite Saudi prince. He had attended Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, though he seems never to have formally graduated. Instead, he took courses offered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in security matters and then by Scotland Yard in antiterrorism tactics in preparation for becoming assistant interior minister to his dad in 1999. By then, he had made his mark as the mastermind of the kingdom’s successful Saudi campaign to crush an al-Qaeda insurgency inside the kingdom during the 1990s and also launched a program for catching and rehabilitating Saudi jihadists in the making. He had narrowly escaped death himself in August 2009 at the hands of a phony al-Qaeda repentant who blew himself up while standing next to MBN at a Ramadan celebration in Jeddah. In 2004, MBN duly became deputy interior minister and then in 2012 full minister upon his father’s death. The CIA was so impressed by MBN that it bestowed its George Tenet Medal upon him in 2017 for his “excellent intelligence performance” and “contribution to realize world security and peace.” He was the clear favorite of US Democratic and Republican administrations to rule Saudi Arabia. After King Salman named him crown prince, it seemed he was indeed destined to become king. Already, however, a parallel narrative was unfolding behind the scenes inside the royal court, where King Salman was maneuvering to short-circuit MBN’s steady rise and ensure that his own son would

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overtake him. MBS was an unknown quantity even inside the House of Saud, not to mention the outside world. Even his age was a mystery when he debuted on the Saudi political landscape when King Salman appointed him defense minister and secretary general of the royal court upon ascending to the throne. As late as June 2015, the semi-official Saudi newspaper Al Arabiya was still describing MBS as “in his thirties.” What is known now about this upstart prince with unbridled ambition to equal in fame the kingdom’s founding father, Ibn Saud, includes the following: He was born on August 31, 1985, his father the last of the powerful Sudairi Seven to rule the kingdom. His mother, King Salman’s third wife, is Princess Fahda bint Falah al-Hathleen. She is the granddaughter of the chief of one of Saudi Arabia’s most illustrious tribes, the Ajman, who occupy a special place in al-Saud history. Ajmani tribesmen were among the last to submit to Ibn Saud’s conquest of the Arabian Peninsula. At a battle in 1925 near present-day al-Ahsa in the Eastern Province, Ajmani warriors managed to wound Ibn Saud and kill his brother. Only after Ibn Saud threatened in 1929 to annihilate the Ajman tribe did it finally succumbed to his rule. MBS is one of six full brothers sharing the same mother, Princess Fahda, three of whom have formed a kind of a power nucleus within the Salman branch of the royal House of Saud. The youngest of them, Khalid, served as ambassador to Washington from 2017 to 2019, when he became deputy defense minister to his older brother, MBS. The third member of this trio, Prince Turki, is their chief business officer and in 2019 became chair of Tharawat, a holding company with investments in banking, real estate, construction, and the media—most notably the Saudi Research and Marketing Group. MBS has two older half-brothers who have made their mark in the Saudi government— Sultan bin Salman, the first Saudi and the first Muslim to fly in space as part of the crew aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1985. The other is Abdulaziz bin Salman, the royal family’s leading expert in oil matters and the first royal to serve as energy minister as of 2017. (Yet another half-brother, Faisal bin Salman, is governor of Medina.)

A Singular Upbringing MBS stands out for never having gone abroad for even part of his education during his upbringing. Also, he does not belong to the elite coterie of Saudi princes who served in the prestigious Saudi air force. In fact, he never pursued a military career or even served in

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the military. He attended royal primary and secondary schools in Riyadh, and the only public account of his character at the age of eleven comes from his English teacher. He described him as mischievous, citing as one example his use of a walkie-talkie in class to chat with the royal guards and showing more interest in spending time with them than learning English.2 MBS went on to study at King Saud University in Riyadh, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in law in 2007. He graduated fourth in his class and was named one of the ten brightest students in the kingdom. A year later, he married his only wife, Sarah Bint Mashoor bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, and as of early 2020 they had four children. The best account of MBS’s early life and career, as he tells it, appeared in two interviews with Bloomberg News reporters who spent eight hours with him in early 2016.3 Of particular note was his own recognition that despite a traditional royal education, he belonged to a new and entirely different generation of Saudis—“the first on the Internet, the first to play video games, and the first to get its information from screens.” As a result, he said, “our dreams are different.” He comes across in these interviews as something of a tech nerd and bookworm, the latter spurred on by his father’s insistence his children read at least one book a week. He describes his mother as a strict disciplinarian. Among his favorite books was Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, a classic Chinese primer on how to outwit your enemy on the battlefield, partly by making unexpected moves. Such tactics were to become a hallmark of his strategy later to best his rival brothers and half-brothers in the race for the throne. MBS seems to have made up for his lack of real-life military experience by indulging in virtual-reality warfare: his favorite video game is Call of Duty, a series with various campaigns enacting and glorifying military combat and martial arts.4 It is not hard to guess which historical figure MBS admires the most and hopes to emulate: his grandfather, King Ibn Saud. Many of the posters and billboards around Riyadh picture King Salman and his son with Ibn Saud standing between them. The government-owned online newspaper, Sabq News, was even less subtle in making the point that MBS sees himself as the reincarnation of Ibn Saud. In fall 2019 the site displayed a picture of the faces of MBS and King Ibn Saud highlighting the similarity of their eyes, noses, and mouths and showing MBS’s face morphing slowly into that of Ibn Saud.5 Only in height did MBS not measure up physically to Ibn Saud, who stood an imposing six feet, nine inches tall, compared with MBS’s six feet.

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The pictorial reincarnation is clearly a bid to enhance the young MBS’s legitimacy in the eyes of the Saudi public. But it is also a reminder of his boiling ambition to reiterate what Ibn Saud had achieved, namely founding the Third Saudi Kingdom in 1932. MBS’s vision for the Fourth Saudi Kingdom is embodied in the futuristic megacity of NEOM, the acronym for “new future,” on which he is spending $500 billion to build in the desert sands and mountains along the Red Sea in the northwest corner of the kingdom. NEOM is to be run largely by robots, powered entirely by solar and wind energy, and become an incubator of cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology. MBS describes himself in the Bloomberg News interviews as torn between following in the footsteps of US tech giants such as Bill Gates, inventor of Microsoft, and Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder of Facebook, or replicating his own father’s career path to the throne. MBS’s initial taste, and distaste, for Saudi tribal governance, according to another source, came from watching his father at work at his weekly open-house majlis. This exercise, the traditional duty of senior princes, consists of receiving petitions from a roomful of Saudis with gripes or requests. According to Robert Lacey, a preeminent scholar of Saudi royal history, “Mohammed became his father’s proxy at the majlis. He was excellent at processing petitions. He was very effective and became inseparable from his father. He became the gatekeeper of his father’s majlis.”6 Saudi officials used to describe the majlis as their form of “desert democracy.” I have attended several of these sessions over the years, including one of Salman’s while he was governor of Riyadh. They are quaint ceremonies that allow commoners direct personal contact, however brief, with their al-Saud rulers. However, they are so formulaic and brief that they leave one wondering about their value. Lacey noted the ceremony had degenerated into a “paper chase,” in which the petitioner was left with little more than a number given out as a tracer to follow his request through layers of Saudi bureaucracy. MBS apparently came to the same conclusion. I was told during a visit to Riyadh in December 2019 that he and other senior Saudi princes no longer bothered to hold them. The majlis had been replaced by electronic e-government in keeping with the crown prince’s notion of modern-day governance. Young MBS might have dreamed of becoming another Gates, but he gave in quickly to his father’s entreaties to enter government. The same year he graduated from King Saud University at age twentytwo, he became a legal adviser at the cabinet’s Bureau of Experts.

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That lasted for two years, and then in 2009 he left in a huff to become a special adviser to his father, still the Riyadh governor. He left partly because he had become fed up with the kingdom’s slowmoving bureaucracy and decisionmaking process. But he told Bloomberg News the final straw was King Abdullah’s refusal of his request for a promotion. There is a less charitable version of his falling out with the king that offers an early insight into his ruthless character, which would later lead to his international disgrace. Even while in government service, MBS, like so many other Saudi princes, undertook to build his own private fortune through investments, partly in real estate. As the story goes, at some point his eyes fell on a choice piece of land in Riyadh that the owner didn’t want to sell.7 So MBS went to a judge to try to force the sale. When the judge refused, he pulled out a bullet and stood it up on the judge’s desk as an only slightly veiled threat to shoot him if he did not comply. The judge then called King Abdullah to complain about MBS’s behavior. MBS himself acknowledged that his critics and enemy-brothers accused him of ruthless power-grabbing, and he has never denied the bullet story, either.8 There was another reason for his unpopularity within the family and falling out with the king in 2009. MBS had alienated many of his father’s friends by using his position as gatekeeper at his father’s court to cut off their access to him. Still, they managed to get their complaints to King Abdullah, who reprimanded MBS in a tit-for-tat fashion: when the king appointed MBS’s father defense minister in 2011, he forbade MBS all access to the ministry. At that point, MBS was convinced his career in government was over. He turned to charitable work, starting with the King Abdulaziz Foundation, of which his father was then chair. Like his father, MBS became chair or board member of a dozen charities dealing with various social issues from drug abuse and low-income housing to education and family matters. Still, his primary interest was the promotion of Saudi youth. In 2011, the same year he was banned from government service, he founded his own charity, the Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Foundation, otherwise known as MiSK. It quickly became an incubator of Saudi artistic and intellectual activity long suppressed by the Wahhabi religious establishment. It was to become the flagship of MBS’s efforts to promote Saudi youth as his primary constituency and political base. MiSK also spearheaded MBS’s campaign to highlight a new image of Saudi Arabia abroad as a progressive kingdom in tune with

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the modern artistic world. Its director for many years was Ahmed Mater, who became known internationally for his artistic photographs of Mecca, the Saudi desert, and other natural landmarks. MBS’s work with MiSK drew the attention of Forbes Middle East, which in 2013 named him “Personality of the Year.” Sadly, MiSK would also become one of MBS’s tools for spying on his critics abroad, a turn of events about which I have more to say in Chapter 8. At the time, however, the Forbes award bestowed the first international light on MBS as a rising young influencer of the kingdom.

Stepping-Stones to the Throne Indeed he was rising. In 2012, he had become supervisor of his father’s personal office when Salman was named crown prince to replace Prince Nayef upon his death. A year later, Salman appointed MBS head of his court and gave him the standing of a minister. Then in April 2014, Salman elevated MBS to the rank of a cabinet minister. Throughout, MBS would have been gathering information about the wheeling and dealing inside the royal family from his father; Salman had served for years as head of the secretive family council, in which rivalries for power and royal misconduct were mediated and resolved. MBS’s steady rise naturally brought him into conflict with other jealous cousins of his generation competing for the throne. According to Lacey, one main rival was Saud bin Nayef, who, like MBS, had served as head of his father’s court after he had become crown prince in October 2011.9 We will never know whether Saud might be sitting where MBS is today had his father not died just nine months after becoming crown prince. But Saud rose anyway to become governor in early 2013 of the strategic Eastern Province, where the kingdom’s vast oil fields are located. He was still governor there in early 2021. One aspect of MBS’s upbringing often overlooked is the family environment and world in which he grew up. He could hardly avoid noticing that the kingdom was ruled by a gerontocracy under the sick and aging sons of its original founder. King Fahd (1982–2005) died at age eighty-four but had suffered a stroke in 1995 and been too ill to rule personally for the last ten years of his reign. Instead, his crown prince, Abdullah, ran the kingdom for him. Abdullah finally became king in 2005 and ruled until his own death ten years later in his early nineties. Abdullah had the distinction of having outlasted two of his crown princes, Sultan and Nayef, both of whom

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were constantly in and out of US hospitals over the last decade of their lives. Even MBS’s own father was seventy-nine when he acceded to the throne in 2015 amid persistent reports he had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for years. Saudi Arabia was badly in need of a turnover in its geriatric leadership to the next generation of the House of Saud. MBS grew up during tumultuous times on the world scene as well. He was just five when the army of Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, rolled across Kuwait in August 1990 right up to Saudi Arabia’s northern border. Iraqi tanks even crossed it several times, and at one point Iraqi Scud missiles reached as far as the Saudi capital, Riyadh. The child would have heard his family discussing the risks of allowing 500,000 US soldiers to come defend the kingdom, the largest Christian presence ever seen in the land of Islam’s birth and site of its two holiest mosques. The joint effort to push the Iraqi army out of Kuwait turned out to be the apogee of the US-Saudi relationship. But the backlash to the huge US military presence inside the kingdom led to a rise and spread of Wahhabi extremism that would eventually drive an ever-widening wedge between the two allies. MBS was sixteen when Osama bin Laden, a Saudi Wahhabi zealot, dispatched nineteen terrorists, fifteen of them Saudi nationals, to hijack four US passenger jets on September 11, 2001. Two of them flew into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and one into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, killing close to 3,000—the worst incident of terrorism on home soil in US history. The other traumatic event he would have witnessed was the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This achieved the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, to Saudi delight, but also the rise to power of Iraq’s majority Shia in alliance with Iran, the kingdom’s number one enemy, to utter Saudi dismay. MBS had thus already witnessed as a teenager the best and the worst of US military intervention in the region. He had also watched the House of Saud’s quest to find a protector other than the United States. In addition, he had seen the kingdom struggle with the wild fluctuations in the price of oil, its main source of economic security, as it went from a low of $24 a barrel in 1990 to more than $100 a barrel in 2011 and then back down to less than $30 a barrel five years later. Little wonder, then, that MBS would become obsessed with the task of diversifying the Saudi economy away from its almost total dependence on oil. He had also witnessed the risks and benefits of dependence on the United States as its chief security partner.

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The MBS-MBN Rivalry Quickens The rivalry between the two cousins, MBS and MBN, noticeably quickened upon Salman becoming king on January 23, 2015. Two days later, the new king appointed his son defense minister and secretary general of his court, making MBS the gatekeeper to anyone who wished to see his father. Multiple accounts say MBS used that post to isolate his father from friends and family, even journalists. For example, the king had had the habit of phoning Saudi and other Arab reporters to debate their articles with them in a friendly manner. This practice came to an abrupt halt. The lengths to which MBS was willing to go to isolate his father went much further. It included cutting him off from seeing his own wife, and MBS’s own mother, as she became critical of his power-grabbing tactics. One report said he had gone so far at times as to place his mother under virtual house arrest.10 For his part, King Salman, just six days after assuming power, set about literally embedding the rivalry between MBS and MBN in his government. He established two all-powerful councils, each overseeing the work of multiple ministries. One was the Council of Political and Security Affairs, led by MBN, and the other the Council of Economic and Development Affairs, headed by his son MBS. Almost immediately, the king’s son was credited with devising the new system of super councils in the name of promoting greater efficiency in government and faster decisionmaking. The effect, in political terms, was to promote MBS to be the near equal of his chief rival. The king was giving his son a perfect perch from which to prove himself to the Saudi public and to Washington. From the start of the MBN-MBS competition, the game of thrones was tilted heavily in favor of the king’s son. Two days after MBN became crown prince on April 29, 2015, the king merged his court with his own, meaning that MBN lost his autonomy of action and source of independent power. MBS, on the other hand, was rapidly expanding his own court, exercising his muscle as defense minister. MBS took charge of organizing the Saudi-led invasion into next-door Yemen, which began on March 26, in a bid to reverse its takeover by Shiite Houthi rebels later backed and armed by Iran. Initially, the invasion was highly popular with the Saudi public, arousing a sense of nationalistic pride that the kingdom was finally standing tall in opposing Iranian expansionism. Before long, however, it would become an albatross around MBS’s neck, seen internationally as an early example of his recklessness in foreign policy.

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The struggle between MBN and MBS played out against the backdrop of a worsening confrontation with Iran, not only in Yemen. On September 24, 2015, a stampede during the annual hajj resulted in the death of at least 769 pilgrims, many of them Iranians. Later reports put the toll as high as 2,400.11 The Saudis never made public the results of their investigation into the worst disaster in hajj history. The deterioration in Saudi-Iranian relations continued nonstop. On January 2, 2016, Saudi Arabia executed forty-seven alleged Saudi terrorists, including the religious and political leader of Shiite militants in the Eastern Province, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. The Iranians replied by sacking and setting on fire the Saudi embassy in Tehran. A day later, Saudi Arabia broke diplomatic ties with Iran, plunging relations between the two countries into a cold war threatening to boil into an open military confrontation. Though MBS had had no military experience, he projected himself as the kingdom’s warrior in chief against Iran. “We won’t wait for the battle to be in Saudi Arabia,” he intoned. “We’ll work so that the battle is for them in Iran.”12 At home, MBS projected himself as economic reformer in chief as the price of oil, ever an indicator of Saudi well-being, fell to a low of $26 a barrel in 2016, less than a quarter of its peak price two years earlier. A sense of panic hit the Saudi kingdom; its need to find other sources of income was becoming existential. MBS’s economic adviser, Mohammed al-Sheikh, calculated the government would be “completely broke” within two years at the rate at which it was then going through its foreign-exchange reserves.13

MBS’s Vision 2030 In this atmosphere of economic apocalypse, MBS, using his position as head of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs, put forth his somewhat fantastical vision for a New Saudi Arabia no longer dependent on oil: Vision 2030. Hints of it came first in the Bloomberg News articles and then a fuller account in a televised interview to the nation on April 25, 2016, with the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television channel.14 The same day, MBS held an international press conference at which he outlined his plan to raise $2 trillion for a sovereign wealth fund that would be the world’s largest, by selling off 5 percent of the shares of Saudi Aramco, the kingdom’s oil company, of which he put the value at more than $2 trillion.15 The initial public offering (IPO) would also rank as the world’s largest ever, raising at least $100 billion, four times the record set by

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China’s Alibaba in 2014. With the proceeds, MBS would expand economic alternatives and end the Saudi “addiction” to oil. Then, in October 2017, MBS invited 3,800 foreign investors and risk analysts to the first of his annual Future Investment Initiatives conferences in Riyadh, where he solicited billions of dollars to launch various megaprojects, most notably the futuristic city of NEOM. To highlight his commitment to radical transformation of the Saudi economy and society, MBS rolled out a talking female robot he called Sophia and, with great fanfare, bestowed Saudi citizenship on her. Most strikingly, in a country where ultraconservative Wahhabi clerics force women to wear black robes and face-covering niqab, Sophia wore neither. We will deal with MBS’s Vision 2030 later in Chapter 7. Suffice it to note here that all this publicity about planned megaprojects, later to be renamed gigaprojects, served to keep MBS constantly in the news to project himself as the would-be architect of a transformed kingdom ready to deal with the challenges of the coming era. Saudi youth in particular were mesmerized by this MBS, so charismatic in appearance and spellbinding in his vision of a new Saudi Arabia set upon radical social reform.

MBN Falters By contrast, MBN seemed uninspired and uninspiring, offering no vision for a new Saudi Arabia. He proved incapable of parlaying his position as crown prince into a platform for making a case for his leadership of the House of Saud. It was unclear whether he thought he could just rest on his laurels as the prince who had saved the kingdom from Islamic barbarians or that he just assumed that as heir apparent he was sure to become king. He gave few speeches and continued his hunting trips to Algeria as if faced with no challenge to his future at home. His supporters urged him to make a bigger public splash but to no avail. The rival princes inevitably came to Washington, where both sought the endorsement of President Barack Obama. The two showed up together for a summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), comprising the six Arab monarchies in the Persian Gulf, that Obama hosted in May 2015 at Camp David. (King Salman boycotted it to show Saudi displeasure with the US president’s nuclear deal signed that month with Iran.) Obama hosted both MBN and MBS at the White House, careful not to show favor for one over the other. But King Salman came for a solo meeting with Obama that September and brought his son to the White House to promote him as his worthy heir

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apparent. By June 2016, Obama understood that MBN, Washington’s longtime favorite, was a losing cause. When MBS came to Washington on his own for a three-day visit that month, he was warmly feted at the White House and met with top administration officials one by one. There was a sense among Saudiologists like me of witnessing MBS’s coming-out party in Washington. Robert Jordan, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, stated ruefully that MBN was “the perfect prince, but he had the wrong father.”16

The Trump Factor The unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the presidential election of November 2016 was a dream come true for the Saudis. They were delighted to see the back of Obama, who had spent his last term in office negotiating first secretly and then openly with Iran to curb its nuclear activity but also to pull the US-Iranian relationship out of the deep freeze it had been in since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Trump, on the other hand, regarded the Iranian nuclear deal Obama had negotiated with Saudi Arabia’s principal enemy as “the worst ever” and promised repeatedly during his campaign to withdraw the United States from it. According to some, Obama had coddled Iran, whereas Trump fulminated against it. The Saudis went all out to embrace Trump, who reciprocated in kind. He made his first trip overseas to Saudi Arabia, where the Saudis played to his hunger for royal treatment and treated him like a king. They even called a summit of Arab and Muslim leaders to come meet and admire him. MBS had seized upon Trump’s victory to cultivate a personal relationship with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The two equally ambitious rising stars in their respective political establishments, both in their early to mid-thirties, began communicating by phone and text messages outside official channels.17 In effect, MBS had an inside track right into the bosom of the Trump family that his chief rival, MBN, could not hope to match. Later, rumors in Washington ran that Kushner knew ahead of time of the king’s plan to replace MBN as crown prince with his son and had blessed it. A Royal Coup in the House of Saud It is doubtful King Salman needed Trump’s blessings to carry out what amounted to a royal coup against MBN. Still, it was clear he had sought to promote MBS in Washington to avoid any surprise or adverse comment to what he was about to do, namely replace Washington’s

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favorite heir apparent with his own son. And so it came to pass on June 21, 2017, at Safa Palace, in Mecca, where the king had gone to celebrate the end of Ramadan and the start of the Aid al-Fitr holiday.18 After the breaking of the daily fast the night before, he convinced MBN to come see him at his palace, which the latter dutifully did. Upon his arrival, security men stripped him of his cell phones and ushered him into a side room, where they began pressuring him to resign from all his positions in government, above all control of the powerful Interior Ministry. The king’s official pretext for dismissing MBN from office was an alleged physical disability: the side effects from drugs he was taking for posttraumatic stress stemming from the suicide bomb attack on him in 2009. In fact, there had been a report while he was visiting Washington in June 2016, attributed to unnamed US intelligence sources, that MBN was “not in great health” and “may be near death.”19 His supporters shot back that he was “fit enough to enjoy hunting trips to Algeria every year” and had done so six months earlier. MBN initially refused to abdicate, but by dawn on June 21 he finally gave in to the unrelenting pressure. Meanwhile, King Salman had assembled members of the Allegiance Council, the body that would have to approve of MBN’s removal and appointment of MBS as the new crown prince. It quickly did both. MBN’s final humiliation was his appearance on television in which he publicly accepted his dismissal, while MBS, in a phony show of humility, kissed his hand and wished him “good luck.” MBN was then driven back to his palace, where he was placed under virtual house arrest to prevent him from rallying his supporters. With MBN’s downfall, King Salman had irrevocably changed the history of Saudi Arabia, putting the fate of the House of Saud in the hands of a neophyte thirty-one-year-old prince. Already by the time he took over as heir apparent, MBS’s behavior had provoked highly unflattering epithets in the foreign media such as “impulsive,” “reckless,” and “ruthless.” In contrast, Saudi women and youth were calling him the “savior” of the kingdom. I discuss in the following chapters how MBS came to evoke such contradictory perceptions in his first five years of de facto rule over Saudi Arabia. 1. “Muqrin Named Deputy Crown Prince,” Arab News, March 27, 2014. 2. Rachid Sekkai, “MBS: My Strange Experience of Teaching the Saudi Crown Prince,” BBC News, December 9, 2018. 3. Peter Waldman, “The $2 Trillion Project to Get Saudi Arabia’s Economy off Oil,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 21, 2016.

Notes

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4. Frank Gardner, ”Mohammed bin Salman: The Note-Taker,” BBC News, October 2, 2019, bbc.co.uk/news/extra/ILGBQVCUCZ/Mohammed_bin_salman. 5. https/sabq.org/U95gde. 6. Robert Lacey, telephone interview with author, April 14, 2015. 7. A second version holds that Mohammed bin Salman simply wrote a letter to the judge with a bullet in it, demanding he approve the land sale. Lacey interview. 8. Waldman, “$2 Trillion Project to Get Saudi Arabia’s Economy off Oil.” 9. Lacey interview. 10. Carol E. Lee and Courtney Kube, “U.S. Officials: Saudi Crown Prince Has Hidden His Mother from His Father, the King,” NBC News, March 18, 2018. 11. Sarah Almukhtar and Derek Walkins, “How One of the Deadliest Hajj Accidents Unfolded,” New York Times, September 5, 2016. 12. Ben Hubbard, “Dialogue with Iran Is Impossible, Saudi Arabia’s Defense Minister Says,” New York Times, May 2, 2017. 13. Waldman, “$2 Trillion Project to Get Saudi Arabia’s Economy off Oil.” 14. Turki al-Dakhil, “Full Transcript of Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Al Arabiya Interview,” April 25, 2016, https://english.alarabiya.net/en/media/inside -the-newsroom/2016/04/25/Full-Transcript-of-Prince-Mohammed-bin-Salman-s -al-Arabiya-interview.html. 15. Samia Nakhoul, William Maclean, and Marwa Rashad, “Saudi Prince Unveils Sweeping Plans to End ‘Addiction’ to Oil,” Reuters, April 25, 2016. 16. Robert Jordan, National Press Club, Washington, DC, February 21, 2019. 17. For a detailed account of the Saudi campaign to use Mohammed bin Salman to establish an inside channel into the White House, see David D. Kirkpatrick, Ben Hubbard, Mark Landler, and Mark Mazzetti, “The Wooing of Jared Kushner: How the Saudis Got a Friend in the White House,” New York Times, December 8, 2018. 18. For the best account of Mohammed bin Nayef’s downfall, see Ben Hubbard, Mark Mazzetti, and Eric Schmitt, “Saudi King’s Son Plotted Effort to Oust His Rival,” New York Times, July 18, 2018. 19. “Saudi Crown Prince Is ‘Fine’ Despite US Reports of Being ‘Near Death,’” Middle East Eye, June 22, 2016.

Part 1

The Old Order Crumbles

3 Upending the House of Saud No king in the history of the Third Saudi Kingdom has ascended to the throne through such ruthless tactics as did Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). Since its founding by Abdulaziz Ibn Saud in 1932, the kingdom has gone through seven transitions of power, three of them perilous passages. None compares with the ongoing one—in the youth of the aspiring monarch, his lack of experience, his disregard for seniority, and his reckless behavior. He has smashed the family code of conduct to smithereens. He will be the youngest monarch the kingdom has ever known. Ibn Saud was just twentyseven when he carried out his daring conquest of the old Saudi capital of Diriyah in 1902 to establish the Najd Emirate, but it took him until the age of fifty-seven before he could proclaim himself king of today’s Saudi Arabia. MBS has broken yet another family taboo. He has gone outside the family to rally the Saudi public, notably the youth and women, to his side in order to overwhelm his rivals for the throne. Normally, the al-Saud family has been careful to wash its dirty linen in private and settle feuds over succession behind tightly closed doors. The dirty linen was cleaned inside the confines of an inner family council of senior princes over which King Salman ruled for many years before he became monarch. These same princes settled succession issues informally until the late King Abdullah in 2007 established the Allegiance Council of the thirty-five sons, or grandsons, of founding father Ibn Saud to decide in whose hands the family’s fate would next rest. The upstart heir apparent has upended the House of Saud in another even more consequential way. He has demoted the standing of the Wahhabi religious establishment as the moral gatekeeper of 29

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society and moved toward making popular support rather than just the royal seal the basis of al-Saud legitimacy. Because MBS’s path to power has been so iconoclastic, many Saudis and foreign Saudiologists1 alike continue to wonder whether he is here to stay and how much lasting change he has brought about in the kingdom. Family feuding has previously put to the test the unity of the House of Saud. Civil war between brothers even caused the downfall of the Second Saudi Kingdom in 1891. The Third Saudi Kingdom witnessed two previous stormy transitions, which I discuss below. The “known knowns” of MBS’s prospects are far more numerous than the “known unknowns” or “unknown unknowns,” in the famous words of former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. Chief among the first is that MBS has trampled on a lot of royal egos and created a lot of enemies among his brothers, uncles, and cousins and thus seriously fractured family unity. He has also shattered the unity of the Seven Sudairi brothers, the royal clan sharing the same mother (Hussa Sudairi), which has in recent times constituted the most powerful faction within the al-Saud family, producing two kings (Fahd 1985–2005) and Salman (2015– ) as well as the heir apparent, MBS. Another known known is that MBS marks the end of the lateral transition of power from one son of Ibn Saud to another, although there are at least two—former Crown Prince Muqrin (b. 1945) and former interior minister Prince Ahmed (b. 1942)—who remained alive in early 2021 as potential challengers to their upstart nephew MBS. In truth, this so-called tradition of lateral succession has prevailed only since the reign of King Faisal (1964–1975). Ibn Saud had passed power directly to his son, Saud, upon dying in 1953, the same thing King Salman has done today. The only difference is that Saud was the oldest son, whereas MBS is among the youngest of King Salman’s twelve sons. Yet another known known is that MBS has discarded the practice of decisionmaking through shoura, or consultation, among senior princes holding key positions. Ever since the death of Ibn Saud, the Saudi government had been carved up into semiautonomous fiefdoms. For example, former Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz held onto the defense ministry for forty-eight years until his death in 2011. Another, Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz, remained interior minister for thirty-seven years until his demise, while also crown prince, in 2012. The late King Abdullah commanded the National Guard for three decades before ceding the post to his son Mutaib in 2010. For his part, King Salman

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had spent forty-eight years as deputy governor and then governor of Riyadh, the capital, before becoming defense minister in 2011.

The End of Consensus in Saudi Governance MBS wasted no time in dismantling all fiefdoms, ending the practice of shoura, and asserting himself as sole decisionmaker. It is hard to assess at this point whether he will become any more an absolute monarch than his grandfather, Ibn Saud, who repeatedly wielded the sword—so prominent on the Saudi national flag as a reminder of how the al-Saud came to power—to cow rebellious tribes into submission. The heir apparent has already made clear he intends to brook no opposition to, or criticism of, his person, decisions, or policies. This character trait has set off alarm bells even among those wishing him well in his high-speed social reform of the sclerotic kingdom. Chas Freeman, the scholarly US ambassador to Saudi Arabia at the time of the 1990 Gulf War, told an audience in Washington, DC, in 2018 that the most dangerous threat to the House of Saud’s unity was MBS’s disregard of family shoura. This practice, he opined, had proved invaluable as a means of holding the Saudi king accountable and “enabled his removal from the throne if his peers in the family judged him to be misgoverning the kingdom.”2 This is precisely what happened in 1964, when King Saud was driven from power by his brothers and half-brothers. It was without doubt the rockiest of any of the first six passages of power in the Third Saudi Kingdom’s history, far more contentious than the seventh now underway as MBS comes to the throne. The saga stands as the only time so far that a Saudi king has been forced to abdicate by the al-Saud family. Saud had had plenty of experience in government— crown prince for twenty years. So, he amply fulfilled one of the traditional criteria for kingship. However, upon becoming king in 1953, Ibn Saud’s son proved an unmitigated disaster—a drunkard, spendthrift, and absentee ruler because of multiple ailments and operations abroad. He spent the last five years of his reign fighting his halfbrother, Crown Prince Faisal. His own brothers stripped him of all executive powers to rule the kingdom. He was the only Saudi king forced first to reign without ruling and then to abdicate. Various accounts of the family struggle to force him out make for fascinating reading.3 In the end, Saud had to barricade himself in his palace, mobilize the Royal Guard to protect its walls, and fend off threats from his brothers commanding the Saudi National Guard and

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army to remove him physically. Clerics of the powerful Wahhabi religious establishment played a key role as well. They sided with the majority of senior princes pressing Saud to step down and issued a fatwa, or religious decree, to back their demand that Faisal replace Saud. On November 2, 1964, Saud went into exile peacefully. According to one account, Faisal, while saying his final good-bye to Saud, kissed the hand of his defeated half-brother in feigned deference.4 Interestingly, this was exactly the same gesture MBS made to his rival for the throne, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN), in the televised ceremony of his deposition on June 21, 2017. The other painful transition occurred when King Fahd, after just three years on the throne, suffered a debilitating stroke in 1995. He thereafter mostly reigned in name only. Instead, his crown prince, Abdullah, became the de facto regent of the kingdom and remained so for the last ten years of Fahd’s life. Given the poor state of his health, Fahd should have abdicated. But other senior princes, namely several of the Sudairi Seven brothers, insisted he stay on the throne to block Abdullah from taking over. Abdullah, commander of the National Guard, was not part of the Sudairi clan, but as crown prince he was clearly next in line for the throne. One of the Sudairi Seven, Defense Minister Prince Sultan, sought to mobilize support within the al-Saud family to skip over Abdullah and have himself declared heir apparent. But Abdullah fought back and successfully defended his claim to the throne. This bitter feud between the Sudairis and their non-Sudairi half-brother helps to explain why King Abdullah went to such great lengths to fix the succession in favor of another non-Sudairi, as described in Chapter 2. Another fault line within the al-Saud hierarchy has been the “purity” of a prince’s Saudi heritage. If one parent is a non-Saudi, he is at a strong disadvantage in competing for the kingship because he is not regarded as “Saudi Saudi.” Nothing in the 1992 Basic Law of Governance, which passes for the kingdom’s constitution, says a prince’s parents must both be Saudi born for him to become king. It simply states that the “most upright” among the sons of the founding father, Ibn Saud, and their descendants may become king.5 Still, no king has had a non-Saudi mother or father. It is generally accepted a candidate must be “Saudi Saudi” to be considered. Thus, King Abdullah’s determined effort to put Prince Muqrin on the throne seemed doomed from the start because of the opposition of the Sudairi Seven to his appointment: Muqrin’s mother, Baraka alYamaniyah, was from Yemen, as her name indicates. Another example was the unlikelihood that Prince Bandar bin Sultan would ever be

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in the running for the crown. He had been the highly influential Saudi ambassador to the United States for twenty-three years and son of a powerful Sudairi, longtime defense minister and Crown Prince Sultan. However, Bandar was born a bastard child. Though Sultan belatedly recognized him as his son, he was forever tainted in any case by the fact that his concubine mother was also a Yemeni. Neither Muqrin nor Bandar could claim to be “Saudi Saudis.” MBS suffers from a lesser pedigree fault. Very much in his favor is the fact that both his parents are Saudis and his father, King Salman, both a Sudairi and king. His mother, however, is not from the al-Saud family. She is from the Ajman tribe, and her grandfather was one of its past leaders. By contrast, five of MBS’s half-brothers, including the illustrious astronaut Sultan, share the same mother with a highly distinguished name, Sultana bint Turki al-Sudairi. Whether this was part of the reason MBS felt “second tier” to his Sudairi halfbrothers, as some reports claim he did, it could well be one factor in his unbridled ambition to prove himself within the family. In any case, MBS had splintered the unity of the Sudairi by pitting himself against other clan members or their sons in the race for the crown. His initial chief rival, MBN, was the son of another powerful Sudairi, Nayef bin Abdulaziz, who rose to become crown prince briefly before he died in 2012. MBS has also pushed aside the last possible contender for the throne among the seven Sudairi brothers, Prince Ahmed, who served thirty-seven years as deputy interior minister and then briefly as minister. Prince Ahmed had been one of three members of the Allegiance Council to oppose the deposition of MBN and the “election” of MBS as his replacement. Later, Prince Ahmed publicly blamed King Salman and his son for dragging the kingdom into a quagmire civil war in Yemen.6 Prince Ahmed briefly served as a rallying point for the opposition abroad to MBS until Ahmed decided for unexplained reasons to return home in October 2018. After that, he fell silent, or more likely was forced by MBS into silence. In March 2020, the crown prince ordered his detention on suspicion Prince Ahmed was plotting a coup against him.

MBS Eliminates All Possible Challengers MBS’s power-grabbing tactics alienated other senior princes, Sudairi and non-Sudairi alike. Upon becoming crown prince in June 2017, MBS set about undermining all his known rivals and future potential ones. He faced two nodes of opposition from within the alSaud family, first the sons of the late King Abdullah and then Prince

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Talal bin Abdulaziz and his son Waleed, an outspoken billionaire private businessman. It is not unusual for a new Saudi king to seek to curb the holdover power of family members associated with the preceding monarch. King Abdullah had gone after the sons and associates of his predecessor, King Fahd, and those of his own crown prince, Sultan, who had made multiple billions of dollars off land deals as minister not only of defense but civil aviation, in charge of developing the kingdom’s airports. Abdullah had opened his own war on royal corruption, but in a far less public and clamorous manner than MBS would undertake later. The late king put a limit on so-called commissions princes could charge as partners, or agents, of foreign investors and stripped the Defense Ministry of its responsibility for civil aviation. Sultan had made $16 billion off government repurchase of land—given to him by the government in the first place—to build Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport in the early 1980s. It was “$16 billion in pure corruption,” as one former State Department official described it to me.7 But Abdullah never sought to pursue Sultan in court or recuperate for the royal coffer some of his ill-gotten gains, perhaps because his crown prince was dying from cancer. Upon taking the throne on January 23, 2015, King Salman wasted no time in cutting Abdullah’s sons down to size, both financially and politically. Six days later, he dismissed Turki bin Abdullah, who had served as deputy governor and then governor of Riyadh Province since 2013. Another son, Mishaal bin Abdullah, then governor of Mecca Province, met the same fate. But the most powerful of King Abdullah’s sons, Mutaib, commander of the 125,000-troop National Guard, represented the greatest political threat because he had his own base of military power. He was purged in another manner: King Salman, like Abdullah, launched his own anticorruption campaign and put his headstrong son in charge. On November 4, 2017, Saudi security agents rounded up more than 300 businessmen, government officials, and princes in the name of a sweeping crackdown on corruption. They herded them not into ordinary jails but the luxurious confines of the five-star Ritz Carlton Hotel in Riyadh, where they were systematically shaken down to extract a portion of their alleged ill-gotten gains. Many were treated roughly, and at least one reportedly died from abuse.8 Among the first of the eleven targeted princes to succumb to the pressure was Mutaib, released November 29 after reaching “an acceptable settlement agreement” amounting to $1 billion.9 His alleged crimes included

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embezzlement, reaping salaries of phantom workers, and enriching himself through phony contracts. As of early 2021, his fate remained a mystery. Whether he was placed under house arrest, forced to wear a tracking device, or forbidden to leave the country—the same fate of many other detainees once released—Mutaib has not been heard from since. The other node of opposition to the Salmans mentioned above was Prince Talal bin Abdulaziz, a half-brother to the king, so liberal in his views he had long been known as the “Red Prince.” His son Waleed was the kingdom’s richest tycoon, nicknamed the “Warren Buffet of Saudi Arabia.” This son’s wealth was estimated at over $18 billion. Both father and son had long pressed for reform including, in the case of the father, election of members in the consultative shoura. Waleed’s Kingdom Holding Company was a well-known international conglomerate, and he personally was the largest single Citibank stockholder. Prince Talal had the distinction of being one of three members of the Allegiance Council who had voted against MBS becoming crown prince. Waleed, forward thinking like MBS, had undertaken a project to establish a television channel based outside the kingdom and independent of government control. Talal, eighty-six when MBS became crown prince, was too old to be a threat and died in December 2018. Because of Waleed’s age at just sixty-two, wealth, liberal views, and independence, he was quite another matter. What’s more, this son had appointed Jamal Khashoggi, the most outspoken critic of the crown prince, to set up his twentyfour-hour news channel. Waleed himself had written an editorial for the New York Times in the wake of the 2011 Arab uprisings calling for “meaningful reforms” and “greater political participation” in all Arab countries.10 He was the most notable Saudi tycoon thrown into the “gilded cage” of the Ritz Carlton the night of November 4, 2017. Waleed finally negotiated his way out on January 27, 2018, after eighty-four days in detention and after a carefully staged tour with a Reuters news agency reporter of his sixth-floor Ritz Carlton suite during which he proclaimed, “Everything’s fine.”11 He refused to disclose what it had cost him to get out and denied he had handed over to the government $6 billion of his assets in the Kingdom Holding Company. Later, he met with MBS and pledged to be one of the “biggest supporters” of the megaprojects he was launching to fulfill his Vision 2030 for the kingdom’s future.12 Waleed’s arrest sent an unmistakable warning to all Saudi billionaires with a habit of speaking out that they would have to remain

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silent if they hoped to keep their wealth intact. MBS’s denunciation of corruption was only the pretext for cracking down on them. He made deals with some of them in return for their support, as I discuss below. Still, the crackdown resulted in the government retrieving $107 billion in alleged ill-gotten gains from a total of 381 Saudi businessmen, princes, former ministers, and other high government officials.

MBS’s Own Signs of Corruption Ironically, MBS’s highlighting of corruption backfired on him in a manner he probably had never anticipated. Suddenly, the US media began looking into the state of his own considerable wealth.13 The outcome was to tarnish seriously his image as the kingdom’s great anticorruption crusader. One story after another came out detailing his exorbitant expenditures on luxury items for his own personal pleasure. As it turned out, by the time he had become crown prince, he had already bought from a Russian oligarch, on the spur of the moment, a luxurious 440-foot yacht for $500 million. And he had also acquired the Chateau Louis XIV near Versailles for more than $300 million. Then, just as he was rounding up allegedly corrupt Saudi businessmen and officials in early November 2017, he spent $450 million to buy Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work of art.14 He first sought to deflect criticism for the purchase of this Christian “Savior of the World” by letting it be known he was donating it to the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi. Its directors had announced the painting would go on display in fall 2019. But that never happened, and the painting was later seen hanging in MBS’s yacht Serene.15 Later reports disclosed MBS had tried but failed to convince French authorities to hang the painting next to da Vinci’s most famous painting, Mona Lisa, in the Louvre in Paris and then sequestered Salvator Mundi at an unknown location inside the kingdom.16 The amount of MBS’s wealth has been the source of much speculation. Estimates range as high as $10 billion.17 One explanation for his greed was that he long suffered a sense of humiliation as a result of his own father’s “poverty” relative to other senior princes. MBS was just fifteen years old when this dawned upon him. At that point, his father was Riyadh governor and heavily dependent on the largesse of family members to pay his expenses.18 According to another source, MBS became painfully aware of his father’s “penury” when King Abdullah turned down his request for money to take his whole family on a vacation to South Africa.19

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Media efforts to track down the sources of MBS’s wealth have focused on his investments when he was just twenty-four years old in about twenty to twenty-five companies dealing with real estate, manufacturing, and the telecom industry.20 They have also examined the holding company Tharawat, run by two of his brothers, leasing Airbus passenger jets to the Saudi national airlines. MBS has shown no regrets for his greed and even defended his wealth as natural for a Saudi royal. In an interview with CBS, he readily conceded he was no Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela. “I am rich,” he said, noting correctly that the royal family owned “lots of land” and incorrectly that the size of his personal wealth has not changed from “10 or 20 years ago.”21 He had already made public, however, that he had had to scrape together $100,000 to make his first investments on the Saudi stock exchange.22 In order to spend more than $1 billion on a yacht, a painting, and a chateau, MBS must have quickly amassed billions after his father became king in 2015. Certainly the once “pauper” king had. Three years later, King Salman’s worth was put at $17 billion,23 and by one estimate the following year, he was the third wealthiest royal in the world.24

Pillars of Royal and Wahhabi Support I outlined earlier how MBS has radically transformed the way the kingdom is ruled, ending the system of consensus-building and fiefdoms within the family and centralizing decisionmaking in his hands alone. These changes alienated many branches of the al-Saud family, and the question remained for some time whether MBS had enough royal support to avoid a backlash that might unseat him upon the death of his father, King Salman. The king had been crucial in MBS’s rise to power and continued to shield him against all criticism and machinations by disgruntled princes. Because of the king’s age and health, there had been speculation King Salman would abdicate after MBS had secured his position as crown prince in June 2017. However, one skeptic of this scenario right from the start was Khashoggi, whom MBS later had killed. Khashoggi put the argument to me that MBS very much needed the king to remain on the throne as long as possible in order to give his son ample time to consolidate his power.25 This is what happened. The king was still on the throne in early 2021, showing every indication he intended to live out his life there. MBS took ample advantage of his father’s long shadow to build his own coalition of support among willing factions within the al-Saud

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family. Most notable among them were the Sultan and al-Faisal branches, which had lost power and influence during the long reign of Abdullah, first as crown prince and de facto ruler (1995–2005) and then king (2005–2015). The Sultan branch was possibly the most corrupt of any within the royal family. As I noted earlier, Crown Prince Sultan had made multiple billions of dollars on the sale of royal lands given to him and then resold back to the government. Bandar bin Sultan, his son, had gained enormous wealth and influence while serving as ambassador in Washington and then as King Abdullah’s national security adviser. He had unabashedly defended royal family corruption, arguing that $50 billion was acceptable given the huge amount, $350 billion, the government had spent on building a modern state. He was accused of enriching himself through hundreds of millions of dollars in payoffs associated with the kingdom’s $30 billion purchase of fighter planes from Great Britain.26 Yet, when MBS launched his anticorruption drive and included eleven princes in the Ritz Carlton Hotel “prison” in November 2017, Bandar was conspicuously absent from among them. Whether he had reached some secret deal to avoid arrest was never disclosed. Among the known knowns, however, was that MBS appointed two of Bandar’s children, his daughter Reema and son Khalid, ambassadors to Washington and London respectively— the two most important diplomatic postings for the House of Saud. Another major pillar of support for MBS came from the al-Faisal branch, the leading reform wing of the al-Saud family for decades. The family’s solid credentials dated back to King Faisal (1964– 1975), who while crown prince and prime minister had finally put an end to slavery in the kingdom. He had also opened schools for girls, called for a shoura council, and sent his sons abroad to the United States for higher education. It is no exaggeration to state that King Faisal died for his zeal for reform: a crazed nephew assassinated him in revenge for his brother’s death in a protest against the introduction of television into the kingdom. One of Faisal’s sons, Saud al-Faisal, served as foreign minister for forty years, setting a world record for longevity. Another son, Turki al-Faisal, led the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate for twenty-two years (1979–2001), then served as ambassador first to the Court of Saint James and afterward to Washington. Turki had called publicly for an elected shoura, a proposal viewed as highly radical within the al-Saud family. A third son, Khalid al-Faisal, was also reform minded and promoted the arts over the objections of the country’s puritanical Wahhabi clerics. He served as education minister and was twice appointed governor of Mecca,

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the last time in 2015. He was still in that post in early 2021. For the al-Faisal family, MBS’s social revolution was a dream come true. Turki al-Faisal, seventy-two years old when MBS became crown prince, found himself in the most difficult dilemma of anyone in his family. On the one hand, the crown prince was pushing through many of the reforms he had championed for decades. On the other hand, MBS had trampled all over the royal code of political conduct. Worse yet, he had promoted the assassination in October 2018 of one of Turki’s senior aides, Khashoggi, who had been one of his most valued political advisers during his time as Saudi ambassador both in London and Washington. Although openly stating that his brutal murder had cast an indelible “stigma” on the House of Saud, Turki still defended MBS indirectly.27 He reminded audiences in Washington of the US record at the Abu Ghraib Prison outside Baghdad: the US military had turned it into a well-documented torture house for Iraqi prisoners after its invasion of the country in 2003.28 There might have been another reason closer to home for Turki to support the crown prince: his brother Khalid remained governor of Mecca, and his son Abdulaziz had been appointed minister of sports in 2020 after a distinguished career in car racing. MBS also brought into his orbit at least some members of what had long been the most important underpinning constituency of the al-Saud monarchy: the Wahhabi religious establishment. Descendants of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the eighteenth-century founder of the Saudi Salafi sect, today they all bear the family name of alSheikh. They number around 4,000 and are best known as enforcers of the straitjacket Wahhabi morality code on Saudi society. Their presence is made felt by battalions of religious policemen, the mutawa, who used to enforce the strict separation in public of unrelated men and women and prayers five times a day. The epitome of the classic Wahhabi religious leader is the stern-faced, blind, grand mufti Sheikh Abdullah al-Sheikh, who for years preached that the introduction of Western movies, music, and other forms of entertainment was haram, forbidden on religious grounds.29 However, there are a good number of young al-Sheikh family members who have rallied to MBS’s cause. The two most prominent ones are Mohammed and Turki al-Sheikh. The former, a Harvard graduate and previous World Bank official, was in 2020 a minister of state in the Saudi government. He was also a member of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs and a key adviser to MBS in drawing up his Vision 2030. The latter, a sports enthusiast, was also a

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chief adviser to MBS with the rank of minister in the government. In addition, he was chair of the General Entertainment Authority, responsible for flooding the kingdom with Western singers, musicians, and even wrestlers in 2019. His presence at the head of the Entertainment Authority gave MBS political cover from the ire of ultraconservative al-Sheikh, though as I detail in Chapter 6 MBS took other drastic steps to neutralize the Wahhabi establishment as well. Overall, MBS drew a show of support from a surprising number of family branches. This became clear to me when King Salman held a reception in May 2019 for the governors of the kingdom’s thirteen regions. Almost all were princes, and the number of sons of past kings and crown princes was striking. One of the most delicate posts, governor of the oil-rich Eastern Province, was then held (and still was in early 2021) by Prince Saud bin Nayef. He was the son of onetime Crown Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz, whose Interior Ministry fiefdom MBS had dismantled. A son of another dissident prince was the governor of the Asir Region, Turki bin Talal, whose father, Talal bin Abdulaziz, as I noted earlier, had voted against MBS becoming crown prince. Whether these scions of past kings and crown princes, losers in the family game of thrones, will maintain their loyalty to the heir apparent after King Salman is gone remains to be seen. Indeed, MBS’s fate once he is on his own loomed in early 2021 as the principal “known unknown” of Saudi Arabia. MBS has already radically changed the way the kingdom has been governed since the time of Ibn Saud. He has established a “monocracy,” in the words of Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Riyadh. In Freeman’s view the cost of abolishing shoura-based government is the greatest risk facing the House of Saud. Shoura had maintained the unity of the royal family and ensured “a system full of checks and balances.” This had kept Saudi monarchs from making disastrous errors of judgment, such as MBS had exhibited in his handling of foreign policy. But Freeman also conceded there had been a cost to keeping the shoura system alive so long. “It took twenty-five okays within the family to approve a decision,” he reminisced on his time in Riyadh. That’s why it so often seemed “nothing was happening in Saudi Arabia.”30 1. I have decided to use this term as an iteration of that used by US Soviet specialists, who used to refer to themselves as “Kremlinologists.” The obscurity of the inner working of the Kremlin was famous, and the standing of Politburo members was inferred based on how close each one stood to the Soviet leader.

Notes

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2. Chas W. Freeman Jr., “The Middle East After Khashoggi,” remarks at the Center for the National Interest, Washington, DC, November 2, 2018. 3. For more detailed accounts, see Robert Lacey, The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Saud (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981), 343–356; Joseph A. Kechichian, Faysal: Saudi Arabia’s King for All Seasons (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 105–110; Ellen R. Wald, Saudi, Inc.: The Arabian Kingdom’s Pursuit of Profit and Power (New York: Pegasus, 2018), 134–140. 4. Wald, Saudi, Inc., 140. 5. Embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Basic Law of Governance, March 1, 1992, http://www.saudiembassy.net/basic-law-governance. 6. David Hearst, “Exclusive: Saudi King’s Brother Is Considering SelfExile,” Middle East Eye, September 7, 2018. 7. David B. Ottaway, “Saudi Court Case Raises Question of Wide Corruption by Leadership,” Washington Post, January 2, 1996. 8. Ben Hubbard, David D. Kirkpatrick, Kate Kelly, and Mark Mazzetti, “Saudis Held in Gilded Jail Paid Billions for Release,” New York Times, March 12, 2018. 9. “Saudi Prince Miteb bin Abdullah Pays $1 Billion in Corruption Settlement,” Reuters, November 29, 2017. 10. Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, “A Saudi Prince’s Plea for Reform,” New York Times, February 24, 2011. 11. “Transcript of Reuters Interview with Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal,” Reuters, January 27, 2018. 12. “Saudi Prince Alwaleed Pledges Support for Crown Prince’s Reforms,” Reuters, July 12, 2018. 13. See, for example, “Saudi Prince’s Rise to Power Turns Him into a Billionaire Boss,” Bloomberg News, August 10, 2018; Justin Scheck and Bradley Hope, “‘I Am the Mastermind’: Mohammed bin Salman’s Guide to Getting Rich,” Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2018; Jason Rossi, “Is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman the Richest Member of the Saudi Royal Family?,” Cheat Sheet, November 15, 2018. 14. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Mystery Buyer of $450 Million ‘Salvator Mundi’ Was a Saudi Prince,” New York Times, December 6, 2017. 15. Kenny Schacter, “Where in the World Is ‘Salvator Mundi’?” Artnet News, June 10, 2019. 16. Summer Said, Kelly Crow, and Benoit Faucon, “Record-Setting Leonardo da Vinci Work Was Displayed on Saudi Leader’s Yacht,” Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2021. 17. Rossi, “Is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman the Richest Member of the Saudi Royal Family?” 18. Scheck and Hope, “‘I Am the Mastermind.’” 19. Former Saudi official, interview with author, December 4, 2019. 20. See “Saudi Prince’s Rise to Power Turns Him into a Billionaire Boss”; Scheck and Hope, “‘I Am the Mastermind.’” 21. Mohammed bin Salman, interview with Norah O’Donnell, 60 Minutes, March 19, 2019. 22. Scheck and Hope, “‘I Am the Mastermind.’” 23. Ruth Umoh, “This Royal Family’s Wealth Could Be More Than $1 Trillion,” CNBC, August 18, 2018. 24. Choe Pek, “Who Are the Richest Royals in the World, and How Much Are They Worth?” https://sg.asiatatler.com/society/the-richest-royals-in-the-world-2019.

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25. Jamal Khashoggi, interview with the author, Washington, DC, July 2017. 26. See David B. Ottaway, The King’s Messenger: Bandar bin Sultan and America’s Tangled Relationship with Saudi Arabia (New York: Walker, 2008), 161. 27. Andrew Parasiliti, “Saudi Arabia Still Awaiting Signs of ‘Goodwill’ from Iran,” al-Monitor, November 1, 2019; Vivian Nereim, “One Year on, Khashoggi Murder Still Casts Pall over Saudi Arabia,” Bloomberg News, October 2, 2019. 28. Turki al-Faisal, “U.S.-Arab Relations,” speech before the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations, Washington, DC, October 31, 2018, https://www.c -span.org/video/?453865-7/us-arab-relations-conference-turki-al-faisal-al-saud. 29. See David B. Ottaway, “Will Saudi Arabia’s Social Revolution Provoke a Wahhabi Backlash?” Woodrow Wilson Center, Viewpoints 126 (May 2018). 30. Chas Freeman, interview with the author, January 14, 2020.

4 King Abdullah: The Surprise Reformer No goal has been more controversial or taken longer to accomplish than reform of the backward-oriented Saudi kingdom. Breaking the straitjacket hold of the Wahhabi religious establishment over Saudi society has been a long-fought battle, mostly led from the top down in fits and starts. At least that was the case until the start of the twentyfirst century, when pressure for reform began bubbling up from the bottom of the fast-changing society like a volcano building up to erupt. Ironically, the main agent of the change underway today was often King Abdullah. In his early eighties before he came to the throne, he hardly had a reputation for being a reformer. Instead, he was commonly seen as being close to the ultraconservative Wahhabi clerics. But a combination of world events, growing threats from Islamic extremists at home and abroad, and his sympathy for the plight of Saudi youth and women turned him into an unexpected reformer. Abdullah was crown prince on September 11, 2001, when three passenger planes were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, resulting in nearly 3,000 deaths. The attack was inspired by a Saudi Islamic zealot, Osama bin Laden, and fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudis. Abdullah, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, had to respond to enormous pressure from the US government to put an end to Wahhabi extremism in Saudi Arabia, which the United States blamed for spreading Islamic extremism worldwide. Two years later, Abdullah faced a domestic onslaught of Saudi terrorists who belonged to al-Qaeda and acted under bin Laden’s command. Starting in May 2003, they took to attacking Saudi government targets such as the Interior Ministry, living quarters for foreigners in Riyadh, and finally the US consulate in Jeddah, in December 2004. It was Saudi Arabia’s own 9/11. The threat from Wahhabi extremism had come home to roost. 43

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Nothing in Abdullah’s past suggested he might respond with reform. His education was all in Saudi schools, and he never learned a foreign language. He had a reputation for being a highly religious, conservative individual, stemming partly from his long-standing, close ties to the Bedouin tribesmen of the National Guard he had commanded since 1962. He loved the desert and was an avid horseman and breeder of Arabians at his Janadriyah Farm, outside Riyadh. He was an outsider to the Sudairi power center and not as “Saudi Saudi” as its members. His mother belonged to the rival al-Rashid family, which had battled with and lost to the al-Saud in the making of the kingdom in the early twentieth century. Another disadvantage he had to overcome was that he stuttered badly, and overcome it he did.

The Saudi Meaning of Reform What exactly does reform mean in the Saudi context? It depends on whether one is talking about economic, political, or social reform. I will deal with Abdullah’s failed attempts at economic reform later in Chapter 7 and concentrate here on the other two areas. It is perhaps helpful to consider the state of the kingdom at the end of the twentieth century. Even compared with the other seven Arab monarchies, Saudi Arabia was far behind in its political evolution. It did not allow elections, banned political parties, and had a parliament of appointed deputies with only consultative powers. Even nearby Kuwait and Bahrain had long had an elected parliament, and the other Arab emirates of the Persian Gulf held elections for councils, albeit with limited authority. Saudi Arabia, in contrast, had actually gone backward to put an end to local elections in Jeddah, Medina, and Mecca, which King Ibn Saud had allowed in the 1920s. The only elections of any kind permitted at the start of the twenty-first century were those held by Saudi businessmen for leadership of the Jeddah and Riyadh Chambers of Commerce. Saudi Arabia had kept one foot firmly planted in the mideighteenth century when Sheikh Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab had spread his puritanical creed of Islam across the Arabian Peninsula. His religious conservatism was the basis for his deal with the founder of the first al-Saud state, Muhammed bin Saud. As a result of their enduring political-religious pact, the term reform today concerns primarily loosening the tight Wahhabi grip over society, particularly over Saudi women, forced to submit to male guardianship, and over the behavior of Saudis in the public square. Females were finally

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allowed into the schoolhouse in the mid-1970s, the workplace in the 1980s, and cars as drivers in 2018! Saudi women were the last in the world to get behind the wheel. Little wonder, then, that the ban on driving was so often cited by the kingdom’s foreign critics as emblematic of the backwardness of Saudi society. But there were worse restrictions. The clerics kept girls from getting any physical exercise at school and women from attending sports events, mixing with men in public, taking a job, travelling abroad, or even going to a hospital without the permission of a male guardian. The power of Wahhabi clerics over social behavior extended to their ban on celebrating Saint Valentine’s Day either by sending cards or roses to friends or loved ones. On that day, every February, the mutawa or religious police, renewed their fierce denunciation of this Christian tradition and swept down on stores, closing any they found selling cards or roses. I came to regard the annual Valentine’s Day battle as one indicator of whether Wahhabi influence was finally waning. Ironically, on Valentine’s Day in 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had met King Ibn Saud on the cruiser USS Quincy in the Suez Canal. Both Saudi Arabia and the United States regarded this meeting as the start of what used to be called a “special relationship” between the two countries. Only in 2019 did the Saudi government finally approve celebration of Valentine’s Day and put a stop to the mutawa raids. Another marker of change was the state of battle over lingerie stores, or more precisely the struggle to force their owners to employ Saudi saleswomen. It became a dramatic example of how hard it was going to be to do away with the ban on women in the workplace. In 2005, Abdullah appointed as his labor minister Ghazi Algosaibi, wellknown both for his poetry and his liberal views. One of the new minister’s first acts was to issue a “request” that lingerie shop owners begin replacing foreign male salespeople with Saudi women. When that elicited no response, the king in 2011 issued a decree ordering shop owners to employ Saudi women. But the following year, a religious court ruled that if this meant Saudi women were going to work alongside foreign or Saudi men, it was forbidden. Its ruling argued that the king’s intent was not to promote ikhtilat, or gender mixing, but only to “allow women to buy their underwear from shops run by women to prevent embarrassment.”1 The Labor Ministry nonetheless pressed on, this time insisting all salespeople be Saudi women. It closed down 100 shops in Riyadh its inspectors found still employing only men. By 2013, eight years after the initial “request,” almost all such shops had changed their workforce from all men to all women.

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MBS’s Pitch for Reform Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) marketed himself to the outside world as the long overdue innovator of a great leap forward in Saudi social life. His message to the Saudi public, however, was just the opposite. He was going to take the kingdom backward in time and restore the open society he claimed had prevailed prior to 1979. That was the year of the Islamic revolution in Iran and the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Saudi Islamic zealots. These were both highly traumatic events for the House of Saud. The reaction of the late King Fahd had been to give Wahhabi clerics free rein to enforce with renewed vigor their rigid religious and social code. MBS described life in the kingdom before 1979 in these idyllic terms: “We were living a very normal life,” and “Women were driving cars, there were movie theaters in Saudi Arabia, women worked everywhere.”2 This depiction of pre-1979 Saudi Arabia was totally fictitious. My first trip to the kingdom was a year before the Iran revolution and Mecca mosque seizure. I remember a daily routine already dominated by bearded mutawa in shortened thobes, or robes, constantly on their religious warpath. Day and night, they patrolled the streets, stores, and restaurants enforcing gender segregation and shutting down all public activity five times a day for prayers. Public entertainment of any kind—movies, music, theater, and the like—was strictly haram, or forbidden. Television had arrived but was still controversial. Just three years before, King Faisal had been assassinated by a nephew enraged by the police killing of his brother at a protest over allowing television into the kingdom. Saudi girls were just beginning to attend primary schools in significant numbers, and women wore all-black robes in public, covering their faces with a niqab, a veil allowing no hair and only eyes to be seen. It was not only forbidden for women to drive, but they needed permission of a male guardian to go anywhere or do anything, let alone work. The capital, Riyadh, was still off-limits to embassies because Wahhabi clerics wanted to block all Western influence from corrupting the kingdom’s Najd heartland. So diplomats were based 600 miles away in the Red Sea port of Jeddah. Even unmarried Westerners eating together in mixed company at a restaurant risked the wrath of the mutawa who would insist they sit in the “family section,” or better yet, leave. One rare Saudi journalist who dared to call MBS’s bluff about Saudis living a “very normal life” before 1979 was Jamal Khashoggi. In an opinion piece for the Washington Post, he shared his own memories of that era. 3 He didn’t remember seeing any woman driving

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until as a teenager he had gone to visit his sister in Arizona in 1976. Going to the movies consisted of watching films outdoors projected on a flat wall while a lookout stood guard to warn of approaching mutawa. One of his friends had broken a leg jumping off a wall to escape arrest. The only places he recalled where women worked outside the home or school at that time were in Kuwait and Bahrain. He remembered one Saudi minister proposing to King Khalid that he lift the ban on women’s “images” appearing in print or on television in a bid to improve the kingdom’s own image “in front of the whole world.” This was one year after the seizure of the Grand Mosque, so the king had turned a deaf ear to the proposal.

Past Political Reforms As with social reform, the Saudi monarchy has been slow to institute political reform. The kingdom did not get something approximating a constitution until 1992, when King Fahd issued a decree outlining the Basic Law of Governance, deriving its authority “from the Book of God and the Sunna of the Prophet.”4 But it had taken a decade of debate to bring about that document. The same year, 1992, Fahd also revived the consultative shoura council. This institution dated back to 1926, when King Ibn Saud had first established the consultative body with 25 members. The council had then fallen into limbo. Fahd expanded its membership little by little from 60 to 150 members and, in 2005 before dying, empowered the council to initiate recommendations for new laws, which still needed the king’s seal of approval. Upon becoming king in 2005, Abdullah launched the first municipal elections for city councils—for men only—but half their members were by appointment. This is still the case today. Finally, the last piece of the current political system was put in place in 2007: Abdullah established the Allegiance Council, composed of thirty-five of Ibn Saud’s male descendants, to vote on the line of succession. None of these institutions of governance has ever impinged on the absolute power of the al-Saud in any way. There was no separation of state and royal family. The king remained the prime minister and his crown prince the deputy head of government, ensuring royal control in particular over the state-run oil company, Saudi Aramco, the wellspring of al-Saud family income. Reforms still came from the top down through royal edicts, sometimes after debate in the shoura. This institution served primarily, however, as a sounding board for public opinion on hot-button issues of the day and at best was allowed to make

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“recommendations.” Other instruments for lobbying the government, such as independent nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), human and political rights groups, and parties, are not allowed to operate to this day. Nonetheless, modern means of communication have provided new avenues for commoners to connect with their royal rulers. Instead of taking their handwritten petitions to the weekly majlis (open house meeting) of princes, they use the internet, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to make known instantaneously their complaints, requests, and reform proposals. In 2011, Abdullah proudly announced he was setting up a Facebook page to receive such communications.

Royal Opposition to Reform Abdullah once told a US ambassador that he had had ten years as crown prince to think about what he planned to do upon becoming king and had drawn up in his mind a ten-year reform plan.5 He certainly never made it public. As I explained earlier, Abdullah had been blocked by the Sudairi clan from becoming king for ten years after King Fahd suffered a debilitating stroke in 1995. The core Sudairi triumvirate—King Fahd, Defense Minister Sultan bin Abdulaziz, and Interior Minister Nayef bin Abdulaziz—were all against reform in varying degrees. But the one most opposed was Nayef, the ironfisted interior minister who rose to become crown prince briefly before his death in 2012. His attitude was reflected in a meeting I learned he had held with a dozen activists in March 2004. There, he had defended his arrest of eleven reformers and warned them of far harsher measures if they did not desist in their demands. The al-Saud had “come to power by the sword” and would not hesitate to use it again to stay there.6 Inside the House of Saud, Abdullah faced stiff opposition from the Sudairi clan to one of his reforms in particular: curbing royal corruption and privileges. The best account of his battle can be found in a diplomatic cable in February 2007 from the US embassy in Riyadh to the US State Department.7 The embassy political officer described it as “the most widespread source of discontent in the ruling family.” He quoted Abdullah as telling his brothers he did not want to face judgment day “with the burden of corruption on my shoulder.” Abdullah had cut free mobile phone service to “thousands of princes and princesses” and ended free tickets for royal family members on the national Saudia airlines. More significantly, the king put an end to the government granting land to princes they then resold “at huge profit”

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to real estate developers and others. This was “the most important source of income” for many princes. The king had also ended another practice—handing over blocks of visas to princes for foreign workers, who then had to pay exorbitant bribes to obtain one. Among those leading the resistance to Abdullah’s anticorruption campaign, according to the cable, were two of the Sudairi Seven, Riyadh Governor Salman and Interior Minister Nayef. Abdullah faced resistance to reform from other quarters as well. One was the sahwa, or Islamic awakening, triggered by the presence of 500,000 US troops stationed in the kingdom during the 1990– 1991 Gulf War. A wave of intense Islamism swept over the kingdom, not only against the United States but also the influx of Western culture. Even the official Wahhabi establishment shared these sentiments. One of my most memorable encounters with Wahhabi officialdom was at a meeting in 2003 with Islamic Affairs Minister Sheikh Saleh al-Sheikh, a descendant of the Wahhabi sect’s founder. He went to great lengths to explain to me that there was a big difference between “modernization” and “Westernization.”8 He and his coreligionists strongly opposed only the latter because it was associated with democracy and a culture alien to Saudi Arabia. He refused even to use the word reform, instead insisting on the term development. This was still the prevailing attitude of official Saudi religious leaders even after 9/11, when Abdullah had set about trying to promote “moderate” Islam and reform the education system the clerics controlled.

The Impact of 9/11 on Reform Efforts The 9/11 attacks were a watershed not only for US-Saudi relations, which I will deal with in Chapter 10, but in the pressure for reform building up inside the kingdom. It came in the form of petitions sent primarily to Crown Prince Abdullah; in 2003, for example, he received five, and they came from all sides—Wahhabi religious reformers, liberal academics, liberal lawyers, women, and the Shiite minority. They had grandiose titles such as “Vision of the Homeland’s Present and Future,” the title of one sent to Abdullah in January 2003 and signed by more than 100 reformers.9 It called for an elected shoura, regional councils, and independent civil society groups as steps toward building a “state of constitutional institutions.” Abdullah met with thirty of the signatories to discuss their petition and was famously quoted as telling them, “Your demands are also mine.”10 Another petition to Abdullah in

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September 2003, “For the Defense of the Homeland,” carried 305 signatures, including women for the first time—51 of them. They urged Abdullah to carry out “radical reform” and a national dialogue to combat the rise of Islamic extremism in the kingdom.11 At times it seemed to outsiders like me that a Saudi version of the Prague Spring was underway. Indeed, some Saudi reformers began calling the political effervescence bubbling up in the kingdom their Riyadh Spring. Abdullah responded not only by holding a dialogue with the petitioners but launching in 2003, under the auspices of his own National Guard, the National Dialogue. Representatives of opposing Muslim sects, youth, and women sat down together to discuss topical social, economic, and religious issues. Though the dialogue’s lasting impact on Saudi society was difficult to determine, it was still the first time an event of this sort had ever taken place. The only clear result was the establishment of the permanent King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue in Riyadh, which exists to this day. The crown prince also announced that the first elections for municipal councils would take place in 2005. This appeared to be partly in response to President George W. Bush’s speech of 2003 announcing a “forward strategy of freedom” for the Arab world and urging Saudi Arabia to show “true leadership” in allowing its people a greater voice in government.12 Interior Minister Nayef, the chief reform opponent, delivered the Saudi reply in March 2004, just as Secretary of State Colin Powell was visiting the kingdom from the United States. Nayef arrested eleven academics, lawyers, and other activists who had just submitted yet another petition, this time asking to be allowed to establish a human rights organization. Upon becoming king in 2005, Abdullah found no relief from the pressure for reform emanating from Washington and increasingly from Saudis themselves. In 2007, another petition reached him signed by 135 liberals, including 49 women, calling for the release of nine of the activists still in jail and steps toward the creation of a constitutional monarchy.13 His half-brother Prince Talal bin Abdulaziz announced he was going to form a political party—unheard of in the kingdom.14 For a brief time, there was a kind of excitement, relatively speaking, even inside the House of Saud. In 2006, Abdullah announced the establishment of his Allegiance Council and named the thirty-five descendants of Ibn Saud who would sit on it to decide who among them would become the next crown prince and eventually king. In theory, it was a kind of “royal democracy” because a majority was required to “elect” the next crown prince among three candidates chosen by the sitting

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king. The council was empowered to reject all three and put forth its own candidate, whom the king could also reject, triggering a ballot among the four.15 One Saudi friend noted the irony of the al-Saud royals pushing for greater democracy for themselves while at the same time refusing it for the kingdom’s commoners.

Reform of the Education System Abdullah gave special attention to the state of the education system blamed by the United States, from the White House to Congress and the media, for generating Islamic fanaticism. Even many Saudi royals agreed there was too much emphasis on inculcating the ultraconservative Wahhabi creed rather than offering students science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) classes. The king named himself head of the Higher Education Council to revamp K–12 school curricula and establish higher institutions of STEM learning. The shining example was to be the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), north of Jeddah on the Red Sea, which opened its doors in 2009 to its first class of Saudi and foreign graduate students. Abdullah, who had donated $10 billion for its initial endowment, insisted male and female students mix freely in classrooms and elsewhere on campus. This was already the model for life on the US-style campus of Saudi Aramco, on the other side of the kingdom in Dhahran. But seeing it extended to KAUST was too much for one member of the Senior Council of Ulema, Sheikh Saad al-Shithri. He denounced the brazen practice of ikhtilat as a dangerous sin and called for the establishment of a committee of religious experts to prevent the teaching of “alien ideologies” there. A week later, Abdullah fired him.16 The most far-reaching reform of Saudi education undertaken by Abdullah, however, came about in a different way—bypassing the system completely. At a meeting between Abdullah and President Bush at his ranch in Texas in 2005, the two leaders drew up a plan to repair badly damaged US-Saudi relations stemming from the 9/11 tragedy. Part of their plan called for sending thousands of Saudi high school and college students to the United States for their education. Thus was born the King Abdullah Scholarship Program, through which Saudi Arabia spent $6 billion annually to send tens of thousands of students to foreign universities, not only in the United States but also in Europe, China, Japan, and Russia. By 2015, there were 125,000 Saudi students enrolled in US universities and colleges,17 and the total number of Saudis studying abroad, including their guardians, in twenty-three

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countries had reached 207,000, one-quarter of them women.18 The vast majority of these students returned to the kingdom tech-savvy and exposed to modern ideas and societies. Of all the reforms Abdullah initiated, the decision to send so many young Saudis abroad was probably the single most consequential to promoting the multiple demands for reforms at home, particularly from women. Abdullah also vastly expanded the number of Saudi universities— the number would more than triple to twenty-eight by 2015, not counting the opening for the first time of private ones, which numbered ten by that year.19 Abdullah inaugurated the most renowned of these in 2008—Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University, outside Riyadh. It was reserved for women only and ranked as the largest such institution worldwide, with a capacity to educate 60,000 students. Overall, the number of university students grew from 650,000 in 2006 to 1.7 million a decade later, with women making up slightly more than half the total of graduates (51.8 percent), with 24,500 of them postgraduate students.20 This mass of university-educated youth, particularly females, was to become the new social base of MBS’s power. Abdullah found it far easier to build new universities than to reform their curricula or for that matter those of grades K–12. I once attended an elementary school classroom in Riyadh where the children were learning to read by chanting in unison the Koran. I also remember one conversation at a private majlis in Riyadh with a Saudi member of Abdullah’s Higher Education Council in attendance. He complained that the task had proven daunting because of the tight grip Wahhabi conservatives held over the whole education system. Abdullah launched the first of several attempts to purge school texts of Wahhabi extremist teachings, but the lack of STEM-educated students continued the pressure to send Saudi students abroad. One failing of the King Abdullah Scholarship Program had been to send any Saudi student who applied to go abroad, no matter his or her qualifications, particularly high school students. Many were so ill prepared, they flunked out and went home. As a result, Saudi Arabia in 2016 limited the program to graduate students concentrating in STEM subjects, reducing the number in the United States to 67,000 the following year.21

Reform of the Government The apex of Abdullah’s reform drive came in February 2009, when he carried out his first reshuffle of the cabinet, appointing four new, “progressive” ministers. Chief among them was the first woman ever

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to hold a higher-level government position, Nurah al-Fayiz, whom the king appointed as deputy education minister for girls’ education. He also named his son-in-law Faisal bin Abdullah bin Muhammed education minister and liberal cleric Muhammed Alissa justice minister. The latter became MBS’s primary choice as well to present a new, more moderate face of the Wahhabi creed to the outside world. Alissa’s job under Abdullah was to reform the justice ministry and especially the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (CPVPV), otherwise known as the Hai’a, which had become the chief target of complaints about abuse of Saudi women. Abdullah gave the Hai’a a new head and appointed new blood as well to the twenty-one-member Senior Council of Ulema, in charge of issuing religious and social edicts known as fatwas. He also ended the practice of appointing only followers of the Wahhabi Hanbali school of jurisprudence to the council, adding Shiites and Sufis who adhered to more liberal Islamic schools of law. At the time, Abdullah’s shakeup of the government and religious institutions was viewed at home and abroad as practically revolutionary. Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, called it “a full-scale assault on ultra-conservative Islamists” who had “locked up” the country’s education and justice systems.22 Khashoggi, then editor of the liberal al-Watan newspaper, was just as enthusiastic. He called it “the true start of the promises of reform,” which would bring “not only new blood, but also new ideas.”23 The Middle East Research Institute, a Washington-based monitoring group, produced a special report in June 2009 listing all the changes that had taken place since Abdullah had become king and concluding they were “far-reaching” and “had changed the face of the kingdom.”24

Abdullah Unleashes the Media on Wahhabi Excesses Abdullah skillfully used the government-controlled media to set the scene for these reforms, particularly those affecting the sacrosanct Wahhabi establishment. He gave the green light to reporting on the excesses of the mutaween in enforcing the Wahhabi social code. This had been greatly facilitated by an incident in March 2002 that had horrified the outside world and Saudis alike: the mutaween were blamed for the death of fifteen girls in a school fire in Mecca because they had barred them from fleeing the building unveiled. Five years later, the local and international media were consumed with lurid accounts of a female victim of the strict Wahhabi

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code regarding gender segregation. The so-called Qatif Girl, a teenager from the town of Qatif in the Eastern Province, had been sentenced to 200 lashes for being in a car with her ex-boyfriend, even though both had been kidnapped and she was gang-raped by seven men. Abdullah eventually pardoned her, and he made clear where he stood on the issue of gender mixing or segregation. He used the state-controlled media and his labor minister to reprimand in public Sheikh Ibrahim al-Gaith, chair of the Hai’a. The sheikh had declared in December 2008 that Saudi labor code banned unequivocally the “mingling of men and women in the workplace.” With Abdullah’s blessing, the labor minister shot back that a new law had been issued that no longer contained the words “prohibition of mingling of men and women.” 25 Abdullah indicated emphatically where he stood in the debate by firing al-Gaith in his 2009 shakeup of the leadership of all the kingdom’s religious institutions. Abdullah manipulated the media in other ways as well to telegraph his views on the equally sensitive issue of whether Saudi women were obliged to wear a niqab so that only their eyes went uncovered. This was particularly true when it came to women appearing in the media. Little wonder, then, at the public shock when the king appeared on the front pages of Saudi newspapers in early May 2010 surrounded by forty women attending a conference on health issues. Not a single one was wearing a niqab. I happened to be visiting Riyadh at the time, and the picture of the king with these ladies was the talk of the whole city, as if an earthquake had struck. Added to the opening of KAUST the previous year, with its mixed student body, the picture conveyed a very strong message of the king’s intention to break down the ban on ikhtilat.

Arab Spring Sets Back Reform The Arab uprisings of 2011 changed the whole landscape for reform. The protests aroused a backlash from al-Saud hardliners and put the brakes on the momentum Abdullah had engendered. For the first time, Saudi Arabia sent its troops abroad to help crush a prodemocracy movement. Abdullah, in fact, sent his National Guard in March to neighboring Bahrain to help the Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty quash street protests by the majority Shiite population. Abdullah took just as firm a stand at home. Saudi human and political rights groups sought to seize the moment to organize a “day of rage” in the streets on March 11. Abdul-

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lah, by then besieged by his own health problems, had gone abroad for back surgery in the United States and did not return for three months. When he finally did on February 23, he was in a wheelchair and looking haggard. But the government seized upon his popularity to orchestrate a massive welcome that helped cool youthful Saudi ardor for the “day of rage.” A pack of foreign reporters found only one protester in the street to interview in Riyadh. It also helped that the king, upon his return, announced first $37 billion, then more than $130 billion, to help meet demands for jobs, housing, higher salaries, and bonuses. And so did a massive show of force by security forces on March 11. There was no “day of rage” in Saudi Arabia, though Shiite militants in the Eastern Province held their own demonstrations beforehand and separately. The royal hardliners, led by Interior Minister Nayef, now had their day in court. In October 2011, Abdullah appointed Nayef his heir apparent. The symbolism escaped no one, along with the new antiterrorism legislation the government proposed that year. It aimed at criminalizing political dissent of any kind, including disobedience to the king. It caused so much controversy at home and criticism from abroad that it took until early 2014 to become law. Human and political rights activists found themselves in grave danger as Saudi security forces responded, in the words of Human Rights Watch, with “unflinching repression for greater democracy.”26 The law included in its definition of “terrorism” any act intended to “insult the reputation of the state” or “harm public order” or “shake the stability of society.”27 But Abdullah did not perform a total backslide, at least not regarding reform for women. In September 2011, he announced for the first time in the kingdom’s history that women would have the right to vote in the next round of municipal council elections, scheduled for 2015. They would also be allowed to stand as candidates to become council members. He might have acted sooner so that they could have participated in the municipal elections taking place that very same month. But he apparently wanted to give the religious establishment time to digest what it had long opposed. Similarly, he postponed a decision on giving women the right to drive, even though the ban had long caused the kingdom to be the butt of world ridicule. I learned he had entertained the idea of starting the process by handing out licenses to older women to avoid any social promiscuity among young male and female Saudis that Wahhabi clerics were predicting was sure to happen. Even worse, one leading cleric, Sheikh Saleh al-Luhaidan, warned that

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driving “would automatically affect a woman’s ovaries” by pushing her pelvis upward, resulting in “varying degrees of clinical problems” when her children were born.28 Abdullah was clearly irritated by these clerics, and in May 2012 he fired one of his religious advisers, Sheikh Abdel Muhsin alObaikan, who had been speaking out against gender mixing and promotion of women in society. The king also called in twenty independent Wahhabi clerics and told them to stop issuing their own religious edicts, or fatwas, questioning his reforms. Liberals were equally targeted. In November 2011, a Riyadh court sentenced sixteen activists to ten to thirty years in jail, a number of them for trying to form an independent human rights organization. Aside from this breakthrough for women, however, Abdullah’s ardor for reform was clearly waning and the hardline policy of Interior Minister Nayef waxing. I got a taste of both the mounting public pressure for reform and Nayef’s iron fist at work during a visit in spring 2012. There was a sense of royal anxiety and of a race against time to head off a social explosion.29 Elsewhere in the Arab world, there was widespread chaos—three Arab leaders had fallen, and civil wars were underway in Yemen, Libya, and Syria. The al-Saud royals were particularly stung to see President Barack Obama abandon Washington’s longtime ally in Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak, even calling for him to step down. Was this a precursor of what he would do if an uprising took place in the kingdom?

Pressure for Reform Keeps Boiling Up There were, in fact, signs of unrest in Saudi society I had never imagined I would witness. Fed up with deplorable conditions, female students battled police on a university campus in southwestern Saudi Arabia, literally throwing their shoes at them. Male and female students alike on two other university campuses also held protests. Shiite militants were battling antiriot police in the Eastern Province, both sides using arms for the first time. Tens of thousands of Saudi students returning home from study abroad were beginning to make their presence felt, and a public opinion poll showed that nearly half the respondents (1,400 in total) believed the greatest challenges facing the House of Saud were poverty, youth unemployment, and the rising cost of living. Abdullah was struggling to find answers. He launched a program to force companies to send their foreign workers home to make way for Saudi job

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seekers. He also embraced the startup of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) being promoted by the World Bank and the Obama administration. But neither offered any immediate relief for unemployment among Saudis aged twenty to twenty-four, 40 percent of whom remained jobless. During my 2012 visit, I attended a diwaniyah, or salon, of human and political rights activists in Jeddah at the apartment of Waleed Abu al-Khair, who would shortly thereafter be thrown into jail. As it happened his wife, Samar Badawi, was at that moment in Washington where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and First Lady Michelle Obama were bestowing a Woman of Courage Award on her. She had already spent seven months in jail for defying her father to marry al-Khair and for her involvement in campaigns demanding for women the rights to drive and vote. The main speaker at the diwaniyah that night was Mohammed al-Qahtani, an economist from Riyadh who had come to explain to the assembled group their human rights under Saudi and international law. He, too, would shortly thereafter be arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison as a cofounder of the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association. Saudi security apparently was aware of the meeting, for while it was taking place the lights went out in the apartment but not elsewhere in the building. Immediately afterward, the landlord told al-Khair he was canceling his lease.

Activists Turn to the Internet What remained of the debate for and against reform during the last four years of Abdullah’s reign shifted noticeably from the diwaniyah to the internet. By 2012, Facebook and Twitter were spreading inside the kingdom like wildfire. Half the total Saudi population, 10 million Saudis, had taken to the internet, and half of them had Facebook accounts. 30 Although Saudi security was crushing all activism on the ground, it was still not sure how to deal with the explosion in social media. It had begun blocking some websites, such as one advocating reform, Toward a State of Rights and Institutions.31 And a new law came out forbidding both the print media and websites from “damaging the country’s public affairs, insulting senior clerics,” or “inciting divisions between citizens.” One of the first victims of the new censorship law had been Raif Badawi, brother of feminist activist Samar. He had created a website, Free Saudi Liberals, attacking Wahhabi clerics for their opposition to

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reform. In June 2012, he was also arrested and charged that his website “infringes on religious values.” Western-style liberals were not the only ones using the new means of communication to agitate. So, too, were Wahhabi clerics, both those belonging to the establishment and those independent of it. During the 2005 municipal elections, Wahhabi conservatives used social media to mobilize their followers and trounce liberal candidates. By 2012, three of the independent clerics had more than 1 million followers each on their Twitter accounts. The use of social media by ultraconservative clerics seemed a strikingly good measure of how far all of Saudi society had come toward adapting to modernity. In 1975, these same clerics had fought tooth and nail to prevent King Faisal from introducing television into the kingdom. At the 2012 Jeddah Economic Forum, I listened to Governor Khalid al-Faisal from Mecca, son of the king assassinated for introducing television into the kingdom, reflect on the impact the widespread use of the internet was having on Saudi society: “We feel afraid, and we love it at the same time,” he said, calling it a “two-edged sword.” Certainly, it was for security authorities. On the one hand, they were using it effectively to track down and arrest activists challenging al-Saud rule. On the other hand, they were unable to track down and silence the family’s most outspoken critic, the anonymous host of the Twitter account @Mujtahidd, who lambasted the ruling al-Saud royals day in and day out for their corruption and hypocrisy. (As of early 2021, Saudi security authorities still had not found a way to silence Mujtahidd, which it referred to as “Twitter User 1.”)32

Abdullah’s Mixed Record of Reform When Abdullah died in his early nineties on January 23, 2015, the reviews of his reign were decidedly mixed. He had begun his twentyyear-long reign by welcoming reform petitions and dialoguing with activists. It had ended in a crackdown on both. Had he really been a reformer? If so, what would be his enduring legacies? In my own assessment at the time, I argued that his most consequential reforms would be his promotion of women and sending several hundred thousand students abroad for an education.33 The former had caused him to initiate the risky process of curbing the powers and influence of the Wahhabi establishment, the main base of power and legitimacy for the House of Saud over two and a half centuries. The latter had laid the foundation for a new social and political base of the al-Saud

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dynasty—and perhaps, too, a new source of legitimacy. Abdullah had sowed a multitude of seeds for major reforms that MBS would shortly come to reap. 1. “Saudi Court Overturns Circular Allowing Men and Women to Work Together in Shops,” Al Arabiya English, May 29, 2012. 2. Norah O’Donnell, “Saudi Arabia’s Heir to the Throne Talks to 60 Minutes,” CBS News, March 19, 2018, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-crown -prince-talks-to-60-minutes/. 3. Jamal Khashoggi, “By Blaming 1979 for Saudi Arabia’s Problems, the Crown Prince Is Peddling Revisionist History,” Washington Post, April 3, 2018. 4. Embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Basic Law of Governance, March 1, 1992. 5. Chas Freeman, interview with author, Washington, DC, January 17, 2020. 6. David B. Ottaway, The King’s Messenger: Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America’s Tangled Relationship with Saudi Arabia (New York: Walker, 2008), 224. 7. David H. Rundell, “Crown Prince Sultan Backs the King in Family Disputes,” US Embassy, Riyadh, February 12, 2007, http:/wikileaks.org/plusd/cables /07RIYADH495_a.html. 8. Ibid., 176–180. 9. For the text, see “Human Rights Petition Circulated in January 2003,” MEED Quarterly Report—Saudi Arabia, July 31, 2003. 10. “Report: Saudi Crown Prince Receives Memorandum of Advice for Reforms,” Financial Times Information, NTIS, US Department of Commerce, World New Connection, January 30, 2003. 11. Suleiman Nimer, “Saudi Intellectuals Press for Reforms to Combat Extremism,” Agence France-Presse, September 30, 2003. 12. “President Bush Discusses Freedom in Iraq and Middle East,” remarks at the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, US Chamber of Commerce, Washington, DC, November 6, 2003. 13. For text of the petition, see “Saudi Reformists’ Petition to King Abdullah Urges ‘Justice and Shura,’” Al-Quds al-Arabi, February 10, 2007. 14. Salah Nasrawi, “Saudi Prince Criticizes Monopoly of Power at Heart of Kingdom,” Guardian, September 5, 2007. 15. “All You Need to Know About the Pledge of Allegiance and the Allegiance Council,” Al Arabiya English, June 21, 2017. 16. “Saudi University Critic Loses Job,” BBC News, October 5, 2009. 17. Belal Abujami, “Saudi Scholarship Program 2016 Update,” American Council for International Students, San Diego, CA, https://www-cdn.icef.com /wp-content/uploads/seminarprogramme/2016/miami__prov__1447__Belal -Abujami__Saudi-Arabia’s-Scholarship-Program---2016-Updates.pdf. 18. “Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Scholarship Programme Funds Thousands of Students to Complete Their Studies Abroad,” in The Report: Saudi Arabia 2015 (Oxford, UK: Oxford Business Group), 325–328. 19. “Saudi Arabia’s Expanding Higher Education Capability,” ICEF Monitor, July 18, 2018, https://monitor.icef.com/2018/07/saudi-arabias-expanding-higher -education-capacity/.

Notes

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20. “More Women Than Men in Saudi Universities, Says Ministry,” Al Arabiya English, May 28, 2015. 21. Abujami, “Saudi Scholarship Program 2016 Update.” 22. Paul Handley, “Saudi Shake-Up Aims to Ease Islamist Hold: Analysts,” Agence France-Presse, February 19, 2009. 23. Khashoggi, “By Blaming 1979 for Saudi Arabia’s Problems, the Crown Prince Is Peddling Revisionist History.” 24. Y. Admon and Y. Carmon, “Reforms in Saudi Arabia Under King Abdullah (Part I),” Middle East Research Institute, June 1, 2009. 25. “Saudi Law Doesn’t Ban Gender-Mixing in Workplace: Legal Expert,” BBC Monitoring Middle East, December 26, 2008, citing Arab News, December 25, 2008. 26. Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2012: Saudi Arabia—Events of 2011,” https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2012/country-chapters/saudi-arabia. 27. Human Rights Watch, “Saudi Arabia: New Terrorism Regulations Assault Rights,” March 20, 2014, https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/03/20/saudi-arabia -new-terrorism-regulations-assault-rights. 28. Mohammed Jamjoom, “Saudi Cleric Warns Driving Could Damage Women’s Ovaries,” CNN, September 29, 2013. 29. See David B. Ottaway, “Saudi Arabia’s Race Against Time,” Wilson Center Middle East Occasional Paper Series, Summer 2012. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ellen Nakashima and Greg Bensinger, “Former Twitter Employees Charged with Spying for Saudi Arabia by Digging into the Accounts of Kingdom’s Critics,” Washington Post, November 6, 2019. 33. David B. Ottaway, “Saudi King Abdullah: An Assessment,” Wilson Center, Viewpoints 68 (January 2015).

5 King Salman: The Daedalus of Saudi Arabia King Salman will always be remembered as the monarch who enabled his son’s rise to power at the expense of the House of Saud’s unity and harmony. Other than his fatherly devotion to Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), his motives remain a mystery and the topic of much speculation. After all, the king had devoted himself for decades to seeking and preserving family consensus. He was the archetype of a godfather, the head of the inner family council dedicated to resolving disputes behind tightly closed doors to keep the al-Saud family from dissolving into feuding factions. Chas Freeman, the scholarly US ambassador to Riyadh in the early 1990s, described him as the family’s “balance wheel.”1 The king was largely free from corruption despite the fact that as governor of Riyadh for nearly fifty years, he had overseen tens of billions of dollars in contracts in the transformation of the city from a desert town to a sprawling modern-day metropole of 7 million people. Salman was also a traditionalist and close to the Wahhabi establishment. He could have continued the tradition of passing the throne on from one brother to another, in his case even a full brother such as Prince Ahmed, another of the famous Sudairi Seven. Ahmed was seventy-three and in good health when Salman ascended to the throne. Salman could have put off the pending struggle for power among the next generation of princes for another decade to preserve peace within the al-Saud family. There is only one obvious answer to this mystery of motives: he wanted to see his favorite son, MBS, become king, and he and only he had the power to make it happen. Otherwise, the two were as far apart in beliefs as they were in age. Salman became king partly because of his impeccable credentials but partly, too, by an accident of history. He was one of the 61

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powerful Sudairi brothers and governor of the Riyadh region known as the Najd, the heartland of the al-Saud dynasty and its power base. He was the senior prince who most resembled in stature and looks the kingdom’s founding father, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, according to Robert Lacey, the preeminent biographer of the royal family, who also noted the great respect in which the Najd tribes held him.2 But for fifty years he was occupied with local politics and building the kingdom’s capital and thus played a minor role at the national level. I remember Riyadh rumors at the time he was named defense minister in November 2011 that his appointment had everything to do with his bid to be recognized as a contender and pretender to the throne. Certainly, he had no military experience in his background to qualify for defense minister. As history would shortly prove, Salman had made his move at just the right time. Two of his full brothers, Defense Minister Sultan and Interior Minister Nayef, had become terminally ill crown princes. In quick succession, one after the other died—Sultan in October 2011 and Nayef eight months later in June 2012. There was Salman, now a national figure holding a key post, waiting his turn. Two days after Nayef’s burial, King Abdullah named Salman heir apparent.

A Staunch Conservative When Salman took over on January 23, 2015, Saudiologists like me immediately focused on whether the new king, given his close ties to Wahhabi officialdom and well-known piety, would continue the reforms King Abdullah had initiated. In his youth, Salman had completed the gigantic task of memorizing the entire Koran by the age of ten. As Riyadh governor, he had sponsored public competitions among young Saudis to do the same. In fact, he was honorary president of the Charitable Society for the Memorization of the Holy Koran. During his long tenure as governor, he had also often taken the side of Wahhabi clerics opposed to promoting women and gender mixing. One leading US risk analysis company described him as “a staunch opponent of social and political reforms,” with a reputation while Riyadh governor as “a technocrat in economic affairs.”3 When US ambassador James Oberwetter went to say his good-byes to Governor Salman as he was finishing up his posting in 2007, he received a lecture on his personal attitude toward reform.4 The pace and extent depended on social and cultural factors. These factors, not the kingdom’s religion, were responsible for keeping Saudi

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women from being educated until relatively recently. Reforms had to be introduced “in a sensitive and timely manner.” But democracy could never be one of them because of the “negative reactions” it would provoke, akin to what had happened to the United States with its civil war between North and South. Democracy would only tear the kingdom apart. This was because Saudi Arabia was a conglomeration of tribes and regions, and “each tribe and region would have its political party.” Salman’s antireform disposition seemed fully borne out by his actions and appointments over his first weeks on the throne. He held a very public meeting with Sheikh Saleh al-Luhaidan, head of the Supreme Judicial Council, whom the late King Abdullah had sacked for opposing his reforms. He also appointed as his adviser Sheikh Saad al-Shithri, whom the former king had removed from the Senior Council of Ulema for speaking out against coeducation at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Additionally, he appointed three members of the al-Sheikh family, descendants of the eighteenth-century founder of the Wahhabi creed, to his first cabinet of ministers. After these conciliatory gestures toward the Wahhabi establishment, Saudiologists fixed their attention on the fate of the scheduled 2015 municipal elections, fully expecting them to be postponed or even canceled. Would he change his predecessor’s decision to allow women for the first time to vote and run as candidates? It came as somewhat of a surprise when the government, though not the king himself, let it be known in May through the local media that the elections would go ahead in December and that women would indeed be included as voters and candidates. But the king’s silence certainly suggested a lack of enthusiasm for this historic occasion.

Motives for Supporting His Son We can only speculate what went on in Salman’s mind to give such free rein to a son so radically different in thinking about reform and family consensus. The two had spent a lot of time together in Salman’s court and majlis, to the point where MBS had become his father’s “gatekeeper” and “proxy” at meetings of his majlis, according to Lacey, who wrote two books about the Saudi royal family.5 Salman might well have felt in part he was settling accounts with his predecessor, King Abdullah, who had banned MBS from holding any government position, as I recounted in an earlier chapter. Or Salman

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might have become fed up with the fractious politics of the House of Saud and given up on reaching consensus among his remaining full and half-brothers over which of them, or which of their sons, should ascend next to the throne. Many Saudiologists believed the king’s deteriorating health explained his behavior: he needed MBS close to him because his memory and mind were fading. There were reports that Salman suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. But Lacey for one insisted this was not true. Salman had even been tested medically and found free of it prior to becoming king. Still, there were signs his memory was slipping with dementia. Ambassador Freeman, who had had many meetings with Salman, suggested that the medicine he was taking for chronic insomnia might have also affected his memory.6 He remembered the king had been prescribed some kind of “blue pills,” and when he stopped taking them, his memory noticeably improved, but not enough for Salman to recognize Freeman at a meeting between the two several years before he became king. Whether as a result of Salman’s loss of memory or general fatigue, MBS became in Freeman’s words “custodian of his father.” However, the king was not so incapacitated that he could not fulfill many of his duties as prime minister and head of state. He continued to oversee cabinet meetings, meet visiting dignitaries, and talk on the telephone with the likes of President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin. And he attended a summit of Arab and European leaders in Cairo in February 2019. Circumstantial evidence also suggests Salman was no passive observer of his son’s machinations and actively conspired to help him best his royal rivals. There was no indication he ever considered passing power to his full brother, Ahmed, as family tradition dictated. He also broke his promise to King Abdullah to make Crown Prince Muqrin the next king, even replacing him with the first of Ibn Saud’s grandsons, Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN). Why Salman didn’t just appoint his own son crown prince at that point remains another mystery of Saudi royal machinations. Instead, he made his son deputy crown prince and further embedded the rivalry between MBS and MBN by making the former the head of the Council for Economic and Development Affairs and the latter chair of the Council for Political and Security Affairs. He had deliberately decided to let their rivalry play out or give the impression, anyway, that he was allowing time to see which of the two pretenders to the throne could win the backing of a majority of senior princes.

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Most surprising about Salman, the great family unifier, is that he had decided instead to become its great divider. Securing the throne for his son became his end-of-life mission rather than ensuring the unity of the House of Saud. This also caused him to discard the bedrock family principle of shoura, the practice of consultation among senior princes to obtain consensus, or close to it, on the line of succession. Salman might point to the approval of his son as crown prince in June 2017 by all but three of the thirty-five members of the Allegiance Council. But this approval came in the midst of the forced resignation of the sitting crown prince, MBN, under enormous pressure from King Salman and his son. The only option before the council was the king’s son, MBS, already deputy crown prince. The vote was a foregone conclusion. Another side of Salman makes his character even more difficult to comprehend. He was an early morning riser and read the Saudi newspapers voraciously. He reacted to criticism from reporters and commentators not by ordering their arrest, the hallmark of his son’s later approach to critics, but by calling them up and engaging them in debate over what they had written. According to one Arab reporter friend he often called, these were friendly exchanges with no resort by the king to reprimand or threat. As soon as MBS became crown prince, however, the calls from the king ended. So, too, did visits to the king from his friends whom MBS viewed as rivals. One such friend, his chief threat, was Prince Ahmed, a full brother who had publicly criticized MBS for leading Saudi Arabia into a quagmire war in Yemen. I recounted in Chapter 2 how the crown prince even sought to isolate his father from his own wife, Fahda bint Falah al-Hathleen. NBC News reported that MBS had been lying to his father about her whereabouts and long absences since 2015, telling him at times she had gone abroad for medical treatment.7 According to this account, the king had told President Obama during a meeting at the White House in September 2015 that he hoped to see his wife while he was in the United States and believed she was being treated at a New York hospital. Obama knew it wasn’t true but didn’t tell the king that. NBC News said its information came from an astounding number of sources—fourteen US senior officials—who reported as well that MBS had at times placed his mother under virtual house arrest. The reasons cited were his mother’s preference for another of her sons to become king and her disapproval of the tactics to which MBS had resorted in his quest for the throne, fearing they would shatter family unity.

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Father and Son at Odds MBS might have succeeded in isolating his father from his critics and rivals, but this did not prevent King Salman from pushing back from time to time against his decisions and policies. One wellinformed Saudi source listed four instances in which father and son had fallen out, in one case quite openly: (1) the initial public offering (IPO) of shares in the state oil company, Saudi Aramco; (2) the murder of Jamal Khashoggi; (3) the Yemen war, and (4) the Trump administration’s plan for a settlement of the Palestinian conflict.8 I will deal in greater detail with these issues in later chapters. Suffice it to mention here why the king might well have differed with MBS over the IPO of Saudi Aramco shares. It caused a lot of debate and a long delay because it was so controversial within the House of Saud and among government ministers. I will explain the reasons for the controversy in Chapter 7, and note here that the IPO was seen as akin to selling off one of the kingdom’s family jewels to foreigners. The murder of Khashoggi, which I discuss at length in Chapter 8, badly tarnished not only the crown prince’s image but the king’s as well. As for the Yemen war, it had provoked significant criticism abroad, a crisis in relations with the United States, and a costly military and humanitarian disaster for the House of Saud. King Salman, according to the Saudi well-informed source, was pressing his son in vain to extricate the kingdom from the Yemen quagmire by the end of 2019. Where the two differed most publicly and repeatedly, however, was over the Palestinian question. On the one hand, the king had long been devoted to supporting the Palestinian quest for a homeland based on UN resolutions regarding its borders and East Jerusalem as its capital. MBS, on the other hand, was known to be supportive of the Trump administration’s peace plan, which strongly favored Israel’s view of a Palestinian state shorn of much of its territory. Every time MBS hinted that he was ready to give up on the Palestinian vision of a homeland, the king issued a statement voicing his continued strong support for it. When MBS said in an interview with the Atlantic in April 2018 that he believed Israelis “have a right to their own land,” the king rushed to assure the Palestinians of the kingdom’s “steadfast position” that they too had “legitimate rights” to an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital.9 Later that year, the king was quoted as telling Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, “We accept what you accept and we reject what you reject.”10 To make clear his commitment to the Palestinian cause, he

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named the 2018 summit of Arab leaders held in Saudi Arabia the “alQuds Summit,” al-Quds being the Arab name for Jerusalem. Father and son’s differences did not stop with these four key issues, at least not according to reports in the foreign media, with a persistence that doubtlessly gave great pleasure to MBS’s many critics and enemies. When King Salman attended a summit of Arab League and European Union leaders in Cairo in February 2019, MBS stayed home and made use of his temporary status as “deputy king.” He made two critical appointments, reportedly without his father’s approval or knowledge. The first was to appoint Princess Reema Bint Bandar ambassador to the United States, the most important diplomatic posting for Saudi Arabia. She was the daughter of the former, longtime Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who had cast his lot with MBS. His second appointment, however, raised the greatest interest because of its implications for the line of succession. MBS appointed his own younger brother Khalid deputy defense minister after he had served less than two years as the kingdom’s envoy to Washington. Saudiologists like me took this as a sign MBS was positioning Khalid to become his crown prince when he became king. If so, Khalid would be treading the same path to the throne that first King Salman and then his son had traveled, using the Defense Ministry as a stepping-stone. The most consequential issue of discord between King Salman and his son MBS, however, was over the dominant role the Wahhabi establishment played in the life and politics of the kingdom. MBS was intent on curbing its influence sharply, launching a social revolution promoting women, and introducing Western-style secular entertainment into the kingdom. Wahhabi clerics had long opposed both, and the king, as I noted earlier, had never wavered in his support for the clerics during his long tenure as Riyadh governor. During my many trips to the kingdom, Riyadh had maintained its reputation among foreign residents as the Wahhabi heartland as reflected in the mutaween’s strict enforcement of gender segregation, closure of stores at prayer time, and austere dress code for women. It scarcely mattered if you were a foreign journalist or even a diplomat. One victim of this clerical zeal was the US consulgeneral in Jeddah, Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, who had a runin with several mutaween while visiting Riyadh in spring 2004. 11 They had barred her from entering a restaurant because she was not wearing an abaya, the black foot-to-shoulder robe required for Saudi women in public. She had identified herself as a US diplomat,

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but they didn’t care. To show their disdain for her diplomatic status, one of them spit on his hand and wiped it on the sole of his foot. In the end, she never entered the restaurant because the religious police ordered the owner to close its doors.

The King-Son Saga Understandably, the foreign media became transfixed by the neverending episodes in the king-son saga, especially after Khashoggi’s gruesome murder. The British press, habitually fixated on the travails of the British monarchy, found rich pickings in those of the Saudi royal family as well. For example, the Guardian reported on all kinds of machinations behind the king’s back while he had been in Cairo attending the Arab-European summit in early 2019.12 Its reporters made a case for “a potentially destabilizing rift” between the king and his son. In fact, they suggested that MBS might have been plotting a coup against his father. They claimed Salman had suddenly dismissed the security team MBS had assigned to him and brought in another of loyalists to protect himself. The newspaper then noted that MBS had not been part of the royal reception at the Saudi airport to welcome his father home and had disappeared from the political scene. He didn’t show up for several subsequent meetings of the cabinet or to greet foreign dignitaries, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia, who visited Riyadh in early March. Later, the Guardian reported that the king had even suspended temporarily his son’s authority over financial and economic matters.13 Such stories about a rift between the king and his son made for titillating reading. They were partly stirred by the opposition and disaffected princes with multiple axes to grind. Many have appeared in the British press because many Saudi activists and princes live in or visit London regularly. Reports of coups in the making began after the king gave his son the unusual title of “deputy crown prince” in April 2015. In October 2015, another London newspaper, the Independent, published “Eight of King Salman’s 11 Surviving Brothers Want to Oust Him.”14 These princes allegedly intended to replace the king with his full brother, Prince Ahmed. The main source was identified as a grandson of King Ibn Saud, though his name was not disclosed. The story also claimed there was “a clear majority” among Wahhabi clerics as well for the change. This might well have been true, given MBS’s open-door policy toward Western entertainment in

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the kingdom, which the clerics steadfastly opposed because of its “corrupting” influence on Saudi society. Another dissident prince who did identify himself publicly was Khaled bin Farhan al-Saud, who had sought political asylum in Germany in 2007, when King Abdullah was on the throne. In July 2018, he publicly urged Prince Ahmed and Prince Muqrin, the deposed crown princes, to unite and “change things for the better,” a hardly veiled call for a coup against King Salman.15 The following March, Khaled launched the Freedom Movement, based in Western Europe, calling for a constitutional monarchy similar to the British one.16 The Farhan family, descendants of a brother to the eighteenth-century founder of the Wahhabi creed, has comparatively little political weight in the kingdom. But Khaled was not the only voice of discontent. Following the Iranian drone attack in September 2019 on two oil fields in the Eastern Province, Reuters news agency found that “some members” of the al-Saud and business elite had also lost confidence in MBS’s leadership.17

Impact of Khashoggi’s Murder The most serious crisis of confidence in MBS came after Khashoggi’s murder in October 2018, primarily in the United States and Europe, and I have devoted Chapter 8 to this watershed event and its consequences. But it also shocked the political elite at home and shook the Saudi public as well. The question immediately posed was how would King Salman react to what the US Central Intelligence Agency concluded was the result of an order from MBS? Would the king reconsider his decision to make his son heir apparent? The answer was not long in coming. In early November, the king undertook a royal tour of his besieged realm, announcing literally hundreds of new local projects, costing billions of dollars, in housing, education, tourism, industry, and agriculture. He ordered the release from prison of bankrupted debtors and restored annual bonus payments to government civil servants, who had seen them eliminated in 2016 because of falling oil prices. Standing at his side throughout the tour was his disgraced son, whose image abroad had changed overnight from that of a great reformer to a bloodthirsty tyrant. When the king gave his annual state of the union speech November 19 at the opening of the shoura council, he had nothing but high praise for MBS’s Vision 2030 and for the kingdom’s prosecution of those

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declared responsible for Khashoggi’s death. The prosecutor had just announced the indictment of eleven Saudi officials and called for the death penalty for five of them. But he had cleared MBS of any responsibility in the journalist’s death. The decision to kill Khashoggi had come from the head of the fifteen-man “negotiation team,” Maher Mutreb. “We are proud of the efforts of the judiciary and the public prosecution,” the king declared.18

Rumors of Abdication King Salman had been the Daedalus of MBS’s meteoric rise to power. Salman made it possible for MBS to vault over two senior crown princes and reach heights he could not possibly have dreamed of reaching under any other king. Outsiders are left to imagine how conflicted the king felt about his son’s shattering of the House of Saud’s unity and turning on the Wahhabi establishment. What we do know is that Salman was uncertain enough of his son’s standing that he did not abdicate in his favor after appointing him crown prince in June 2017 or thereafter, either, at least as of early 2021. I remember discussing Salman’s possible abdication with Khashoggi on several occasions during summer 2017 in Washington, DC. Khashoggi argued that it would never happen for the following reason: MBS needed his father as a shield to protect him from his princely rivals within the House of Saud. They might well have been galvanized into blocking MBS if the king had abdicated in 2017. But they would not dare to move against him as long as Salman was still on the throne. The king enjoyed too much respect for his standing within the royal family. MBS needed time to consolidate his power, and only his father as king could give him that. MBS’s need only increased with time as he rounded up a dozen senior princes on anticorruption charges, launched a social revolution, imprisoned scores of Wahhabi clerics and activists, and ordered his aides to silence Khashoggi. MBS had made enemies on all sides, and only his father could protect him from their wrath. And so the king has for his first four years as crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. 1. Chas Freeman, interview with author, Washington, DC, January 14, 2020. 2. Quoted in Angus McDowall, “Saudi Prince Salman Named Defense Minister,” Reuters, November 5, 2011.

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3. PRD Group/Political Risk Service, “Saudi Arabia: Country Update,” November 1, 2012, https://advance.lexis.com/api/permalink/9591e088-de86-4b01 -ae08-11dc18a0196c/?context=1519360. 4. James C. Oberwetter, “Ambassador Farewell Call on Riyadh Provincial Governor Prince Salman,” April 1, 2017, https://search.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables /07RIYADH651_a.html. 5. Robert Lacey, telephone interview with author, April 16, 2015. 6. Robert Lacey, interview with author, January 14, 2020. 7. Carol E. Lee and Courtney Kube, “U.S. Officials: Saudi Crown Prince Has Hidden His Mother from His Father, the King,” NBC News, March 18, 2018. 8. Briefing by Saudi researcher for US Saudi specialists, Washington, DC, May 6, 2019. 9. “Saudi Crown Prince: ‘Israel Has Right to Exist in Peace in Their Own Land,’” Jewish Business News, April 3, 2018. 10. Stephen Kalin, “As U.S. Pushes for Mideast Peace, Saudi King Reassures Allies,” Reuters, July 29, 2018. 11. For more details of this incident, see David B. Ottaway, The King’s Messenger: Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America’s Tangled Relationship with Saudi Arabia (New York: Walker, 2008), 223–224. 12. Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Nick Hopkins, “Rumors Grow of Rift Between Saudi King and Son,” Guardian, March 5, 2019. 13. Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Nick Hopkins, “Saudi Crown Prince Allegedly Stripped of Some Authority,” Guardian, March 18, 2019. 14. Hugh Miles, “Saudi Arabia: Eight of King Salman’s 11 Surviving Brothers Want to Oust Him,” Independent, October 23, 2015. 15. David Hearst, “Call for Coup in Saudi: Dissident Prince Urges Uncles to Seize Power,” Middle East Eye, July 5, 2018. 16. Bel Threw, “Rebel Saudi Royal Forms Europe-Based Opposition Calling for Regime Change in Riyadh,” Independent, March 12, 2019. 17. “Exclusive: In Saudi Arabia, Criticism of Crown Prince Grows After Attack,” Reuters, October 2, 2019. 18. “King Salman Backs Son amid Furor over Khashoggi Murder,” Pakistan Today, November 20, 2018.

Part 2

The New Saudi Arabia

6 The Kingdom of Mohammed bin Salman No other Saudi pretender to the throne went to such great lengths to promote his image and pretensions publicly as did Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). The first sign came in 2015, two years before he became crown prince, when he purchased for $300 million a chateau near Versailles named after France’s eighteenth-century “Sun King,” Louis XIV. The same year, he bought, on a whim, from a Russian vodka tycoon, a 440-foot-long yacht for $500 million while vacationing in southern France. The young MBS’s “French connection” piqued my curiosity because I was unaware of its extent. It turned out that 2015 had been full of Saudi-French dealings, one of them not so pleasant. In August, MBS’s father, King Salman, rented a seafront villa in Vallauris, on the French Riviera. But after 150,000 local residents signed a petition protesting the closing of the public beach in front of the villa, the king cut short his stay and flew away to Morocco, where he already had his own summer palace. There was another far weightier dimension to this French connection, however. In September 2014, Salman and MBS had been feted in Paris by President François Hollande while on a state visit to discuss the Saudi purchase of French arms. The following September, MBS, who by then had been elevated to the rank of deputy crown prince and defense minister, returned to France to sign deals for a whopping $11.4 billion worth of arms. Whether there was any connection between MBS’s acquisition of Chateau Louis XIV and the arms deal remains a mystery. The purchase was carried out through various shell companies, apparently to hide MBS as the new owner. 1 But his attraction to a chateau by that name seemed apt, given his own glorification of 75

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absolute monarchy as the best form of government for Saudi Arabia. He once described the kingdom as “a network of thousands of absolute monarchies,” starting with its tribes and reaching up to the national level. “Moving against this structure would create huge problems in Saudi Arabia.”2

The King’s Dilemma MBS’s image of himself as a great reformer and a dedicated absolute monarch at the same time might seem contradictory, but his dilemma is hardly unique. The late political theorist Samuel Huntington studied the danger facing modernizing monarchs who, he noted, tended to centralize power to survive the challenge both from status quo forces opposed to reform and from new, supportive political and social groups demanding more. He termed this conflict “the king’s dilemma” and reviewed the outcome of various modernizing monarchies in the second half of the twentieth century. He found that the process was inevitably marked by an unhappy coexistence of reform and repression and monarchical versus popular legitimacy. Most often, the monarchs had failed to find ways to expand participation in governance by the new political forces fast enough, and the result had been “revolt or revolution.”3 He concluded that the future of traditional monarchs was on the whole “bleak,” and the best they could hope for was to remain as reigning figureheads. But Huntington did not live long enough to witness the results of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings: all eight Arab monarchs survived, whereas four elected Arab presidents fell. Still, MBS has fulfilled Huntington’s prediction that modernizing monarchs will be caught between old regime forces opposing reform and new ones favoring it. And, as Huntington also predicted, his response has been to centralize power and resort to massive repression. He has ended the autonomous fiefdoms established by his elders, eliminated the crown prince’s independent court, and centralized all security matters in a new state security presidency under the king. But he did not carry out this centralization of power just for the sake of reform. It was also aimed at eliminated any challenges to his power grab from rival royal contenders and pretenders to the throne and at stamping out all political activism of any kind. Politically, MBS’s concept of political “reform” seems to harken back to the iron-fisted rule of the traditional Arab and Muslim sultan, reinforced by the security techniques of the modern-day Arab military dictator.

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Citizens or Subjects This raises the question of what it means to be called a citizen in Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy rather than a subject. The latter term is not used by the kingdom or Saudi commoners, either. When I once asked a Saudi academic what the term citizen meant to him, he replied that it had the same meaning as in the constitutions of Western countries, though clearly it does not. The 1992 Basic Law of Governance uses the word “citizen” repeatedly but never spells out what the term means or enumerates such a person’s rights. The citizen must pledge allegiance to the king and has a duty to defend the kingdom’s Wahhabi creed, society, and homeland, in that order. But on the question of citizen rights such as freedom of religion, speech, and assembly, or on the meaning of human rights, the document is silent. The Basic Law of Governance states that the Koran is the kingdom’s constitution and that all government “derives its authority from the Book of God,” not from elections of any sort by citizens.4 Most Saudis questioning what it means to be a citizen have been leaders of the minority Shia population who have long complained about religious and economic discrimination and demanded equal treatment with the majority Sunnis. Since Wahhabi clerics regard Shia as apostates, and the Saudi kingdom often views them as little more than a fifth column for Shiite Iran, it is no surprise they complain of being treated like second-class citizens. In reaction, they have demanded that faith not be a criterion for citizenship.5 What the term citizens means in the mind of MBS appears closer to what most Western political scientists would describe as subjects of a monarchy. All reform is bestowed by the king at his will and whim, and Saudi citizens have no rights to initiate it, agitate for it, and certainly not vote it into enforcement. Wahhabi clerics, in issuing their religious fatwas, sometimes compare the relationship between the Saudi king and ordinary Saudis to that between a shepherd (al-ra’i) and his flock (al-ra’iyya).6 Just as the king is formally known as Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, he is also custodian of all Saudis. Certainly, MBS demanded total subservience of Saudis of all political persuasions to king and state. His attitude was reminiscent of King Louis XIV’s insistence on the divine right of the king to rule as he pleases, reflected in those famous words ascribed to him: “L’état, c’est moi,” or “I am the state.” The best example of this behavior on MBS’s part came in his arrest in May 2018 of a half dozen Saudi feminists behind the years-long campaign to gain the right to drive for women—just one month before the ban was lifted. The message

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seemed to be: I am solely responsible for granting this reform from on high, and Saudi feminists should not try to take any credit for it.

Repression Unbound MBS proved as “absolute” in his suppression of critical Wahhabi clerics and human and political rights activists as he was of rival princes. His opening salvo came less than three months after his promotion to crown prince in June 2017. That September, security agents rounded up twenty activists—a collection of Wahhabi clerics, liberal writers, academics, and journalists. “In recent years we cannot recall a week in which so many prominent Saudi Arabian figures have been targeted in such a short space of time,” commented Amnesty International.7 Among those arrested were two leaders of the former sahwa (Islamic awakening) movement of the mid-1990s, Sheikh Salman al-Oudah and Sheikh Awad al-Qarni. The former had by then 14 million followers on his Facebook and Twitter accounts, and the latter had more than 2 million. The government accused all of those arrested of working for the benefit of unnamed foreign parties and disrupting the “social peace in order to stir up sedition and prejudice national unity.”8 Saudi authorities had long suspected al-Oudah and al-Qarni in particular of being members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Oudah was a leader of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, based in the Qatari capital of Doha, where many brethren lived. They accused the two sheikhs of siding with Qatar, which Saudi Arabia and its allies had placed under an air, sea, and land blockade in June 2017, partly over its support for the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Oudah’s last transgression had been to express the hope Saudi Arabia and Qatar would find a peaceful resolution to their dispute. Al-Oudah had a reputation as a reform-minded Islamic scholar and had long presented the greatest challenge to the religious right of the al-Saud monarchy. He had been a leader of the first-ever dissident group to surface in the kingdom, the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights. It had been founded in the wake of the 1990– 1991 Gulf War, sparked by the presence of 500,000 US troops in the kingdom. This war had also birthed the sahwa movement. Al-Oudah had spent five years in prison for preaching a combination of antiSaud and anti-US stands and proliberal reforms. At different times, he had lent a voice of support for Islamic extremists attacking US targets and written an open letter to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin

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Laden condemning his bloodthirsty tactics and role in the killing of nearly 3,000 people in the 9/11 attacks.9 I had occasion to meet the sheikh in June 2013 at his apartment in Jeddah and to discuss his views on the historical significance of the unfolding Arab uprisings. He had become a student of Western revolutions and written extensively about their relevance to those taking place in the Arab world. He was uncertain whether the uprisings were real revolutions because “we Arabs don’t know what the word means.” But the circumstances in which the Arab uprisings took place were “kind of all the same” as those in which Western revolutions had unfolded. When it came to the potential for an uprising in monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, he was cautious. “Anything might happen,” he said. Reform, he contended, was “the only way to their salvation.” But he thought it more likely that the al-Saud family would seek to strengthen their power “in order to suppress the people.”10 As of early 2021, a special criminal court was still delaying a decision whether to impose the death sentence on both al-Oudah and al-Qarni. MBS dealt with the official Wahhabi establishment in a different manner. It stood as the main barrier to his plan for the “normalization” of Saudi society and still held a lot of religious sway over millions of Saudis. The kingdom’s highest Wahhabi cleric, Grand Mufti Abdulaziz al-Sheikh, was dead set against women driving or voting, not to mention Western entertainment such as movies, concerts, and the like. In January 2017, he condemned them as “a depravity” of which the outcome would be to “change our culture.” Movie theaters would surely lead to gender mixing, which “corrupts morals and destroys values.”11 Significantly, only a slim majority of the twentyone members of the Senior Council of Ulema approved the government’s decision to lift the ban on women driving.

Dealing with Wahhabism and Its Clerics MBS employed a variety of tactics to curb Wahhabi influence and end the reign of moral terror exercised by the mutaween over Saudi society. Whereas the late King Abdullah had engaged in scrimmages with them, MBS launched a full frontal assault on the main Wahhabi institution—the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (CPVPV), which commanded 4,400 mutaween and maintained a staff of 1,600 support personnel.12 The key date was April 13, 2016, when the government issued new regulations regarding what the religious police could no longer do. It stripped the mutaween of their

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powers of “arrest, restraint, following, pursuit, detention, interrogation, confirmation of identity and investigation.” And it restricted their tactics in carrying out their duties to prevent vice and promote virtue only “by advising kindly and gently.”13 This put an end to their authority over the public square, that is, their endless patrols and harassment of Saudis and foreigners in shops, stores, malls, and parks. Suddenly there was a change in the Wahhabi religious voice. The grand mufti and his like-minded ultraconservative clerics were silenced, and moderate ones were empowered to defend MBS’s reforms. One such new voice was that of Sheikh Qasim al-Ghamdi, the former head of the CPVPV in Mecca. A year after the new regulations were promulgated, he derided dire Wahhabi predictions that without the mutawa society would “plunge into moral corruption” and asserted that “the reality proves the opposite.”14 The Saudi Englishlanguage newspaper, Arab News, quoted the sheikh in a provocative article that would have been censored only a few years before: “The Saudi Religious Police Is Deemed Redundant by Many.” It was a sentiment indeed shared by many Saudis. Al-Ghamdi also riled Wahhabi clerics by pointing out that nothing in Islam said that Saudi women had to wear black veils in public. Another new Wahhabi voice of moderation was that of Sheikh Muhammed Alissa, who took over as secretary-general of the Muslim World League in August 2016. King Abdullah had appointed this Islamic scholar as justice minister in 2009 in a bid to loosen the hold of ultraconservatives over the judiciary. Alissa was particularly active in international interfaith gatherings of Muslims, Christians, and Jews Abdullah had been promoting. At a conference in New York in October 2018, entitled Cultural Rapprochement Between the US and the Muslim World, he had proposed a “peace caravan” to Jerusalem of representatives from all three religions to help promote a settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I met Alissa in early 2019 while he was in Washington to attend the annual White House Prayer Breakfast and promote his peace caravan proposal with US think tank scholars. He was not optimistic it would happen anytime soon because various political and logistical issues stood in the way.15 These included which religious leaders would participate and whether Israeli visa stamps would appear in passports of participants, fearing that would constitute recognition of Israeli sovereignty over Palestine. As it happened, we were meeting just as Pope Francis was making Vatican history in a first-ever visit to the United Arab Emirates, next door to Saudi Arabia. Would it ever be

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possible to see the pope come to Saudi Arabia? I asked. “Why not?” he replied, noting that Saudi religious leaders had already visited the Vatican, and Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran had gone to Riyadh for a meeting with King Salman in April 2018. Clearly, Alissa was a different breed of Wahhabi scholar than Saudi Arabia’s late ultraconservative grand mufti, Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Baz. He was famous, or infamous, for having issued a fatwa in 1993 declaring the world flat and anyone who believed it was round “an atheist deserving of punishment.”16 I can still remember a meeting I had with him at his Riyadh office in the early 1980s. He had begun the interview by asking whether I was Jewish, apparently because my first name is David. Even after explaining I was a Protestant, the blind mufti remained suspicious of me as he dealt simultaneously with my queries and phone calls from Saudis asking his advice, mainly on family and marriage matters. In addition to empowering a new breed of Wahhabi clerics and scholars, MBS won support for his social reforms from several members of the al-Sheikh family, descendants of the eighteenth-century founder of the Wahhabi creed. As noted in an earlier chapter, three members of the cabinet were al-Sheikh (the ministers of Islamic affairs, education, and state) as well as the shoura council speaker. But the most significant politically was the presence of Turki alSheikh at the head of the General Entertainment Authority, established in May 2016 with a ten-year plan to spend $64 billion. Its mandate was to arrange for scores of Western and Arab singers (male and female), bands, orchestras, and artists to come perform for the first time and for international wrestling, golf, tennis, and race car matches to take place in the kingdom. The General Entertainment Authority stood at the center of MBS’s effort to rebrand Saudi Arabia as a global tourist destination and a playground for Saudis as well. It figured in his Vision 2030, which aimed to diversify the kingdom’s economy away from oil, partly by promoting a tourism industry. But it had enormous political importance as well for MBS and his political gambit to build a base of popular support among entertainment-starved Saudi youth. At times, the constant stream of foreign entertainers and city festivals gave the kingdom a circus atmosphere. MBS’s critics suspected it was all part of an effort to deflect criticism away from himself after he was blamed for Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. They accused him of “sportswashing” the crime. Nonetheless, this massive dose of entertainment introduced overnight into the kingdom, and distinctly

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secular in character, marked in a dramatic fashion the end of the Wahhabi straitjacketing of Saudis.

Curbing the Royal Welfare State Another source of opposition to MBS’s reform agenda was other privileged royals. Saudi Arabia has at least 10,000 princes, though probably fewer than 100 of them are politically active. Still, all receive a monthly stipend from the government plus many subsidies in the form of free water, electricity, interest-free bank loans, and complementary plane tickets. In effect, the government operates a welfare state for the royal family. A cable from the US embassy in Riyadh sent to the US State Department in November 1996 gave some idea of the scope of this royal welfare system, outlining the scale of monthly stipends doled out to members of the al-Saud family by the Ministry of Finance’s Office of Decisions and Rules.17 The amounts varied from $800 a month for the lowest-ranking princes to as much as $270,000 a month for each of Ibn Saud’s thirty-five sons. His grandchildren received $27,000 a month, great-grandchildren $13,000, and greatgreat-grandchildren $8,000. The embassy estimated that altogether the government was doling out $2 billion a year in royal stipends in the mid-1990s, when the entire government budget was $40 billion. This was just the beginning. Royals also received “bonus payments” for their marriages, their palaces, and their land grants, which they could sell off to enhance their income. In addition, the cable noted another $10 billion in off-budget spending on various pet projects of the king, and five or six senior princes reaped the revenue from the private sale of 1 million barrels of oil per day. Whether these royal stipends have been reduced or eliminated entirely is not clear. When MBS arrested 380 princes, businessmen, and senior state officials on November 4, 2017, he said he was going after corrupt business and land dealings and embezzlement of government funds. As I detailed in an earlier chapter, at least eleven princes had been among those incarcerated in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The detainees were released after paying back to the treasury some of their allegedly ill-gotten gains. Altogether, the government claimed it had recovered more than $100 billion in cash or assets. The freedom of those arrested seems to have required a “confidentiality agreement” swearing them to silence because none has commented publicly on the terms of his settlement. The only public protest came from a group of eleven other princes who got together over a lesser issue: in Janu-

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ary 2018, their arrest was made public for demanding the government rescind a decree ending free water and electricity for their palaces. Not all princes or state officials arrested on corruption charges were against MBS’s social reforms, by any means. Prince Waleed bin Talal, the kingdom’s richest businessman, was a well-known promoter of social reform. He openly defied the Wahhabi ban on gender mixing to allow male and female employees at his Riyadh headquarters in Kingdom Towers to work side by side. Also “imprisoned” in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel for alleged corruption were Economy and Planning Minister Adel Fakieh, who worked on MBS’s Vision 2030, and Finance Minister Ibrahim Abdulaziz al-Assaf, who later became the foreign minister briefly. MBS’s crackdown on corruption at home might have been viewed in a more positive light abroad had reports about his own extravagant expenditure on luxury items not surfaced in the foreign media, such as his purchase of Chateau Louis XIV for $300 million and then of the superyacht Serene for $500 million. The most embarrassing and incongruous of his acquisitions became public just eleven days after his roundup of allegedly corrupt Saudi businessmen and princes on November 4, 2017. The New York Times detailed how he had arranged, through an associate, the purchase at a Christie’s auction in New York City of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece Salvator Mundi, spending a record-setting $450 million to obtain it. The fact he had gone to such extraordinary lengths to hide his ownership of the painting suggested he was aware of the risk to his reputation.18 After all, here was the Saudi royal destined to become Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, who had coveted a famous painting of Christianity’s “Savior of the World.” It was first reported that he had given the masterpiece to the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi, which said it was “looking forward to displaying” it in September 2018. That never happened, and its whereabouts became a mystery, until “the world’s most expensive missingin-action painting” resurfaced on MBS’s yacht, Serene.19

Suppression of All Activism MBS was not much kinder toward Saudi citizen activists than he was toward Wahhabi clerics and rival princes. Activists quickly became an endangered species. In this regard, MBS was not exactly initiating a new policy. As I detailed earlier in Chapter 4, following the Arab uprisings in 2011, King Abdullah had begun arresting leaders of the banned Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association,

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the main nongovernmental human rights group in the kingdom. Altogether, there were around twenty leading activists in jail by the time King Salman came to the throne in 2015. And under Abdullah’s reign, the first counterterrorism law was issued, affecting not just Islamic extremists but nonviolent protesters. In addition, Abdullah had begun a crackdown on Shiite activists who had held their own mini-uprising in 2011 in and around Qatif, their main stronghold, in the Eastern Province. In October 2014, three months before Abdullah’s death, the Saudi Supreme Court had upheld the death sentence of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, the Shiite firebrand who had dared advocate for a separate homeland for the kingdom’s Shia. The Shia make up 10 to 15 percent of Saudi nationals, with the majority of them living in the Eastern Province. (Al-Nimr was finally executed in January 2016, with forty-six other Shiite militants and Sunni terrorists.) After MBS became crown prince in June 2017, there was a noticeable hardening in the royal attitude toward all rivals—princes, wealthy businessmen, critics, and dissidents alike. This would eventually lead to the establishment of a veritable police state, which I describe later in Chapter 8. The process began with the arrest of several dozen clerics and academics that September and then the roundup in November of the more than 380 princes, businessmen, and senior officials. That same month, the government also promulgated a new counterterrorism law, called Crimes of Terrorism and Its Financing, criminalizing not just violent extremists.20 Anyone who portrayed the king or crown prince “in a manner that brings religion or justice into disrepute” faced five to ten years in prison. The definition of “terrorism” went far beyond resorting to violence to include “disturbing public order” and “shaking the security of the community and the stability of the state” to “exposing its national unity to danger.” Terrorism even included an attempt by anyone to appeal to international organizations to stop the Saudi government from carrying out “an action,” a term left undefined. MBS had effectively given himself carte blanche to stifle all opponents and criticism. The law had also stripped away the Interior Ministry’s authority to deal with these crimes, giving it to the new Presidency of State Security, reporting directly to the king. The application of the new law has been draconian and extended to female reformers, social media critics, and bloggers. The repression reached its apex with the murder of Khashoggi in early October 2018, the far-reaching consequences of which I discuss in Chapter 8.

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Criminal offenses had been charged against anyone “breaking allegiance with the ruler” and “trying to distort the reputation of the kingdom.” The total number of Saudi activists rounded up is difficult to determine. Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that as of May 2018 the government had been holding for more than six months 2,305 people for investigation, 251 of them for more than three years without ever appearing before a judge.21 It was not indicated in the Interior Ministry’s online list of arrestees whether they were all Saudis. The New York–based Committee for the Protection of Journalists counted twenty-six Saudis incarcerated, the third highest number worldwide in 2019 after nationals imprisoned in China and Turkey. Other steps to suppress critics and criticism included bans on traveling outside the kingdom, extended sometimes to other family members of the victim. In some cases, the government took to imprisoning relatives and using them as hostages to pressure dissidents abroad to return. The total number of Saudis under the travel ban had reached 1,000 by late 2019, according to two of my Saudi sources. One of them had been banned from traveling simply for expressing sympathy toward Turkey, whose ruler, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was regarded by MBS as an enemy of Saudi Arabia.

Jailing Feminists By far the most international attention went to the arrests of eleven women who had campaigned for years for the right of Saudi females to drive motor vehicles. It was almost as if MBS was deliberately seeking adverse publicity. The arrests took place on May 15, 2018, even though the much-anticipated ban on their driving was scheduled to be lifted June 24. When the Saudi government had announced the previous September its decision to allow women to drive, it had also warned feminists to stop speaking to foreign human rights groups and the media. One of the charges leveled against these eleven was that they had done just that. Their treatment at the hands of Saudi security agents caused outrage abroad. One of them, Loujain Hathloul, had been previously jailed but not harmed physically for driving a car into the kingdom from the neighboring United Arab Emirates. This time she was badly abused, according to her sister, Alia, who wrote in a New York Times opinion piece that her sister had been “beaten, waterboarded, given electric shocks, sexually harassed, and threatened with rape and murder.” 22 Another woman arrested was Eman

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Nafjan, whom I had interviewed during the 2011 Arab Spring because of her activism. A linguistics specialist in English, she had participated in various “drive-ins” and ran a blog called SaudiWoman in which she discussed at length the travails of her gender in Saudi society stemming from the male guardianship system. Nafjan was released from prison in March 2019 but was still on trial, whereas Hathloul was finally sentenced in December 2020 to five years and eight months in prison. She, too, was released in February 2021 after serving 1,001 days in jail with the remainder a suspended sentence that would be reimposed if she spoke about her ordeal and barred from travel abroad as well.23 The arrests and mistreatment of these feminists overshadowed the slow but steady improvements in women’s rights and conditions. As I outlined in Chapter 4, it had begun with the late King Abdullah’s decisions to send tens of thousands of them abroad for education, appoint thirty to the shoura council, and decree their right to vote and stand as candidates in municipal elections. The pace of reform, however, picked up noticeably after MBS silenced the Wahhabi establishment’s outspoken objections to any change. There are now more female than male university graduates, their numbers in the workplace are growing fast, and they no longer need a male guardian’s consent to seek a job or travel abroad. In fact, since September 2016 women have been openly petitioning the government to end the whole guardianship system, which is being dismantled piece by piece. The world of sports is finally opening up to girls and women at schools and at the national level. They can go to stadiums, albeit in separate sections. In February 2020, the government announced the creation of a soccer league for women. They are finally also able to mix with men at restaurants and other public places. But Saudi women still have an uphill struggle ahead. Their first participation in elections for the 285 city councils in December 2015 resulted in only 20 being elected, compared with 3,100 men, though the government did appoint another 17. By March 2019, only 70,000 women had received drivers’ licenses. The unemployment rate for women at that time was 31.7 percent, whereas for men it stood at 6.6 percent.24

Birth of a Saudi Diaspora The Saudi government’s silencing of activists worked at home but not abroad. Never before has any Saudi government faced such a challenge from a totally new phenomenon: a sizable diaspora of dissi-

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dents. For decades, the Saudi opposition in exile consisted primarily of one old-time activist: Saad al-Faqih, an Islamist who had established in London first the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights and then the Movement for Islamic Reform. I had received at the Washington Post his nonstop communiques exposing the alleged misbehavior of the al-Saud royals throughout the 1990s. He was a lonely voice in the wilderness back then but still active in 2019 predicting an explosion in Saudi Arabia “at any moment.” Another of this first generation of dissidents was Ali al-Ahmed, a Shiite activist who founded the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, DC, issuing scathing commentaries on the latest events in the kingdom. The new generation of Saudi dissidents is much bigger and far more active, operating from London as before but now also from the United States, Germany, and Canada. The Saudi government used to pride itself that all its students sent abroad were highly patriotic and came back home, thus avoiding a brain drain or an opposition in exile. This is no longer the case, as was so starkly reflected in the growing number of Saudi asylum seekers abroad. According to statistics kept by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the number grew from just 32 at the start of King Salman’s reign in 2015 to 2,170 three years later.25 And HRW and Amnesty International are not the only ones chronicling the abuse of human and political rights in Saudi Arabia. Since 2014, a Saudi group, Alqst, has taken over where the suppressed Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association left off after the arrest of all its leaders. Like HRW and Amnesty International, Alqst issues reports on new arrests and the alleged mistreatment of prisoners, their trials, their sentences, and any releases. It also maintains a “prisoners of conscience” list and produces an annual report. In December 2018, Alqst published a special report on the reign of King Salman, asserting it had “ushered in a period of repression unprecedented both in its scope and range of methods” and “exceeding in intensity anything seen before in previous eras.”26 The report was prepared before Khashoggi’s murder but still detailed the cases of more than 170 Saudis who had fallen victim to state repression by then. And it charged that Saudi Arabia had crossed all previous “red lines” of treating dissidents with the arrest and torture of women. Alqst’s annual conference in London provided another indicator of the growing diaspora of dissidents. The first one, held in 2017, had attracted just a handful of participants. The next year, “we were there in the tens, and we were there in the hundreds in 2019,” said Abdullah Alaoudh, a dissident academic living in Washington, DC.27

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Nor could the Saudi government stop bloggers living abroad, though it did silence 720 social media accounts inside the kingdom critical of MBS or his policies. Abroad, the most persistent criticism came from an anonymous Saudi using the hashtag #Mujahidd who had not been identified or silenced as of early 2021. Another blogger made no attempt at hiding his identity, Ghanem al-Masarir. Operating from London, he posted hundreds of videos on YouTube satirizing the king and especially his son, whom he nicknamed “the bear that has gone astray.”28 His videos had been viewed 300 million times by early 2020. The Saudi government had tried but failed to intimidate him into silence, to the point that British authorities warned him his life was in danger three weeks after Khashoggi’s murder in Turkey.

The Use and Misuse of Saudi Artists The only Saudi reformers who seemed to escape MBS’s wrath were artists—painters, filmmakers, photographers, and actors. The birth of a Saudi art movement had taken place in the early 1990s in a most unlikely place: Abha, the capital of the mountainous Asir Province, in the southwest corner of the kingdom. Prince Khalid al-Faisal, then the governor there, had acted as sponsor and protector of Muftahah, or “the key,” a cultural center in downtown Abha where a dozen artists gathered to paint, act, sing, and play musical instruments. According to Ahmed Mater, one of the participants, the Wahhabi clerics hated the sound of music and the mixing of male and female artists there. But Khalid, a poet and painter himself, defended the center from their efforts to close it down. “It was a big deal, a model for the country,” Mater reminisced in late 2019 at his spacious workshop in Riyadh.29 He himself had been a doctor but turned to photography, and his extraordinary pictures of pilgrims and the out-ofcontrol construction around the Great Mosque in Mecca went on exhibit at the Sackler Museum in Washington, DC, in September 2016. Under an outreach program called Edge of Arabia, the works of more than fifty Saudi artists were taken on a grand tour of the United States and Western Europe from 2014 to 2019. MBS seized upon these artists and exhibitions of their paintings, sculptures, and pictures to project a new image of Saudi Arabia to the outside world. He took control and credit for the flourishing new, and distinctly secular, anti-Wahhabi culture and used his Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Foundation (MiSK) to promote it abroad. MiSK was at the cultural forefront of his three-week tour of the United States

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in March 2018, holding a pop-up exhibition of thirty-three Saudi artists at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. At the time, Mater was heading up the MiSK Art Institute, dedicated to promoting the new Saudi arts movement at home and making its artists and their work known abroad. MBS signed an agreement with the former mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, at their meeting there on March 27, creating a partnership between Bloomberg L.P. and MiSK. In this case, it was to provide financial training for 262,000 Saudi students and called for Bloomberg to install computer terminals at thirty Saudi universities. There to explain the partnership was Badr al-Asaker, then board chair of the MiSK Initiatives Center. The goal, he said, was “to empower young Saudis to become active participants in the knowledge economy,” as outlined in MBS’s Vision 2030.30 This certainly was a laudable objective, but it was not MiSK’s only mission. In November 2019, the US Justice Department accused two Saudis, one a Saudi American employed at Twitter’s corporate headquarters in San Francisco, of mining the company’s vast list of accounts for the names of suspected Saudi dissidents and critics of MBS. They were charged with spying on behalf of a foreign power. One of them was identified as Ali Alzabarah, a Saudi national who had checked out 6,000 Twitter accounts at the behest of Saudi intelligence agents. The alleged scheme dated back to 2014, and both suspects had left Twitter the following year.31 I discuss this incident in greater detail in Chapter 8. Suffice it to say here that the trail of this spying operation led back to MiSK and its secretary-general, al-Asaker, but the chances he was acting on his own appeared slim because MBS was MiSK’s founder. It was yet another indication of how far MBS was willing to go to silence all critics and dissidents. He had decided to use the most successful cultural initiative and organization in Saudi Arabia as a tool of state intelligence. The implications seemed far-reaching for the scores of legitimate Saudi artists who had benefited from MiSK’s programs at home and its promotion of their work abroad. It was certain to cast doubt on all similar institutions and initiatives coming from MBS. Indeed, when a MiSK delegation showed up at a UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) youth forum in Paris in November 2019, 6,500 French people signed an online petition demanding that UNESCO cancel a partnership agreement it had signed with MBS’s personal charity. As of early 2021, MiSK’s fate remained unclear, but its website no longer listed the names of any official other than that of MBS.

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The MiSK spy ring lent credence to the assessment of the US Central Intelligence Agency that MBS had been intimately involved in Khashoggi’s murder. The alleged head of the hit squad responsible for the deed, Maher Mutreb, had been reporting back to al-Asaker, who was also head of MBS’s private office. The operation illustrated MBS’s willingness even to risk endangering Saudi Arabia’s relationship with the United States. Its discovery only served to provide more ammunition to his many critics in Congress and the US media. Because US authorities had not uncovered the Saudi spy ring inside Twitter until 2019, little wonder, then, that MBS had been emboldened the previous year to take a far greater risk and order the murder of his most prominent critic.

MBS Launches His Social Revolution Like Khashoggi’s murder, the use of MiSK as an arm of Saudi intelligence cast a pall over the social revolution MBS was unleashing inside the kingdom. I had watched this revolution unfolding during my annual visits to the kingdom. It really took off in April 2018, when the first movie was projected legally at the unfinished Financial District in Riyadh—that year’s sensation in the United States, the Black Panther. It features a Marvel Comics superhero who unites the tribes of the imaginary Wakanda nation and uses a fictitious metal called vibranium to develop advanced technology to become a world power. The film seemed to mirror MBS’s dream for his own and Saudi Arabia’s future. On that same visit, I watched MBS launch his first entertainment gigaproject at the village of al-Qiddiya, twenty-five miles outside Riyadh—two and a half times the size of Disney World in Orlando, Florida, with Texas-based company Six Flags as its projected anchor. Thereafter, movie theaters began opening all across the kingdom, and foreign artists, bands, and orchestra were invited to perform in the major cities. World Wrestling Entertainment had begun putting on annual shows before huge crowds after it signed a ten-year agreement with the General Entertainment Authority worth $400 million to the Stamford, Connecticut, company. It subsequently committed to putting on two shows a year. The one in October 2019 featured two female wrestlers, Lacey Evans and Natalya, obliged to wear bodysuits to cover their bare arms and legs in deference to fading Wahhabi dictates. International tennis, golf, and boxing matches also came to the sports-starved kingdom. I was again there in December 2019 when the world heavyweight boxing match between Mexican

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American Andy Ruiz and Britain’s Anthony Joshua took place in the middle of the night in Riyadh, with the prize money offered by Saudi Arabia estimated at $60 million to $70 million. (Joshua won on points over the heavier but visibly ill-prepared Ruiz.) The appearance of world-famous female singers seemed to provoke the most controversy, more from abroad than at home. Mariah Carey ignored a worldwide protest over her performance there in February 2019 while eleven Saudi women were still in prison for promoting the right of women to drive. But Nicki Minaj, who had initially agreed to sing at the Jeddah World Fest in July 2019, pulled out to “make clear” her support for Saudi women, the LGBTQ community, and freedom of expression. As I wrote in an earlier chapter, there was a surprising lack of backlash from Wahhabi clerics. The only reported incident of violence occurred in November 2019 at the King Abdullah Park in Riyadh when a Yemeni religious zealot jumped onstage to stab three foreigners, a woman and two men, acting in a musical performance. There were also online protests against women on video dancing at festivals and one rapping in the holy city of Mecca to a tune called “Mecca Girl.” But the minor scale of protests was what surprised both Saudis and Saudiologists like me the most.

Entertainment Tsunami Evokes Mixed Reaction As might be expected, Saudis’ initial reaction to this sudden tsunami of Western entertainment washing across the kingdom was mixed. The Wahhabi establishment has been silenced but must be aghast at what is happening. Young people clearly appreciate it, judging by the huge crowds turning out for performances. This is particularly true of the hundreds of thousands who have gone abroad for their education over the past two decades. But I also found concerns during my visit in December 2019 among approving older Saudis who still feared a Wahhabi backlash. “There is uncertainty because of the clash between the old and new cultures,” one academic friend told me. “For the first time, there is a sense of fear for the future.” The source of his fear was not just the clash of religious and secular cultures. There was a rising, highly educated class in the kingdom with demands and expectations for jobs and housing. For the time being, it was appreciative and enjoying the opening Saudi society. But he foresaw the day when this new class would come to take entertainment for granted and then focus instead on demands for jobs, housing, and eventually political participation.32

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What should outsiders make of this birth of a relatively secular counterculture to the oppressively conservative Wahhabi-dictated one? Is a clash inevitable, and what would be its political consequences? Is this counterculture here to stay even? These were questions I kept mulling over during my December 2019 visit while dining with my old Saudi friends in Riyadh’s now gender-mixed restaurants. I found myself skeptical of the thesis espoused by Sean Foley, author of an excellent book on the explosion in Saudi arts. He told a university audience in Washington, DC, there was no confrontation of cultures underway in Saudi Arabia but “two separate ones cohabiting more or less peacefully.”33 Most Saudis I talked to seemed to believe MBS’s cultural and social reforms were here to stay even if, as one put it, they might seem artificial. Still, many Saudis remained fearful of a clash of cultures because MBS was pushing his entertainment agenda too fast and too far. At that time, none knew of the pending breakout of the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought an abrupt respite to all entertainment in the kingdom for more than a year. But prior to the pandemic, I found some Saudis already ambiguous in their reaction to the counterculture taking root in the kingdom. They liked the festivals, entertainment, and mixing of the sexes, but they were already criticizing the tens of billions of dollars the government was spending to promote them “instead of fixing social problems.”34 A totally different view was expressed by Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi national intelligence chief and ambassador to Washington. He saw the reforms underway as far too slow in coming and, if anything, in need of acceleration. His father, King Faisal, had introduced some of the first reforms during his reign (1964–1975) and been assassinated over the introduction of television. “For me, it’s a continuation of what was happening before. There was a lot of momentum already,” he told me, citing some of King Abdullah’s reforms. “But the pace has picked up, and there has been no social backlash.” When I asked him why reform had come so slowly in Saudi Arabia, he readily admitted it should have happened much earlier. “Abdullah could have done more,” he replied, “but he had too many other things in his cup.”35 1. Nicholas Kulish and Michael Forsythe, “World’s Most Expensive Home? Another Bauble for a Saudi Prince,” New York Times, December 16, 2017. 2. Jeffrey Goldberg, “Saudi Crown Prince: Iran’s Supreme Leader ‘Makes Hitler Look Good,’” Atlantic, April 2, 2018.

Notes

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3. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 177–189. 4. Saudi Embassy, Basic Law of Governance, Article 7. 5. For a more detailed discussion of the citizenship issue, see Roel Meijer and Paul Aarts, eds., “Saudi Arabia Between Conservatism, Accommodation and Reform” (The Hague: Netherlands Institute of International Relations, January 2012), 19–24. 6. Ibid. 7. Amnesty International, “Saudi Arabia: Wave of Arrests Targets Last Vestiges of Freedom of Expression,” September 15, 2017. 8. Human Rights Watch, “Saudi Arabia: Prominent Clerics Arrested,” September 15, 2017. 9. See “Shaykh Salman al-Oudah’s Ramadan Letter to Osama Bin Laden,” Muslim Matters, September 18, 2007, https://muslimmatters.org/2007/09/18 /shaykh-salman-al-oudahs-ramadan-letter-to-osama-bin-laden-on-nbc/. 10. Sheikh Salman al-Oudah, interview with author, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, June 4, 2013. 11. See David B. Ottaway, “Will Saudi Arabia’s Social Revolution Provoke a Wahhabi Backlash?” Viewpoints 126 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, May 2018). 12. State Department, “2012 International Religious Freedom Report,” https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/208622.pdf. 13. Damien Sharkov, “Power of Arrest Stripped from Saudi Arabia’s Religious Police,” Newsweek, April 14, 2016. 14. “Year After Curbing Its Power, the Saudi Religious Police Is Deemed Redundant by Many,” Arab News, March 30, 2017. 15. Mohammed Alissa, interview with author, Washington, DC, February 6, 2019. 16. Christopher Reyes, In His Name (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2010), 568. 17. “Saudi Royal Wealth: Where Do They Get All That Money?,” November 30, 1996, http://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/96RIYADH4784_a.html. 18. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Mystery Buyer of $450 Million ‘Salvator Mundi’ Was a Saudi Prince,” New York Times, December 6, 2017. 19. Kenny Schachter, “Where in the World Is ‘Salvator Mundi’?,” Artnet, June 20, 2019. 20. Law of Terrorism Crimes and Financing, http://www.sama.gov.sa/en -US/AntiMoney/AntiDocuments/Law%20of%20Terrorism%20Crimes%20and %20Financing.pdf. 21. Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2019: Saudi Arabia—Events of 2018,” https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019#. 22. Alia al-Hathloul, “My Sister Is in a Saudi Prison: Will Mike Pompeo Stay Silent?,” New York Times, January 13, 2019. 23. Martin Chulov, “Saudi Women’s Rights Activist Loujain al-Hathloul Released from Prison,” Guardian, February 10, 2021. 24. “Saudi Arabia’s Unemployment Rate Drops to 12.5 Percent,” Arab News, June 7, 2019. 25. See https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/statistics/unhcrstats/576408cd7/unhcr -global-trends-2015.html; https://www.unhcr.org/5d08d7ee7.pdf. 26. Alqst, “Human Rights Under King Salman and His Son Crown Prince Mohammed,” December 24, 2018.

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27. Abdullah Alaoudh, interview with author, Washington, DC, February 27, 2020. 28. David Segal, “YouTube Satirist Has the Saudis’ Strict Attention,” New York Times, January 5, 2020, https://www.unhcr.org/5d08d7ee7.pdf. 29. Ahmed Mater, interview with author, December 7, 2019. 30. “MiSK Foundation Partners with Bloomberg L.P. to Advance Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 with Major Investments in Financial Training and Global Market Capabilities,” Market Watch, March 27, 2018. 31. Kate Conger, Mike Isaac, Katie Benner, and Nicole Periroth, “Former Twitter Employees Charged with Spying for Saudi Arabia,” New York Times, November 6, 2019. As regards MiSK secretary-general, see James Reinl, “Meet the Saudi Mastermind Behind the Twitter Spy Scandal,” al-Arab, November 8, 2019. 32. Saudi academic, interview with author, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, December 6, 2019. 33. Sean Foley, talk at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, February 21, 2019. Also, see Foley, Changing Saudi Arabia: Art, Culture, and Society in the Kingdom (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2019). 34. Saudi source, interview with author, Washington, DC, May 6, 2019. 35. Turki al-Faisal, interview with author, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, November 13, 2019.

7 The Fourth Industrial Revolution Even before he became crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) showed himself to be a dreamer on a prodigious scale. His dreams of grandeur pushed him to launch gigaprojects costing hundreds of billions of dollars to market himself as the architect of an imagined Fourth Saudi Kingdom. The brand-new city of NEOM would be the first to embody the digitalized economy and society of the Fourth Industrial Revolution he saw underway in China and the Western world. He began to make his dreams public in April 2016, when he unveiled his Vision 2030, to make Saudi Arabia one of the world’s leading financial, economic, and high-tech centers. He would start by establishing the kingdom as “the heart of the Arab and Islamic worlds” and a “global hub” connecting Asia, Africa, and Europe. He envisioned going on to create the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund and to turn the kingdom into an international financial powerhouse. The fund would grow to “take control over more than 10 percent of the investment capacity of the globe.”1 At home, Vision 2030 promised to radically transform the Saudi economy to end its dependence on oil at last and make the private sector rather than the state its driving engine. The plan, laid out in an eighty-five-page document, names no fewer than ninety-six “strategic objectives” in nine sectors of the economy and government to be accomplished over fifteen years. The most headline-grabbing news, however, was that MBS intended to sell off 5 percent of Saudi Aramco, the world’s most profitable oil company, in what he described as “the largest IPO in the history of the planet.” He put Saudi Aramco’s value “at more than $2 trillion or $2.5 trillion,” so that the IPO would generate at least $100 billion.2 In October 2017, shortly after becoming crown prince, MBS disclosed the capstone of his vision: a fantastical city run by robots, 95

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serviced by drones, and powered entirely by wind and solar energy. It would serve as an incubator of a new, digitalized economy and even a way of living that existed nowhere else on the planet. He called the city NEOM. The name was a composite, he said, of the Latin word neo, for “new,” and the Arabic word mustaqbal, for “future.” It would cost $500 billion to build from the sand up, cover 10,000-square miles (at thirty-three times the size of New York City), and stretch out for 290 miles along the Red Sea coast in the kingdom’s desolate northwest corner. MBS was certainly not modest about the project, which he later said he had first proposed to his colleagues in 2015 while mulling over the site for a new commercial and economic capital for the kingdom. Few would disagree with his description of NEOM as “truly outside the box” but they might his claim that it represented “a civilizational jump for humanity.”3 His vision of life there was somewhat Orwellian, to say the least. There wouldn’t be a need for a single supermarket because “everything will come to your house using technology,” he explained. All aspects of one’s life would be linked by artificial intelligence: “Your medical file will be connected with your home supply, with your car, linked to your family, linked to your other files.” It would be a prime example of “the Internet of Things.”4 He had already presented the new city’s first robot, named Sophia, and bestowed Saudi citizenship on her at an international conference of hoped-for investors in October 2017. Sophia was full of symbolism too, for she wore no face veil, head scarf, or black robe, the ubiquitous dress of Saudi women. MBS rambled on in a slightly enigmatic manner about how “the first robot in NEOM is NEOM itself.” MBS had plenty of foreign inspiration and advisers to feed his dreams for a futuristic Saudi Arabia. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, heralding a digitalized economy and way of life, had been the hot topic for several years at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Another inspiration had come from a 165-page study carried out by the American management consulting company McKinsey, “Saudi Arabia Beyond Oil,” delivered to MBS in December 2015.5 It outlined ways to end the kingdom’s addiction to oil by investing $4 trillion in building up the non-oil sector of the economy, which would double its gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030 and create 6 million new jobs for Saudis. The study was essentially a first draft of Vision 2030 made public the following April. It is worth noting that all these deliberations over Saudi Arabia’s future were taking place in the midst of an oil price crash. In 2014,

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the value of a barrel of oil fell from a peak of $112 in June to half that in December. The collapse continued into 2015, reaching a low of $40 per barrel by the end of that year, the lowest since 2009. The Saudi government had to take more than $100 billion out of its foreign reserves but still ran a budget deficit of $98 billion. Inside MBS’s economic brain trust, there was a sense of panic. It had determined that the government wasted $80–$100 billion on “inefficient spending every year,” according to Mohammed al-Sheikh, a former World Bank official and now one of MBS’s chief economic advisers. Had spending continued at the same pace, the Saudi government would have gone “completely broke” in two years.6 MBS had in mind not just NEOM and a Saudi Aramco IPO. His dream also included three other gigaprojects to kickstart new industries in tourism and entertainment. Two high-end resorts for foreign tourists—Amaala and the Red Sea Project—would be located south of NEOM on the Red Sea, making use of its pristine waters, undamaged coral reefs, and scores of small islands. Nearby are the ancient Nabatean ruins at the desert oasis al-Ula, the Saudi equivalent of those in Petra in Jordan. The government quickly launched an annual winter musical festival at the desert site, which had been closed off to foreign tourists because of Wahhabi disdain for tourism and the Nabatean ruins as well. As for entertainment, the main gigaproject would be located at al-Qiddiya, twenty-five miles outside Riyadh, where a playground two-and-a-half times the size of Disney World in Orlando, Florida, would be built.

Oil Giant Saudi Aramco Goes Public Four years after the unveiling of MBS’s dreams for a new Saudi Arabia, it began to be possible to assess which ones seem realistic and which fantastical. The most noted one internationally was doubtlessly the IPO of Saudi Aramco shares, launched in December 2019. The IPO took place only after repeated delays over three years caused by prolonged and fractious debate within MBS’s brain trust and between his Saudi and US advisers. The contentious issues included whether, where, and when to launch the offering and what its declared value should be. In the end, it didn’t achieve what MBS had hoped, but it was at least a partial success. MBS first had to replace his recalcitrant energy minister, Khalid al-Falih, with his older half-brother, Abdulaziz bin Salman, and endure a showdown with his US advisers. He also had to overcome his own father’s doubts about allowing foreigners to have

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a share of the al-Saud family’s main source of income and to find out how precisely the world’s largest, but highly secretive, state oil company was run. When MBS first disclosed his IPO plan in 2016, his goal was to sell off 5 percent of Saudi Aramco, and he unilaterally set its value at $2 trillion or more. His calculations seemed to be based first and foremost on what it would take to produce the $100 billion he had in mind to help swell the coffers of his Public Investment Fund (PIF), what other countries referred to as sovereign wealth funds. As always, he was in a hurry and wanted to launch the offering the following year. He also wanted to launch it on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the world’s largest. So, he turned to Wall Street giants to prepare the IPO—JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Citigroup. For them, it offered a bonanza in fees and a potential lucrative stake in Saudi Aramco. None of MBS’s plans for the IPO worked out as he had hoped. His Saudi financial experts warned him against launching it on the NYSE because of lawsuits still ongoing in US courts by the families of 9/11 victims, who claimed the Saudi government had helped the Saudi terrorists carry it out. His advisers considered London, Tokyo, and Hong Kong as alternatives but rejected all of them. One issue in all cases was the need to divulge Saudi Aramco’s finances and determine its exact reserves, which had held steady at around 260 billion barrels for decades. However, his US advisers told him his $2 trillion evaluation of Saudi Aramco was way too high and should be put at somewhere between $1.1 trillion and $1.3 trillion. As the quarrels went on month after month, MBS decided he could build up the PIF’s coffers in another way. He could have the PIF sell off its 70 percent holding in SABIC, the huge Saudi petrochemical manufacturing company, to Saudi Aramco and thereby raise $70 billion for the fund. He announced this in March 2019, causing further delay. Only after Energy Minister al-Falih was fired in September 2019 did final preparations for the IPO go ahead. To attract skeptical investors, Saudi Aramco promised it would include its new shareholders in a promised $75 billion annual dividend—no matter the price of oil or size of its profits. To further reassure investors, in early November 2019 Saudi Aramco issued its first-ever report on its finances in a prospectus required to launch any IPO. The headline news was that the company had earned $111 billion in net revenue in 2018, making it by far the world’s most profitable oil company. Its reserves, verified by outside evaluators, stood at 257 billion barrels,

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the world’s second largest after Venezuela. This was just about what the Saudis had always claimed, and foreigners had always doubted.7 On December 5, they unilaterally set the value of Aramco after a tense showdown in mid-October at Saudi Aramco headquarters in Dhahran between Saudi officials and their US advisers, who continued to insist on a far lower evaluation of the company’s worth than MBS’s estimate. They had issued dire warnings that his evaluation would scare off the foreign institutional investors needed to succeed. MBS was determined to go ahead anyway, so he parted company with the US banks and potential investors.8 The results of the IPO were bittersweet for MBS. Saudi Aramco offered only 1.5 percent of its shares, not the initial 5 percent envisaged, to 5 million investors, who began buying up 3 billion shares on the first day, December 11. The offering took place only on Saudi Arabia’s own Tadawul Stock Exchange, not New York or London as MBS had hoped, and participation was limited to Saudis and other Gulf Arab country investors. Instead of US banks, the Saudi government turned to two local ones and the London-based British HSBC to underwrite the IPO. The amount raised was enough to give MBS reason to declare victory, though it fell far short of his initial hopes. The 3 billion shares sold for $25.6 billion, beating out the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba for the biggest IPO in history until that time. The offered price per share put Saudi Aramco’s total value at $1.7 trillion. But excess demand was such that the Saudis added another 450 million shares, which raised an additional $3.8 billion to reach a total of $29.4 billion, bringing Saudi Aramco’s overall value up just short of MBS’s original $2 trillion figure. The bottom line, however, was that the IPO had raised less than a third of the $100 billion initially targeted. I was visiting Saudi Arabia the first day of the IPO and had caught up at a dinner party with Yasir al-Rumayyan, the Saudi official in charge of the offering.9 At that point, he was also the PIF governor and Saudi Aramco’s board chair. His star had been on the rise since MBS had appointed him head of the PIF in 2015. MBS then named him to replace dismissed energy minister al-Falih as the head of Saudi Aramco. Al-Rumayyan was as close to being Saudi Arabia’s economic czar as anyone, certainly ranking as MBS’s chief financial adviser. He was riding high when I saw him the night of the IPO, and he was mulling already whether to float more Saudi Aramco shares in what is known as a greenshoe option. He was both exhilarated by the outcome and furious with his foreign advisers, whom he largely

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blamed for the three-year delay in launching the IPO. He oozed a sense of triumph over his US consultants, who had refused to accept the Saudi estimate of the company’s value. But he also partly blamed the Saudi bureaucracy for “dithering for months” and partly, too, the diversion caused by the PIF’s decision to sell its 70 percent share in SABIC to Saudi Aramco. However, he was proud to note that the Iranian-sponsored drone-and-missile attack on two Saudi Aramco facilities in the Eastern Province just three months earlier (on September 14) had not adversely affected the offering. In his view, it was just the opposite; it had highlighted how fast Saudi Aramco could recover after losing half its production capacity—fully restored by the end of that month. As for the decision to offer Saudi Aramco shares only locally, al-Rumayyan confirmed they had ruled out the NYSE because of fears of lawsuits. He didn’t explain why London, Tokyo, and Hong Kong had also been excluded.

Saudi Arabia’s Gigaprojects The most visible domestic reforms the first four years of MBS’s de facto reign shared one common objective: opening up Saudi society to entertainment and the kingdom to domestic and foreign tourists alike. There was little doubt MBS looked upon entertainment and tourism as the chief cures for the Wahhabi establishment’s grip on Saudi society. But they also held out the hope of providing jobs for a large number of the hundreds of thousands of Saudis pouring out of universities at home and abroad. More than 1 million Saudi youths were looking for jobs in 2018, and the unemployment rate among those aged twenty to twenty-four stood at 36.6 percent. His Vision 2030 aimed to cut the overall unemployment rate, which stood at 12.7 percent that year, to 7 percent.10 Al-Qiddiya, outside Riyadh, was the main gigaproject symbolizing for MBS the long-delayed official permission to consider entertainment no longer haram, or forbidden on religious grounds. Its projected cost at the start was close to $8 billion. I was there to see King Salman and his son inaugurate the site, if not the start of construction, in an explosion of fireworks and laudatory speeches on April 28, 2018. Saudi officials kept comparing it with Disney World in Orlando, Florida, noting with pride that it would be two and a half times its size—at forty square miles, or the size of San Francisco— when it is completed in 2035. It will have three theme parks and sports, arts, and wellness facilities of all kinds. MBS was also

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delighted to announce that the Texas-based Six Flags would serve as its anchor, giving the project a world-class partner. The expectation is that al-Qiddiya will attract 1.5 million visitors a year as soon as its grand opening takes place, scheduled for 2023. As I sat in the stands for the celebration, it was difficult for me to imagine anything more diametrically opposed to the Wahhabi vision of the good life than al-Qiddiya. The entertainment city was destined to stand as the first embodiment of the new distinctly secular counterculture arising in the kingdom to challenge Wahhabism. The other grand construction opening, for foreign tourists, was taking place along the Red Sea coast south of NEOM, where two massive resorts are being built. Amaala seemed on the drawing board as fanciful as MBS’s overall Vision 2030. Its mantra is “wellness tourism,” and it is inside the Prince Mohammed bin Salman Nature Reserve, the first site named after MBS. It is rich in pristine waters, coral reefs, and small islands. MBS wants it to become one of the top-twenty worldwide tourist attractions, “better than the Maldives.” The language used to describe the multiple-centers resort and its targeted audience makes clear MBS’s ambition to propel Saudi Arabia to the top of international tourist destinations. Its publicists speak of it as an “über-luxury tourism destination” and the “Riviera of the Middle East.” It aims to attract an estimated 2.5 million “ultra-high net worth individuals,” or “global UHNWIs.”11 It aims to have 1,500 residential units at three sites, including “water bungalows,” and will be able to accommodate 2,500 UHNWIs at a time. Amaala’s cost of construction had still not been disclosed as of mid-2020, but it had set a target date for opening in 2028. South of Amaala, another tourist dreamland is in the making, the Red Sea Project. In its promoters’ description of its pristine waters, coral reefs, and myriad facilities, it seems much the same as Amaala, though also much larger; it will cover ninety islands and 11,000 square miles compared with Amaala’s fifty islands and 1,500 square miles. It apparently hopes to appeal to a larger audience than Amaala’s UHNWIs only, or, at least, its promoters were not talking in those terms in their struggle to raise an initial $3.5 billion just to launch the project. Hanging over the fate of the Red Sea Project and Amaala were questions not only of finances but what kind of dress and drink would be permitted. Saudi authorities were promising to give them a special status, a code of dress and conduct unlike those enforced elsewhere in the kingdom. But as of early 2021, the government had yet to detail any of them or disclose whether alcohol would be allowed.

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NEOM: Shining City in the Sand Without a doubt, the most ambitious new project of all is NEOM. It has an entirely different purpose and meaning in the mind of MBS. It is not a third hub of tourism but the embodiment of the futuristic digital “smart city” and the Fourth Industrial Revolution he dreams of bringing to the Saudi kingdom. He intends NEOM to depend entirely on artificial intelligence and the integration of masses of data into the so-called Internet of Things to dictate how human beings live, work, and play there. On December 10, 2019, I visited NEOM, or rather the vast site where this $500 billion imagined city of the future is supposed to rise up to become the economic hub tying together three continents. The site was still mostly desolate, aside from a few tiny villages and scattered oases. Local villagers were being removed and offered land elsewhere, but at least one tribal chief refused to leave his home and would later be killed by security forces in a shootout.12 The landscape consists of stretches of hard-packed sand, gorges, and seemingly prehistoric worndown mountains, some of which harbor ruins of the ancient Nabetean civilization. At the time I visited, the only finished construction open to foreign visitors was a work camp at the fishing village of Sharma. At another nearby location off-limits to foreigners like myself were five palaces for the king and crown prince that had cost $3 billion to build in one year. As a sign of support for the project and his son, the king had held his first cabinet meeting there in late July 2018, marking, as an aide to MBS said, “the historic beginning to a city of dreams.” I got a sense of this imaginary city talking to some of its designers over lunch at the work camp, which consisted of rows of containersized bungalows for the 100 mostly foreign city planners working there. NEOM was to consist of six urban clusters where the inhabitants would live according to their specialty. They would work at incubators for cutting-edge technologies and study possible future “disruptions” in different industries. The idea was to make it possible for all inhabitants of the six clusters to have to walk “no more than seven minutes” to get from their residences to the workplace or to a recreational center. There would thus be no need for cars, and trains would link the six clusters. Robots would pick up the garbage and clean the solar panels, which together with windmills would provide all of NEOM’s energy needs. A security planner was there studying how to manage the busy drones flying inside and between these six clusters, making food and other deliveries. Their enthusiasm was palpable for designing the first entirely digitized city in the world, for 1 million residents whose every daily need for working and living would be satisfied in new and dif-

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ferent ways. This including forecasting each and every inhabitant’s future health needs based on stored data about each person’s preconditions. In case of sickness, all they would have to do was to call “Doctor NEOM.”13 In January 2021, MBS announced “The Line,” his name for the six “carbon-positive urban developments” built in a 100mile-long chain of “hyper-connected future communities without cars or roads and built around nature.” They would be powered by “100 percent clean energy,” and artificial intelligence would assure pollution-free, healthier, and more sustainable environments for its 1 million residents. “We need to transform the concept of a conventional city into that of a futuristic one.”14 MBS envisages NEOM as not only a global incubator of cuttingedge technology and living but as the lynchpin of trade, transportation, and commerce between Asia, Africa, and Europe. The link to Africa would come from a bridge spanning the Red Sea starting just north of NEOM, crossing Tiran Island, and ending at a special industrial zone in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. How it would be a link to Europe, except for ship traffic passing through the Suez Canal on its way there, has never been made clear. Even the bridge to Egypt seemed a stretch of the imagination. On a visit to Egypt in April 2016, King Salman and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi announced plans for the King Salman Bridge, which would have to cross an earthquake-prone zone beneath the Red Sea and cost $4 billion. As of early 2021, NEOM was still largely on the drawing board, though MBS in announcing The Line said construction was scheduled to begin in the first quarter of that year and he was ready to spend between $100 billion and $200 billion on infrastructure. The US company AECOM, whose workers I had seen during my visit, had won the contract as chief consultants for building NEOM Bay City near the airport, which opened there in June 2019. Two Saudi companies, the al-Tamani Group and the Saudi Arabian Trading and Construction Company, were awarded contracts to build and manage housing for 30,000 workers.15 In August 2020, NEOM named US company Bechtel the project manager for building the infrastructure. But the big breakthrough for MBS and NEOM’s future prospects had come a month earlier, when the first foreign company invested in it. Air Products, a Pennsylvania-based firm, announced it was taking part in a $5 billion venture with Saudi company ACWA Power to produce “green hydrogen” transformed into ammonia for export, using only renewable energy generated there.16 Green hydrogen was still in its infancy, but it was fast becoming one of the new sources of carbon-free energy emerging in advanced economies of the world.

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Past White Elephants Saudi Arabia has a checkered past with building mega-industrial cities. The first two, Jubail on the Persian Gulf coast and Yanbu on the Red Sea, were launched in the late 1970s under the aegis of a special royal commission. Both have prospered as centers for refineries and petrochemical plants. But six others the late King Abdullah initiated have floundered, and two have failed completely. The most successful has been the King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC), also located on the Red Sea coast, sixty miles north of Jeddah. But it, too, has struggled to prosper. This city was designed to house non-oil clean industries to diversify the economy and accommodate 1 million people. It was also supposed to become a seaside resort for tourists, particularly pilgrims heading for, or coming back from, Mecca. When I visited the city in April 2017, fourteen years after its conception, it was home to only about 10,000 people, and hundreds of apartment buildings and villas stood empty. Its industrial zone was half empty, and overall it was running at 15 percent capacity. The project had achieved two goals, however. It had become a major port and boasted an eighteen-hole golf course with high enough standards to attract world-renowned players. I asked alRumayyan, MBS’s economic czar, at a briefing in Washington, DC, in late 2017 what lessons KAEC held for NEOM.17 He dismissed any parallel, noting that KAEC had depended totally on private investors, whereas the PIF he headed stood behind NEOM. In other words, the government would not allow NEOM to fail, and the PIF had the billions to ensure it didn’t. King Abdullah had left behind another hugely expensive white elephant: an entire financial district built from scratch on the outskirts of Riyadh under the revealing slogan Journey into the Sky. The idea was to make Riyadh the world’s fourth largest financial center after New York, London, and Hong Kong. The King Abdullah Financial District comprises sixty buildings, the tallest seventy-three floors high. They are linked by air-conditioned walkways and a monorail. The scheme also envisaged a rail connection to Riyadh’s international airport allowing foreign businesspeople direct access to it without a visa. Construction had started in 2005, but when I visited the project twelve years later in April 2017, only a few of the buildings had been completed. At that point, the massive project had come to a complete halt. Its only occupant was PricewaterhouseCoopers, there to assess how many more billions it would take to complete the financial district. One of its principal builders, the Saudi Oger Construction Com-

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pany, owned by Prime Minister Saad Hariri of Lebanon, had gone bankrupt. The state PIF was in the process of taking over ownership after siphoning $8.3 billion from the Saudi Public Pension Agency to complete the project. MBS, in his Vision 2030 road map, had conceded the project was in deep trouble. It had been undertaken “without consideration of its economic feasibility” and offered a “large oversupply of commercial space for years to come.”18 In fact, I was told the space there was equal to all the rest already available in Riyadh. The history of King Abdullah’s white elephants should serve as a cautionary warning of the problems MBS’s four new gigaprojects might also face. The two Red Sea resorts are crucial to MBS’s vision of a post-oil Saudi Arabia in which tourism will play a major role in generating growth and creating tens of thousands of jobs. In fact, the government hopes to more than triple tourism’s contribution to the GDP to 10 percent by 2030. McKinsey, in its “Saudi Arabia Beyond Oil” report, estimated the tourism sector could generate as many as 1.3 million jobs.19 But the success of both Amaala and the Red Sea Project depends heavily on foreign private capital and investors, even if the government builds the initial infrastructure. The example of KAEC, also dependent on private investors, remains a sobering reminder of what might lie ahead for these two new and even more ambitious and costly Red Sea gigaprojects.

Impact of Jamal Khashoggi’s Murder The fate of NEOM, in contrast, hangs on the willingness of US, Chinese, and Japanese high-tech companies to invest in MBS’s dream city of the future. During his three-week tour of the United States in March 2018, MBS focused on convincing the tech titans of Wall Street and Silicon Valley to do just that. But his own actions raised serious doubts about the risks of dealing with him. First had come the arrest and shakedown of leading Saudi businessmen and princes and then the murder of Khashoggi. The latter event had ended MBS’s hopes of attracting Amazon to set up two centers in the kingdom. Its owner, Jeff Bezos, is also owner of the Washington Post, which had published Khashoggi’s opinion pieces. Making matters worse for their personal relationship, US authorities later linked MBS to the hacking of Bezos’s iPhone and the extraction of information about his extramarital relationship with a television anchorwoman, all of which appeared in a National Enquirer blockbuster story.20

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Khashoggi’s murder initially had a deadening effect not just on Bezos but on many other foreign investors. This was vividly reflected in the reaction of Richard Branson, owner of two space companies. He had been in discussions with MBS on a $1 billion Saudi investment in his Virgin Galactic in return for which Branson would invest in the two Red Sea resort projects. After the Khashoggi incident, Branson halted all negotiations and resigned from the two projects’ boards of directors. He also declared Khashoggi’s murder had changed the willingness “of any of us in the West to do business with the Saudi Government.”21 Branson’s assertion was substantiated in the sharp decline of foreign investment in the kingdom. From $8 billion in 2014, it had plummeted to $1.4 billion in 2017. It jumped back up to $3.2 billion the following year, but that was still far below what it had been under the late King Abdullah ($16 billion in 2011).22

MBS’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Whether MBS’s Vision 2030 is ever to become more than a fantasy depends in large part on Saudi Arabia’s PIF. It has become MBS’s main tool, along with Saudi Aramco, for achieving most of his goals for a new Saudi Arabia. One study called the PIF “a sovereign wealth fund for the prince.”23 Just as MBS has centralized political power in his hands alone, so he has economic and financial power as well. He is PIF board chair. His hopes to kick Saudi Arabia off its addiction to oil depend on increasing its assets from the $360 billion in its coffers in 2020 to $2 trillion in 2030. That would make its PIF by far the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. Already, the PIF has become the promoter, financial backer, and main owner of MBS’s four gigaprojects— NEOM, al-Qiddiya, Amaala, and the Red Sea Project. It is also the largest shareholder in four banks that together hold 45 percent of all financial assets. Its subsidiaries include the Saudi Arabian Military Industries (SAMI), set up to produce 50 percent of Saudi arms requirements by 2030. Another subsidiary is Saudi Entertainment Ventures (SEVEN), which describes as its mission to “become the leading national investor, developer, and operator” of this new sector of the economy.24 It has a partnership with the US entertainment giant AMC. Together, they put on the first movie shown in the kingdom in April 2018 and plan to tap into the $64 billion MBS has earmarked to expand the sector by building fifty movie theaters across the kingdom. The PIF also holds two-thirds of the shares in the large Saudi Arabian Mining Company and is a major shareholder in various food product

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companies. The PIF has already achieved one of MBS’s goals, namely to establish the dominant role of the state in the Saudi economy. But this has left the private sector, supposed to replace the state as its new motor force, instead totally dependent on it. The PIF had also built up its investments abroad to account for 25 percent of its total assets by 2020. Its three largest commitments by then had been $45 billion into Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Group’s $100 billion Vision Fund, $20 billion in Blackstone’s infrastructure fund, and $3.5 billion in US car-sharing venture Uber. PIF head alRumayyan disclosed in 2019 that its cumulative investments in the United States had reached more than $50 billion.25 This estimate appeared in conflict with the PIF’s own filing regarding its US holdings as of September 2020, wherein it disclosed they had been reduced from $10 billion to just $7 billion.26 It was unclear what had happened to another $10 billion the PIF had set aside for investment in nine joint projects with the Russian Direct Investment Fund. In any case, the Saudi wealth fund was diversifying its investments into China, which had received remarkably little attention initially. Above all, it was turning its attention inward to fund MBS’s four gigaprojects, which required hundreds of billions of dollars just to build their basic infrastructures. In November 2020, MBS announced the PIF would invest $40 billion annually over the next two years in these projects. The PIF’s ventures have not always worked out well. It had attempted to purchase for $400 million the British soccer team Newcastle United but failed because of opposition from British human rights groups outraged by Khashoggi’s murder. It had invested $2 billion to buy 8.2 million shares and became one of the five biggest investors in Elon Musk’s electric car venture, Tesla. But it then sold almost all of them when their value collapsed, only to miss out on the spectacular rise in the company’s fortunes in early 2020. Its experience in Son’s Vision Fund also ran into trouble. One of its investments, in the US office-sharing venture WeWork, went sour when its IPO failed, and it later faced bankruptcy. As a result, the PIF declined to put any more of its billions into Son’s planned Vision Fund 2. Just how MBS could ever expand the PIF into a $2 trillion fund by 2030 remained unclear, though that was his goal. It had reached about $360 billion by mid-2020, but it was struggling to raise a lot more. The Saudi Aramco IPO had generated $30 billion, not the targeted $100 billion. It acquired another $69 billion with the sale of its 70 percent interest in SABIC to Saudi Aramco. But that was just taking money out of one state pocket and putting it into another. The PIF had hoped

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to raise another $200 billion by turning fourteen state companies into private-public partnerships, but progress toward that goal was moving at a snail’s pace. Another possible source for the fund was Saudi Aramco. In 2016, MBS had not dismissed the idea of the PIF taking ownership of the oil giant. At one point, he even described it as “part of its [PIF] assets.”27 That transfer theoretically would have given it access to some of its enormous profits—$111 billion in 2018 and $88 billion in 2019. But that had never happened, and the PIF had to turn to jumbo loans from foreign banks to meet its immediate investment plans, $11 billion in 2018 and another $10 billion in 2019.

MBS Reverts to State Capitalism MBS seemed to have abandoned altogether his goal of switching the kingdom’s economic motor from the state to the private sector. He had also changed the main purpose of the PIF, which had initially been to generate sources of income other than oil sales in the form of income earned on massive investments abroad. Instead, he had converted the PIF into the keystone of a state-driven development model akin to that of China’s and followed by South Korea in its early economic takeoff. As I noted above, the kingdom is the owner of all four gigaprojects underway to diversify the economy. An International Monetary Fund (IMF) report of July 2019 noted the expanding “economic footprint” of the Saudi central government, pointing to the “increased role of the PIF” as one culprit and stating it was “important that the public sector does not crowd out the private sector.”28 This was indeed what was happening. The role of the private sector remained highly problematic. MBS’s message to Saudi businessmen during the first years of his reign was hardly one likely to spur confidence. He had humbled the richest Saudi businessman, Prince Waleed bin Talal, and extracted more than $100 billion from 380 others he incarcerated in the RitzCarlton Hotel on anticorruption charges. The government had also delayed its payment to scores of private companies to the tune of $43 billion, which it did not pay off until 2019. Two pillars of the Saudi private sector had been taken down. The Saudi Oger Construction Company had gone bankrupt partly because of delayed government payments. The Saudi Binladen Group, the kingdom’s largest private construction company, had been forced to hand over 36 percent of its shares to the government and reduce the family’s representation on its board to just two out of nine members. The new “cronies” of the kingdom’s old system of crony capitalism had yet to emerge, but

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there was every sign they would be just as subservient to the al-Saud state as before, only serving a different master.

End of Oil Addiction Still Far Off Breaking Saudi Arabia’s addiction to oil still seems a long way off. Saudi Aramco’s oil sales still account for the bulk of government revenues by far—at least 70 percent in 2019 and 80 percent of exports. Furthermore, “non-oil activity is highly dependent on government outlays financed by the oil revenues,” according to the IMF report.29 Still, World Bank and IMF reports did give MBS credit for trying to generate sources of revenue other than oil. The government had reduced or ended its subsidies for gasoline, water, and electricity and instituted a 5 percent value-added tax (VAT), increased to 15 percent in July 2020. It had also imposed a residence tax on the 10 million foreign workers and their families. These steps had raised nonoil revenues from 5 percent to 8 percent of the GDP by 2018. And the government had succeeded in lowering its dependence on oil revenues, which had averaged 86 percent between 2012 and 2015. Oil seems destined to remain the lifeblood of the Saudi economy for at least several more decades. This means its fortunes remain tied to the sharp and often sudden swings in world prices, another of which happened in 2020. This time it was caused initially by MBS himself. Determined to show which country was the kingpin of the oil world, he opened a price and production war with Russia, a country producing just about as much oil as Saudi Arabia. The showdown ended two years of expanded cooperation between the kingdom and Russia to keep prices up by keeping production down. Russia was the biggest exporter outside the thirteen-nation Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), led by Saudi Arabia. After a well-supplied market was hit by the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020, Saudi Arabia wanted OPEC and Russia to reduce production by 2.5 million barrels a day. But President Vladimir Putin refused any cut in Russia’s production. He even refused a phone call from King Salman to discuss it. MBS then lived up to his reputation for impulsive and unpredictable behavior in a bid to force Putin to back down. Saudi Arabia not only cut prices by as much as $8 dollars a barrel but also announced plans to increase production by more than 2 million barrels a day, up to a total of 12.3 million a day. Both countries had ample foreign reserves to endure low prices in the short term, with Saudi Arabia holding nearly $490 billion and Russia $440 billion. They also had at least one goal in common: putting US shale oil producers out of

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business. These pioneers in a new technology had collectively brought total US production to more than 13 million barrels a day by early 2020, suddenly making it the world’s largest producer. And new entrepreneurs had turned the United States into an oil exporter competing with both Saudi Arabia and Russia for market share in Europe and Asia. I discuss the outcome of this three-way struggle later in Chapter 10 as well as how oil became a serious bone of contention in the USSaudi relationship.

MBS as Economic Czar After four years as Saudi Arabia’s new visionary de facto ruler, MBS had personally taken command of the Saudi economy. He was the head of both the PIF and the Council of Economic and Development Affairs as well as chief decisionmaker of Saudi Aramco. There was no sign he was giving up on any of his gigaprojects or goal of propelling Saudi Arabia into the digitalized world of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. To the contrary, he kept adding new ones. In July 2019, Saudi Arabia signed an agreement with Virgin Hyperloop, based in Los Angeles, to develop the superspeed technology (600 miles an hour) for a kingdom-wide transportation system. It will take some years yet to determine whether his gigaprojects, particularly NEOM, are leading Saudi Arabia into the Fourth Industrial Revolution or just toward hosting more white elephants. Oil will continue to dictate what is possible in the short and medium terms while facing a “sustained declining trend” in global demand.30 Its long-term future in a world increasingly powered by renewable energy, as MBS imagined for NEOM, seems a daunting challenge. The Saudi economy remains surprisingly stagnant. Only once since King Salman took over the throne has GDP growth surpassed 2 percent. It had even been in the negative in 2016 and barely above zero in 2019. In 2020, Saudi Arabia began with a price war with Russia and the United States and then was hit by the devastating coronavirus pandemic, which crippled the entire world economy. It led the IMF to forecast a 6.8 percent drop in the Saudi GDP for that year, an estimate later revised downward to 4.1 percent.31 The government had been forced to cut its expenditures by 20 percent, including $8 billion on its gigaprojects, and spend at least $57 billion in economic stimulus measures. The main problem was that Saudi Aramco, the country’s cash cow, was suffering grievously from low world oil prices. It was struggling to meet its commitment to pay out $75 billion in dividends, 98 percent of it to the government, which itself was facing a

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$79 billion budget deficit for 2020. Saudi Aramco’s own profits had fallen nearly 44 percent to just $49 billion that year, its total payments to the government in dividends, royalties, and taxes down 30 percent from 2019 to $110 billion.32 It was canceling multibillion dollar projects, issuing international bonds, and considering selling off some of its pipelines to raise cash.33 The government had turned once again to tapping its foreign exchange reserves to make ends meet, taking another $48 billion out of them. Altogether, the reserves had fallen $290 billion, from a high of $735 billion in 2014 to $445 billion in November 2020. A sign of the extent of its financial difficulties came in early 2021, when it broke with the other oil producers in OPEC and Russia to announce it was unilaterally cutting its production by 1 million barrels a day to help keep prices up. Altogether, it was becoming increasingly questionable if the Saudi government could afford MBS’s costly gigaprojects and myriad other ambitious goals outlined in Vision 2030. In June 2020, the staid Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, published a devastating critique of his “glitzy megaprojects,” urging him to reconsider his whole approach to economic reform.34 1. “Full Text: Saudi Arabia’s ‘Vision 2030’ National Transformation Program,” Saudi-US Trade Group, April 26, 2016. 2. “Full Transcript of Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Al Arabiya Interview,” Al Arabiya English, April 25, 2016. 3. “Crown Prince Mohammed Details Astonishing Plans for $500bn NEOM Mega-City,” interview with Bloomberg News in the National, October 26, 2017. 4. Ibid. 5. “Saudi Arabia Beyond Oil: The Investment and Productivity Transformation,” McKinsey, December 2015. 6. Peter Waldman, “The $2 Trillion Project to Get Saudi Arabia’s Economy off Oil,” Bloomberg News, April 21, 2016. 7. Saudi Aramco Company Prospectus, https://www.aramco.com/-/media /images/investors/saudi-aramco-prospectus-en.pdf. 8. For a detailed account of the showdown, see Kate Kelly and Stanley Reed, “How Aramco’s Huge I.P.O. Fell Short of Saudi Prince’s Wish,” New York Times, December 11, 2019. 9. Yasir al-Rumayyan, interview with author, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, December 6, 2019. 10. “Saudi Labor Market Update—2018,” Jadwa Investment, April 2019. 11. “Saudi’s Amaala Resort Will Have ‘Its Own Regulatory Structure,’ Target UHNWIs: PIF,” Arabian Business, July 2019. 12. “Saudi Tribal Leader Killed After Refusing to Give Up Home for NEOM Project,” Middle East Monitor, April 17, 2020. 13. For details on “Doctor NEOM,” see “NEOM to Be First Totally Digitized City in World—CEO,” Saudi Gazette, February 5, 2020.

Notes

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14. “His Royal Highness Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince and Chairman of NEOM Company Board of Directors, Today Announced the Line, a Revolution in Urban Living at NEOM, a Blueprint for How People and Planet Can Co-Exist in Harmony,” https://whatistheline-newsroom.neom.com. 15. http://www.arabnews.com/node/1555771/saudi-arabia. 16. “Air Products, ACWA Power, and NEOM Sign Agreement for $5 Billion Production Facility in NEOM Powered by Renewable Energy,” Air Products News Release, July 7, 2020. 17. Yasir al-Rumayyan, NEOM briefing, Saudi Embassy, December 5, 2017. 18. “Full Text: Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030.” 19. “Saudi Arabia Beyond Oil.” 20. See Stephanie Kirchgaessner, “Jeff Bezos Hack: Amazon’s Boss’s Phone ‘Hacked by Saudi Crown Prince,’” Guardian, January 22, 2020; Karen Wise, Matthew Rosenberg, and Sheera Frenkel, “Analysis Ties Hacking of Bezos’ Phone to Saudi Leader’s Account,” New York Times, January 21, 2020. 21. Richard Branson, “My Statement on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” October 11, 2018, https://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/my-statement-kingdom-saudi-arabia. 22. Figures are from https://unctad.org/en/PubicationsLibrary/wir2019_en.pdf. 23. Stephan Roll, “A Sovereign Wealth Fund for the Prince,” SWP Research Paper 8 (Berlin: German Institute for International and Security Affairs, July 2019). 24. Saudi Entertainment Ventures, “Saudi Entertainment Ventures (SEVEN) Heralds New Era in Saudi Arabia’s Entertainment Sector,” November 21, 2019, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/saudi-entertainment-ventures-seven -heralds-new-era-in-saudi-arabias-entertainment-sector-300963485.html. 25. Natasha Turak, “Massive Saudi Wealth Fund Zeros In on China, Plans to Open New Asia Office,” CNBC, May 1, 2019. 26. Saeed Azhar, “Saudi Wealth Fund Cut U.S. Stocks by $3 Billion Last Quarter, Reduced ETFs,” Reuters, November 17, 2020. 27. Mohammed bin Salman said in his interview with Al Arabiya, “The Public Investment Fund believes that no assets other than Aramco will be included in the fund. Aramco is part of the assets.” See “Full Transcript of Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Al Arabiya Interview.” 28. International Monetary Fund, “IMF Executive Board Concludes 2019 Article IV Consultations with Saudi Arabia,” July 18, 2019, https://www.imf.org/en /News/Articles/2019/07/18/pr19287-saudi-arabia-imf-executive-board-concludes -2019-article-iv-consultation-with-saudi-arabia. 29. Ibid. 30. International Money Fund, “The Future of Oil and Fiscal Sustainability in the GCC Region,” no. 20/01 (Washington, DC: IMF), January 31, 2020. 31. Sam Bridge, “IMF Eases Back on Forecasts for Saudi Arabia’s Economic Slump,” Reuters, October 13, 2020. 32. Isabel Debre, “Saudi Oil Giant Aramco Reports 30% Drop in Payment to State,” AP News, March 22, 2021; Isabel Debre, “Oil Giant Saudi Aramco Sees 2020 Profits Drop to $49 billion,” Associated Press, March 21, 2021. 33. For stories on Saudi Arabia’s economic straits, see Matthew Martin, “Saudi Arabia’s Financial Woes Mean It’s Squeezing Cash Cow Aramco,” Bloomberg News, September 9, 2020; Saeed Azhar and Hadeel Al-Sayeg, “Aramco May Have to Sell Assets, Borrow More to Maintain Saudi Dividend,” Reuters, December 16, 2020; “Saudi Arabia Says 2020 Budget Deficit Will Rise to $79 Bln amid Pandemic,” Agence France-Presse cited in Al Arabiya English, December 15, 2020. 34. Stephen Grand and Katherine Wolff, “Assessing Saudi Vision 2030: A 2020 Review,” Atlantic Council, June 2020.

8 “Who Will Rid Me of This Troublesome Journalist?” No other Saudi pretender to the throne had done a three-week public relations tour of the United States to sell himself as the legitimate heir to the kingdom and a worthy ally. Self-promotion was regarded as way outside the Saudi royal code of conduct. Kings and crown princes never gave interviews or held press conferences when they came to Washington to see the incumbent US president and other top administration officials. The idea of a Saudi king or crown prince submitting himself to tough questions from US reporters was inconceivable. Thus it was that the performance Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) put on starting in March 2018 was viewed by longtime Saudi watchers like me as nothing short of extraordinary. Little wonder that the US media were so easily enthralled by this handsome, thirty-two-year-old prince brimming with charm and self-confidence, the first Saudi royal ever to seek out television appearances, offer long interviews to leading columnists, and hold meetings with editorial boards of major US newspapers. MBS’s five-star tour began in Washington on March 20 with a meeting at the White House with President Donald Trump, his number one salesman, who welcomed him warmly with the words, “You are more than the crown prince now.” MBS had also shown he was, as the British media called him, “the prince of PR.” He prepared the US public for his trip with an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes and the publication by America Media Inc. (AMI) of a ninety-seven-page magazine, The New Kingdom. It was filled with laudatory articles about the prince, who readers were told in a banner headline was “The Most Influential Arab Leader” dedicated to “Transforming the World at 32.” AMI’s publisher was no less than David Pecker, a close friend of Trump’s. At Walmart, Safeway, and other major retail stores across the United States 200,000 copies were put on sale. 113

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At his meeting with MBS, Trump held up a poster showing how important Saudi Arabia was to the United States, or at least to its arms industry, indicating that $12.5 billion was in the pipeline, part of promised Saudi purchases totaling $110 billion. Afterward, MBS had lunch with Vice President Mike Pence and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Mike Pompeo, whom Trump had just nominated as his new secretary of state. That night, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who had already developed a close working relationship with MBS, held a dinner for the crown prince attended by Jason Greenblatt, then the White House’s special envoy for IsraeliPalestinian peace negotiations. MBS was the only Arab leader to have shown any interest in Kushner’s pro-Israeli peace plan in the making. The apotheosis of MBS’s carefully choreographed Washington splash was a gala dinner on March 22 for hundreds of US businesspeople, bankers, past and present high-ranking policymakers, think tank Saudi watchers like me, and media influencers at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was billed as the inaugural Kingdom of Saudi Arabia–US Partnership Event, to be held annually under the banner Together We Prevail. MBS sat next to House Speaker Paul Ryan, and speakers included former vice president Dick Cheney, former secretary of state James Baker, and Florida governor Jeb Bush, there to read a welcome statement from his father, former president George H. W. Bush. The big surprise of the night was the appearance of and rambling, nostalgic speech by the former Saudi ambassador to Washington, Bandar bin Sultan. He had held that post for twenty-three years, the longest by far of any foreign envoy. He had dealt with five US presidents and become indispensable to the Bush administration during the 1990–1991 Gulf War. That event was and still is regarded as the apex of US-Saudi cooperation. Bandar, of course, referred to it repeatedly that night as he asserted, “We have the power to shape history if done together.”1 MBS went on to visit New York, Boston, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Houston, embracing the movers and shakers of the US financial, high-tech, media, and entertainment world. He met four living US presidents—Trump, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. He held question-and-answer sessions with the editorial boards of the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times. He discussed investment deals with British billionaire innovator Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, promoting space tourism, and board chair of Virgin Hyperloop, developing superspeed transportation. On his West

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Coast stops, he dined with the likes of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, entertainment promoter Ari Emanuel, Walt Disney Company chair Robert Iger, and Snapchat head Evan Spiegel. In New York, he was photographed chatting with media billionaire and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg at Starbucks. MBS also met with Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates and television star Oprah Winfrey. These were not just publicity stunts. MBS discussed bringing Hyperloop One to Saudi Arabia with Branson and setting up Amazon data centers with Bezos. He arranged for the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) to invest $400 million in Emanuel’s entertainment and media agency, Endeavor. He received Gates’s seal of approval for his personal charity, the Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Foundation (MiSK) and for a joint $10 million initiative to encourage health and development projects by young entrepreneurs. It seemed the entire US political, financial, and entertainment elite was rushing to do business with the most dynamic pretender to the throne in Saudi Arabia’s modern-day history.

A Dissident Voice There was one notable dissident voice spoiling MBS’s impeccable coming-out party: Jamal Khashoggi, the kingdom’s most illustrious independent journalist. The day MBS arrived in Washington, the Washington Post Global Opinion section published a commentary by Khashoggi under the title “Why Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Should Visit Detroit.”2 His coauthor was Robert Lacey, the preeminent scholar of Saudi royal family history and author of The Kingdom. Khashoggi presented a biting critique of MBS’s plans for more gigaprojects such as NEOM and the two Red Sea resorts, noting the sad fate of the late King Abdullah’s six industrial cities and the Riyadh Financial District, which remained “ghost towns.” Detroit, in contrast, offered an inspiration for how a down-and-out city could make a comeback with new investments under dynamic leadership. “Many inner cities in Saudi Arabia fester today as Detroit once did— they are miserable Third World slums that completely mock the oil riches of the kingdom.” MBS should follow the example of Detroit, not NEOM, in Khashoggi’s opinion. Who was this uppity fifty-eight-year-old commentator admonishing the crown prince for his fantastical plans for a new Saudi Arabia? Making matters far worse, he was doing it from the capital

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of the world’s only superpower, and its leader, Trump, was MBS’s most important promoter and ally. Khashoggi was no ordinary Saudi journalist. He carried a name and a pedigree none other could boast even though his name and ancestry were Turkish. His uncle was Adnan Khashoggi, the billionaire arms dealer, whose own father, Mohammed, had been the personal doctor for King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, Saudi Arabia’s founding father. An even stranger connection was that of the architect, Emad Khashoggi, a distant relative. He had built the look-alike Louis XIV Chateau, outside Versailles in France, that MBS had bought for $300 million. Jamal Khashoggi had gone into journalism after graduating from Indiana State University. He had first been a reporter and then editor for Saudi Arabia’s main English-language daily, Arab News, in Jeddah, and then twice editor of the progressive Arabic-language daily, al-Watan, in Abha, capital of Asir Province, in southwest Saudi Arabia. As a foreign correspondent for al-Madina, his hometown newspaper, he had traveled to Afghanistan to report on the resistance to the Soviet occupation during the 1980s and met one of its most illustrious leaders, Osama bin Laden. He had not hidden his sympathies for the Islamists leading the resistance and became a specialist in the various Islamic groups operating there and inside Saudi Arabia. Saudi authorities would later accuse Khashoggi of being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, though he and his family denied it. He had, however, shown sympathy for some of their views. I had come to know Khashoggi while covering the 1990– 1991 Gulf War, during which the presence of 500,000 US troops in the birthplace of Islam had raised the hackles of Saudi Islamists, among them bin Laden. The leader had offered to raise an Islamic army for King Abdullah if the king would forego calling in US Christian soldiers. The shock of the US troops had sown the seeds for a revival of the Saudi Islamist movement known as the sahwa (Islamic awakening) in the mid-1990s. As a frequent visitor to Saudi Arabia, I had found Khashoggi the person to turn to for an explanation of Islamist groups inside the kingdom. From him, I first learned not only about the history of the Muslim Brotherhood in the kingdom but also other influential Islamist groups challenging the mainstream Wahhabi creed and its powerful clerics. Even more of a challenge to the House of Saud, according to Khashoggi, was Sheikh Mohammed Surur, a former Syrian Muslim Brotherhood member who broke away to form a more ultraconservative Salafi school of thinking particularly hostile to Shiism and Iran.

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Khashoggi told me Surur’s followers were particularly numerous inside the Saudi civil service. Surur had lived in the kingdom from the mid-1960s until 1974, when he was expelled. Because Khashoggi was known to have sympathies for the Muslim Brotherhood, I was never sure whether to believe him until I heard confirmation of his thesis years later. It came from a surprising source, the Islamic scholar MBS had appointed to serve as his new “moderate” Wahhabi voice and head of the World Muslim League, Mohammed Alissa. He described to me the impact Surur and his followers had exercised on the kingdom during an interview in early 2019 in the following terms: they were very hard-line Islamic literalists and had more religious influence in the kingdom than the Muslim Brotherhood. But they were not as engaged in political activism as the brethren were.3 This made it sound like Surur had been expelled mainly on religious grounds because he had presented a challenge to the Wahhabi establishment. But after Surur died in Qatar in November 2016, a leading Saudi commentator close to MBS described Sururism as a “Salafist Brotherhood movement” that very much had a “political vision” and even accused the late King Fahd of “betrayal” of Islam because of his less than pious social behavior.4

An al-Saud Family Insider Khashoggi also had close ties to the leading reformist branch of the al-Saud family, namely the al-Faisal. Two sons of the late King Faisal (1964–1975), Turki and Khalid, were the primary supporters of social and political reform inside the kingdom. A third son, Saud al-Faisal, had been the kingdom’s foreign minister for forty years before dying in Los Angeles in July 2015. Saud was a graduate of Princeton University, Turki of Georgetown University, and Khalid of Oxford. The latter, a poet and artist, had been behind the founding of the al-Watan newspaper and made Khashoggi editor, even though Wahhabi clerics found his criticism of their ultraconservative brand of Islam highly objectionable. In fact, al-Watan’s attacks had led to Khashoggi’s firing as editor in 2003. Khalid had been governor of Asir Province when al-Watan began publishing, and he had also sponsored the artistic center, Muftahah, in its capital, Abha, which I discussed in an earlier chapter. He then served twice as governor of Mecca Province, a post he still held in early 2021. Turki had just as brilliant a career. He had headed the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate for twenty-four years, resigning just ten days before the

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9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001. Two years later, he was appointed the kingdom’s ambassador to the Court of Saint James in London and then to Washington, DC. In both capitals Khashoggi served as Turki’s personal media and political adviser. No wonder, then, that reporters listened closely to what he had to say about Saudi attitudes and policies, not to mention what was going on inside the royal family. After Turki abruptly left Washington in December 2006 after serving only seventeen months, Khashoggi became involved in an illfated media venture financed by Prince Waleed bin Talal, the kingdom’s leading billionaire. He wanted to launch a twenty-four-hour business news channel to be called al-Arab and put Khashoggi in charge of setting it up. Several years passed with nothing happening as Khashoggi waited with growing impatience in his office at the top of Waleed’s Kingdom Towers commanding a spectacular view of downtown Riyadh. The cause of the holdup was the delicate issue of where to set up al-Arab’s headquarters. Khashoggi wanted it in Istanbul, Turkey, to escape pressure from Saudi and other Gulf Arab rulers. Waleed finally chose the Bahraini capital of Manama under pressure from the Saudi government, which exercised enormous influence over Bahrain’s rulers after saving them from a Shiite uprising in 2011. Finally, al-Arab took to the air on February 1, 2015. It survived just one day before the Bahraini government closed it down. It was Khashoggi’s fault. He had unwisely chosen to allow the inaugural broadcast to include an interview with a Bahraini Shiite opponent of the ruling Sunni al-Khalifa royal family. Because Khashoggi was at once both an insider and outsider to Saudi royals, I also listened closely to his views on the game of thrones underway inside the family. He often expressed viewpoints contrary to those prevailing among US Saudiologists. For example, after King Salman anointed MBS heir apparent in June 2017, the common speculation was that the aging monarch would shortly thereafter abdicate to ensure that his son would take over. Khashoggi didn’t think so. MBS, then only thirty-two years of age, was too unknown and short on legitimacy to take over immediately. After all, he had been promoted to heir apparent only after the king fired two crown princes, an unprecedented event in Saudi royal history. Khashoggi’s prediction would prove 100 percent accurate. The king stayed on and provided his indispensable backing to MBS as his son resorted to ever more ruthless and divisive tactics in his power grab.

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The Falling Out The onset to Khashoggi’s falling out with MBS can be dated precisely: November 10, 2016. On that day, Khashoggi participated in a panel discussion on the implications of Trump’s election for future US policy toward the Middle East. Held in Washington, DC, it was sponsored by the pro-Israeli Washington Institute for Near East Policy and included Dennis Ross, a former US ambassador to Israel and senior State Department official. Khashoggi told the group that Saudi Arabia was “rightfully nervous” about a Trump presidency because as a candidate his stand on Middle East issues had been “contradictory,” particularly toward Iran. He had been “vocally” anti-Iranian but had also spoken favorably about President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, a close ally of Iran. Khashoggi warned Saudi leaders of “false hope” in the new US leader, and said that they should be ready for “some surprises.”5 His advice was not welcome at the royal court, where Trump’s unexpected election had immediately triggered enormous hope for a radical change at the White House after outgoing President Barack Obama had engineered an opening to Iran and negotiated an agreement limiting Iranian nuclear capabilities. Saudi authorities rushed to disown Khashoggi as a representative of official thinking and in early December banned him from writing in all Saudi newspapers or appearing on any television channels in the kingdom. Even Khashoggi’s Twitter account, with more than 1 million followers, was blocked. Made a pariah in his own country, Khashoggi traveled in September 2017 to the United States in search of an outlet for his views. When it came to the upstart MBS, his views were somewhat contradictory. Khashoggi supported his social reforms and lauded his Vision 2030. But MBS’s crushing of activists and all criticism were intolerable to him. That fall, Khashoggi found a mouthpiece for the freedom of expression he so desperately sought: the online Global Opinions section of the Washington Post. His opening salvo came upon the arrest of thirty Saudi activists, both liberal reformers and Islamic activists, in September 2017, less than three months after MBS had become crown prince. His Global Opinions piece on September 18 was entitled “Saudi Arabia Wasn’t Always This Repressive. Now It’s Unbearable.”6 He recounted his guilt and torment at watching his friends being rounded up while he remained safe and sound in distant self-exile. He couldn’t stand it any longer even though he applauded the reforms MBS was undertaking. He had made his choice. “I have

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left my home, my family, and my job, and I am raising my voice. To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison.” Khashoggi would write twenty pieces for Global Opinions over the following year before his murder as he sought to adjust to a lonely and unsettled life of looking for a permanent place to live and work in Washington. About the same time he began writing for the Washington Post, he decided to apply for permanent residency in the United States and for a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where I am a Middle East fellow. He wanted to write a book not about Saudi Arabia or MBS but as a kind of primer for Saudis coming to the United States in which he planned to explain how its institutions and society work. Its title would be The US Made Easy for Saudis.7 One of the US “institutions” Khashoggi most appreciated was home mortgages. He regarded it as the answer to the housing shortage plaguing middle-class Saudis, and he pushed for the adoption of the practice in his commentaries in the Saudi media. In his book proposal, he wrote, “It’s the most important issue in Saudi Arabia today.” His campaign had had results. In 2012, the Saudi government issued its first law on home mortgages. It took time for banks to buy into the practice, but eventually it caught on. One of the goals of MBS’s vision for a new Saudi Arabia was to ensure that 70 percent of Saudis had their own homes, and he had come to see mortgages as indispensable to achieving that goal by 2030.

Democracy for the Arab World Now Khashoggi also began promoting a project to establish a nonprofit foundation he planned to call Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). He argued in his book proposal for the Woodrow Wilson Center that democracy was not incompatible with the “sociopolitical fabric” of Arab society and that its “tools,” particularly public debate in a free media, could help accelerate both reforms and “control of public funds” to combat corruption. He also wanted to organize an army of “bees” to counter what the opposition abroad was calling the “flies” of the Saudi government’s cyberwar against individuals critical of MBS. These “flies” were Saudi security trolls assigned to praise everything MBS said or did and denigrate his critics. The head of this campaign was Saud al-Qahtani, his infamous media czar, who would later play a key role in Khashoggi’s assassination. Altogether, Khashoggi was setting himself up to become the main thorn in the side of MBS, the most credible Saudi voice challenging

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his image as a great reformer and up-and-coming world leader. What’s more, Khashoggi was writing and speaking out in the capital of Saudi Arabia’s most important foreign supporter. It was shaping up to become a contest of wills and credibility between Khashoggi and MBS, and it was playing out right in front of Trump. We know now that MBS’s determination to silence his chief adversary hardened in October 2017, one year before his murder. That’s when the US National Security Agency (NSA) had recorded a conversation between MBS and a top aide in which the crown prince said he would use “a bullet” on Khashoggi if he refused to return to Saudi Arabia voluntarily and end his campaign of vilification.8 Unfortunately, the recording was not discovered in the NSA’s archives until after his death. I saw Khashoggi over various lunches during his lonely year of exile in Washington. Saudi authorities were trying to entice him into coming back home with offers of a prominent media position, and for a while he wavered. Al-Qahtani had called him repeatedly. But Khashoggi remained suspicious it would be a one-way ticket and put an end forever to his freedom of speech and career. He was well aware of the Saudi practice of kidnapping opponents and critics, even princes, living in self-exile like him. In August 2017, the BBC aired the history of three princes who had been kidnapped between 2015 and 2017 while living in Europe and forcibly returned to the kingdom by Saudi security agents.9 The most daring rendition by far, however, had been carried out in August 2015 at the airport in Beirut, Lebanon: as Ahmed Al-Mughassil, a Saudi Shiite, was debarking a plane coming from Tehran, Iran, Saudi agents acting on a tip from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) captured the mastermind of the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 and whisked him back to Saudi Arabia. The bomb had blown up the living complex of US military personnel stationed in Khobar, a city in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, resulting in the death of nineteen US officers and soldiers. After his capture at the Beirut airport, Al-Mughassil was never heard from again and was almost certainly executed. All four renditions had happened after King Salman came to power, with MBS at his side. One of the princes, Sultan bin Turki bin Abdulaziz, had the distinction of being kidnapped twice, first in 2003 and then again in 2016. Khashoggi continued his planning to launch DAWN, with its main office on Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown Washington. He told me over one lunch in July that he had found the financial backing for it but was still struggling to find the personnel to run it. He had barely managed to launch the project before his death. And he

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never became an Arab reporter fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center because he had failed to obtain the necessary permanent residency green card. Khashoggi’s last Global Opinions piece for the Washington Post, published fifteen days after his death, was a heartrending plea for freedom of expression in the Arab world.10 An iron curtain was being lowered by Arab rulers on freedom of expression, and Arabs “need[ed] something similar” to the role Radio Free Europe had played during the Cold War to keep alive the hope for freedom behind the Iron Curtain. He doubtless was thinking of his DAWN project when he wrote, “We need to provide a platform for Arab voices.” Another posthumous article appeared in the online Londonbased newspaper Middle East Eye, where Khashoggi had also been publishing his commentaries under a pseudonym.11 This time it had been a plea to the leaders of both Saudi Arabia and Iran to stop meddling in each other’s affairs and begin respecting the rights of their own people. He pointed to certain troubling similarities he saw in both Saudi and Iranian leadership: both had the worst human rights records of any Middle East countries, both had failed “notoriously” to respect the rights of their citizens, and both had jailed those who “dare[d] to speak out.”

The Assassination Plot Unfolds It was only a matter of time before MBS would take action to silence his most prestigious critic, Khashoggi, holding forth from the pages of the Washington Post and setting up a foundation to besmirch the crown prince’s image. The opportunity came in late September 2018. Khashoggi had divorced his Saudi wife and fallen in love with a young Turkish scholar, Hatice Cengiz, he had met at a conference on the Middle East in Istanbul that May. They were engaged and even bound together in a religious marriage. But in order to be recognized as husband and wife in Turkey, they needed a civil marriage certificate, and that required an official Saudi document verifying he was unmarried at the time. He tried to obtain it at the Saudi embassy in Washington but was told he would have to go to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where they planned to hold a civil wedding. And so he did. On September 28, he walked into the consulate and, after a surprisingly cordial reception, was told to come back October 2 to collect the document. Alerted to its good fortune, MBS’s secret security Tiger Squad, specializing in forcible renditions, quickly laid plans to seize Khashoggi. The two

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masterminds of the operation were among MBS’s closest associates, al-Qahtani and Major General Ahmed al-Asiri, the deputy chief of Saudi intelligence. The former was known as “Lord of the Flies” by Saudi dissidents after the legions of trolls he commanded attacking them on social media. Al-Asiri was best known to foreign reporters as the official government spokesman for the Saudi-led Arab coalition waging war against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. The two ringleaders selected fifteen members of MBS’s Tiger Squad, who rushed to Istanbul to be inside the consulate when Khashoggi came back for the document. Reams of articles have been written about what happened next, and the lawsuit filed by Cengiz and DAWN against MBS in October 2020 in the US District Court in Washington, DC, contains their version of events in considerable detail.12 Much of the information for all these accounts was derived from leaks by Turkish intelligence agents who had managed to place listening devices inside the consulate that recorded the grisly proceedings. As soon as Khashoggi walked through the consulate doors, he was ushered upstairs to the office of the Saudi consul general, Mohammed al-Otaibi. There, the Tiger Squad’s operational leader, Major General Maher Mutreb, offered Khashoggi the choice of returning to Saudi Arabia either voluntarily or by force. Khashoggi refused, and a struggle ensued during which one of the Saudi agents injected him with a large dose of a drug. At the same time, another officer put a plastic bag over his head, making it impossible for him to breathe. His last known words are disputed. According to one version, he gasped, “Don’t cover my mouth. I have asthma. Don’t do it. You’ll suffocate me.”13 Other accounts reported he cried out three times “I can’t breathe.”14 Whether he died from the drug overdose or asphyxiation remains unclear. But even the Saudis ultimately conceded that he was then dismembered, into fifteen parts according to one account.15 What happened to his remains is still unknown because the Saudis refused to say. The official Saudi version was that an unnamed local collaborator disposed of the remains. Other accounts suggest they were stuffed down a well behind the nearby residence of the Saudi consul general. It took eighteen days before Saudi authorities finally confessed that Khashoggi had indeed been murdered inside the consulate. First, they claimed he had left the building, and a look-alike of him was actually videotaped walking away from the consulate. Then the Saudis alleged they didn’t know what had happened to him. But they heatedly denied he had been harmed, let alone killed, inside the consulate. Finally, on October 20, 2018, they issued an official statement

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admitting he had been killed there and claiming it had happened in the heat of a quarrel involving a fistfight. “The brawl aggravated to lead to his death.” The Saudi government’s initial denials, the statement claimed, were because of attempts by the security team “to conceal and cover what happened.”16 At the same time, the Saudi government announced it had fired five senior officials and arrested eighteen others suspected of involvement in the killing. Among those fired were MBS’s media advisor, al-Qahtani, and his deputy intelligence chief, al-Asiri. The official statement also included a commitment to continue the investigation into Khashoggi’s murder and “to bring the facts to the public.” But two grisly facts were conspicuously absent from this initial account: his dismemberment and the whereabouts of his remains. On November 15, 2018, the Saudi prosecutor general indicted eleven Saudis and announced it would seek the death sentence against five of them for “ordering and executing the crime.”17 This time he admitted Khashoggi’s body had been cut into pieces but still did not disclose what had happened to them.

MBS’s Icarian Moment Khashoggi’s murder caused MBS’s image as Saudi Arabia’s longawaited savior to plummet precipitously overnight. It was truly his Icarian moment, a fall from the glittering heights of international stardom to the ranks of other bloody Arab dictators such as Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Bashar al-Assad of Syria. The entire international media focused on one question: Had MBS himself ordered Khashoggi’s assassination? Or had he uttered words similar to the infamous ones attributed to King Henry II of England when in 1170 he had sought to silence his chief challenger, Archbishop Thomas Becket: “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” In that historic case, four of the king’s devoted knights had answered the call and slayed Becket inside the Cathedral of Canterbury. For a long time, MBS denied any responsibility, direct or indirect, for Khashoggi’s killing. Instead, he seized on the explanation conveniently provided by his chief US defender, Trump, the first to blame the deed on “rogue killers.”18 Echoing Trump, the second official Saudi version, issued on November 15 by the Saudi prosecutor general, did indeed attribute Khashoggi’s murder to a “rogue operation.” It had begun on September 29 with an order from al-Asiri to bring Khashoggi back to the

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kingdom “by means of persuasion and if persuasion fails, to do so by force.”19 The date mentioned was the day after Khashoggi’s first visit to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The “leader of the mission” repeatedly referenced but never named was identified in foreign media accounts as Mutreb, one of MBS’s personal security guards. The prosecutor said he had formed the fifteen-member team sent to Istanbul. He had worked closely with an unnamed individual described as “the former adviser” also immediately identified in the international media as MBS’s media czar, al-Qahtani. He had told the team in a briefing that Khashoggi represented “a threat to national security” and his rendition was “a significant achievement of the mission.” Mutreb, too, had decided it would be too difficult logistically to transport Khashoggi to a safehouse and to “murder the victim if the negotiations failed” to bring him back voluntarily to the kingdom. As to what had happened inside the consulate, there had been a “physical altercation” that caused Khashoggi to be restrained and “injected with a large amount of a drug resulting in an overdose that led to his death.” The Saudis alleged that Khashoggi’s remains had been handed over to a “collaborator” whose name and nationality were not indicated, though a “composite sketch” had been assembled. Finally, the prosecutor general provided an official reason for the initial contradictory accounts by Saudi authorities as to what had happened inside the consulate: Mutreb, in agreement with the unnamed leader of the negotiating team, had written a false report to al-Asiri stating Khashoggi had left the building alive after “the failure of negotiating or forcing his return.”20 The official account had clearly been carefully constructed to exculpate MBS of any knowledge of, or involvement in, Khashoggi’s killing. His problem was that nobody, not even his most avid protector in the White House, believed he had clean hands. Trump had at first provided MBS the explanation of “rogue killers.” But his subsequent comments suggested quite the opposite. He described the Saudi government’s initial multiple muddled versions of Khashoggi’s murder as “one of the worst in the history of cover-ups.”21 Then, after the CIA reached the conclusion “with medium to high confidence” that MBS himself had ordered Khashoggi’s assassination, Trump had this to say on November 20: “It could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event—maybe he did and maybe he didn’t.” Trump added, “Our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” which remained “a great ally” in his administration’s struggle against Iran.22

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The UN Account of Khashoggi’s Murder All the evidence that has emerged in Turkish, British, and US accounts of Khashoggi’s assassination strongly suggest his murder was more than an iteration of King Henry II’s incitement to silence Archbishop Becket. The most authoritative findings so far by any outside body have come from the UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur, Agnès Callamard, whose ninety-eight-page report was made public in June 2019. 23 Her account included a day-by-day, then an hourby-hour, and finally a minute-by-minute sequence of events leading to Khashoggi’s “execution.” It named all the Saudis involved in the fifteen-man hit team, their ranks, when and how they had arrived in Istanbul, and their various roles in the murder. By her count, seven of the fifteen were intelligence officers and four worked in MBS’s office. Three were members of the Royal Guard, protecting MBS. The team leader, Mutreb, worked under MBS’s media chief, al-Qahtani. Callamard had listened to the Turkish secret recording of conversations among the Saudis just before and after Khashoggi’s arrival at the consulate. Mutreb, she said, had referred to him as “the sacrificial lamb.” Then, thirteen minutes before Khashoggi walked into the consulate, she had heard Mutreb on the recording asking Salah Tubaigy, a forensic pathologist who had been asked to join the Saudi team, whether it would be possible “to put the trunk in a bag?” He had replied: “No, too heavy” but reassured Mutreb it would be “easy” because the “joints will be separated. . . . If we take plastic bags and cut it into pieces, it will be finished.” Tubaigy began using a bone saw he had brought with him to start dismembering Khashoggi’s body at 13:39 p.m., twenty-four minutes after the journalist had entered the consulate. Callamard also recounted some of the recorded argument over Khashoggi’s refusal to send a message to his son. “What should I say? See you soon? I can’t say kidnapping.” When he refused, he was told, “You know what will happen at the end.” At 13:33 p.m., the struggle over injecting Khashoggi with a drug began. But Callamard left unclear the precise moment Khashoggi had died and whether he ultimately succumbed to the drug or suffocation. But she said that six minutes later, at 13:39 p.m., sounds could be heard of Khashoggi’s dismemberment underway. Her report concluded “credible evidence” existed that Khashoggi’s execution had been premeditated and authorized from above. “It is hard to accept the theory that the 15 persons team leader planned this murder without authorization from superiors in Riyadh,” she wrote. “A state cannot evade responsibility for the acts of their officials by

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claiming that they acted ‘rogue.’”24 It was, in her judgment, an “extrajudicial killing” for which the Saudi state bore full responsibility. Those involved had been state officials using state assets such as planes and the consulate to carry it out. Callamard also found “credible evidence” that MBS had ordered Khashoggi’s murder and put al-Qahtani in charge of carrying it out. However, further investigation was needed, she wrote, to determine what role each had played. She all but openly compared MBS to King Henry II. MBS, she said, had already authorized the arbitrary arrests of princes, businessmen, journalists, and human rights activists and “at a bare minimum” condoned “unlawful acts of torture and physical harm.” In addition, she observed that MBS “willingly took the risk that other crimes, such as the killing of Mr. Khashoggi, would be committed, whether or not he directly ordered the specific crime.”25 The Saudi government immediately condemned the report’s “lack of objectivity” and “unreliability” and said that all of those responsible for the deed were already on trial. The message was clear: there would be no further investigation or arrests, at least not by MBS’s government.

International Reaction Still, MBS had to face the court of international public opinion, which saw more than sufficient evidence to judge him guilty, particularly in the United States. On April 8, 2019, the US Department of the Treasury banned from the United States sixteen Saudis it had concluded were involved in the operation. (Their families were also banned.) The big discrepancy between the Saudi and US lists of suspects was the absence of al-Qahtani in the former and his inclusion at the top of the latter. The Treasury Department statement asserted that he had been “part of the planning and execution of the operation” and that the leader of the fifteen-man team, Mutreb, was his subordinate.26 The US list also included the Saudi consul general, al-Otaibi. These travel bans hardly qualified as the “severe punishment” Trump had promised on October 13 to impose on those involved. And Trump had repeatedly rejected what a vast majority in Congress, Republicans as well as Democrats, were demanding, namely a cutoff, or at least a suspension, of arms sales to Saudi Arabia. One Republican senator close to Trump, Lindsey Graham, compared MBS to a “wrecking ball” and now felt “used and abused” after long defending Saudi Arabia as a “good ally.”27 He described MBS as henceforth “toxic” and certain to fail in his hopes of becoming a world leader. Still, Trump

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stood by MBS, or at least the preservation of the US-Saudi relationship. Trump said that although he did not buy MBS’s descriptions of Khashoggi as an “enemy of the state” and a Muslim Brotherhood member, he still felt the US relationship with the kingdom was too important to imperil $110 billion of Saudi arms purchases he suggested, falsely, were in the works. Whatever the outcome of the investigation, the United States intended to remain “a steadfast partner” of Saudi Arabia.28 Elsewhere, the European Parliament condemned the killing and reminded MBS that the “systematic practice of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings constitute a crime against humanity.”29 It also called for an independent international investigation and warned its members to stand ready to impose visa bans, arms embargos, and asset freezes on all those responsible. Germany issued travel bans on eighteen of the implicated Saudis and suspended its arms sales to the kingdom, a suspension still in place in early 2021. France also imposed travel bans on eighteen Saudis but did not follow Germany in suspending arms sales. Canada suspended an $11 billion arms deal until April 2020. Another more important arms provider, the United Kingdom, came under enormous pressure from Parliament to follow suit. But like Trump, Prime Minister Theresa May judged the British relationship with Saudi Arabia too valuable overall to enact a ban. The Turks were also conflicted, not by arms sales, which were nonexistent, but by virtue of having all the crucial evidence on tape of the premeditated killing of Khashoggi. But none of it was admissible in a court because it had been obtained by breaking all laws of international diplomatic behavior. So they at first pushed for an international investigation and trial until in March 2020 they finally issued indictments against twenty Saudis, including al-Qahtani and al-Asiri, along with unenforceable arrest warrants. Alone among the big powers, China and Russia condemned nobody and affirmed their faith in Saudi justice. The Arab world’s reaction was more ambiguous: MBS went on a tour in late November seeking a reaffirmation of support from its leaders. He succeeded in obtaining it from Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and his closest Arab ally. The sheikh saluted the “pivotal role” MBS was playing in the region and the whole world for that matter.30 And in Bahrain, King Hamad dutifully hailed MBS as the “cornerstone of regional security and stability.”31 Egypt’s leader, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, was less effusive but still pledged his support of Saudi policy to isolate Qatar and contain Iran. Still, 100 Egyptian journalists, despite tight state control of the media, voiced their opposition to MBS’s visit because the Saudi government

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was “violating human rights, especially the right to live.”32 In Tunisia, MBS’s arrival provoked public demonstrations, a rare response to a visiting Arab leader. Most embarrassing, however, was the reaction of the two monarchs outside the Gulf Arab ones. A planned stopover in Amman, Jordan, to see King Abdullah was first postponed and then canceled. And in a rare public rebuke, King Mohammed VI of Morocco declared he was “too busy” to see MBS, and in any case, his visit was “not appropriate.”33 More significant was the reaction of the world’s leading bankers and potential investors. MBS was hosting his first annual Future Investment Initiative just twenty days after Khashoggi’s murder, on October 22, hoping to attract billions of dollars to make his Vision 2030 come true. It was an event the Western media immediately dubbed “Davos in the Desert” after the meeting each year of world financial, security, and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland. Instead, the media focused on the no-shows. Ministers from France, Australia, and the Netherlands canceled, and Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, a highlighted US speaker, also withdrew. So did twenty chief executives of major banking and investment firms, including those from JP Morgan, Uber, Goldman Sachs, and Ford Motor Company. The chief executives of BlackRock and Blackstone, Larry Fink and Stephen Schwarzman, pushed first for the conference’s postponement and then boycotted the event when MBS insisted on going ahead. So did World Bank president Jim Yong Kim and IMF managing director Christine Lagarde. Still, hundreds of businessmen, bankers, and investors did show up, allowing MBS to declare Saudi authorities had signed multiple deals. Most, however, were just memoranda of understanding (MOUs), purportedly worth $56 billion. Even had they been carried out, most were in the lucrative energy sector, not for Vision 2030.

Impact of Khashoggi’s Assassination What had been the lasting damage of Khashoggi’s killing to Saudi Arabia and MBS? Could the impact to the two be separated with MBS as heir apparent? Clearly, MBS had taken a devastating fall from grace internationally. Overnight, his image had changed from that of a long-awaited reformer and emerging pan-Arab leader to that of just another bloody Arab dictator, like Hussein dressed in royal robes. MBS had become a modern-day version of the Greek mythological character Icarus, whose impulsiveness and hubris had brought about

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his precipitous downfall. Perhaps MBS had not literally drowned, as had Icarus. Still, in the words of Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to Washington who still supported MBS, he would have to live forever afterward under an indelible “stigma.”34

MBS’s Police State Strikes Abroad Part of that stigma resulted from what the media subsequently discovered was a vast spying operation MBS had established to track down and silence his enemies and critics. It was called the Center for Studies and Media Affairs and headed by MBS’s right-hand man, the nefarious al-Qahtani. The center had been employing the most sophisticated cyber-hacking tools, forcible renditions, and other assassinations even before killing Khashoggi. US and Israeli companies had provided training and technology, particularly the Israeli Pegasus spyware. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius described in great detail how al-Qahtani’s center had set up a rapid intervention group and engaged three US companies—Cerberus Capital Management, DynCorp, and Tier I Group—to help train some of its members and upgrade Saudi spying operations.35 The Israeli-founded company NSO Group, specializing in cyber-hacking and spyware, had provided the tools. The key Saudi official working on the plan had been alAsiri, the deputy chief of Saudi intelligence, named in the UN report. Interestingly, the list of sixteen Saudis sanctioned by the US government never included al-Asiri, though he had been on the Saudi list of those implicated in the Khashoggi murder. A London-based online newspaper also did some in-depth reporting on this rapid intervention group, which it said was called Fiqat elNimr, or the Tiger Squad.36 It had been named after its founder, alAsiri, whose nickname was “Tiger of the South” because of his role as aggressive spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen. The squad consisted of fifty top security and intelligence agents, five of whom were part of MBS’s personal security detail. The report linked the Tiger Squad to the assassination of two other Saudi critics, one a prince, before it had carried out the Khashoggi operation. Citing Turkish intelligence sources, the newspaper, Middle East Eye, said Mutreb, the leader of the fifteen-man team sent to Istanbul, had made fourteen calls back home during the day of Khashoggi’s murder, seven of them to MBS’s personal office. A Turkish newspaper it cited had reported four of those calls were to Badr al-Asaker, head of MBS’s private office and secretary-general of his foundation,

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MiSK. Other reports said that on one of those calls, team leader Mutreb had told an unidentified aide to MBS to “tell your boss . . . the deed was done.”37 For months and even years after Khashoggi’s murder, report after report, one more damning than the other, came out detailing how Saudi cyber specialists had worked to track down Saudi dissidents living abroad, in some cases sending Tiger Squad agents with the intent to carry out renditions or possibly assassinations. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation had visited three dissidents in the United States to warn them of danger to their lives. Others living in Canada and Norway had also been advised by those governments. Al-Qahtani had focused especially on Omar Abdulaziz, a dissident in exile in Canada who worked closely with Khashoggi in setting up DAWN. He had worked with a University of Toronto research center, the Citizen Lab, to identify, warn, and make public al-Qahtani’s targets. Just one day before Khashoggi’s murder, the lab had concluded with “high confidence” that Abdulaziz’s phone had been infected with the Israeli Pegasus spyware.38 The lawsuit filed by Cengiz and DAWN described how MBS’s operatives had used similar tactics in May 2018 to those he would use against Khashoggi that October. They had attempted to lure Abdulaziz back to Saudi Arabia, even sending royal court emissaries to Canada to assure him of his safety if he did return. They had also wanted to meet him at the Saudi embassy in Ottawa, but he had refused, ironically, after Khashoggi warned him not to risk going there.39 Long afterward, in June 2020, Abdulaziz was again warned by Canadian security authorities that his life was still in danger. A third Saudi dissident, Iyad al-Baghdadi, living in Norway, had also been targeted before Khashoggi’s murder. Norwegian authorities had intervened to prevent ten suspicious Saudi “security agents” from entering the country.40 A fourth target was a former senior Saudi intelligence agent, Saad Aljabri, who had served as the main link to the CIA for decades and was close to Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN), the former crown prince who had lost out in the power struggle with MBS. Aljabri, too, filed a lawsuit against MBS in the US District Court in Washington, DC, in summer 2020. It accused MBS of dispatching “a hit squad across the Atlantic Ocean in a direct attempt to kill Dr. Saad.”41 As with Abdulaziz, Saudi security had thrown in jail two members of his family (two children in his case and two brothers in Abdulaziz’s) to put pressure on Aljabri to return home from exile in Canada. The lawsuit alleged MBS was still scheming to kill him in mid-2020 and had even obtained a fatwa, a religious edict, to approve it.

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One of the most bold and risky spying operations undertaken by al-Qahtani’s center was only made public years after it took place. His agents had managed to place spies inside the social networking service Twitter, widely used by Saudis, to obtain information on the accounts of MBS’s critics and opponents. The US Department of Justice exposed the scheme when it indicted in early November 2019 two former Twitter employees, a Saudi and a Lebanese American, and their Saudi handler. The two employees were accused of running a spy operation from inside the company headquarters in San Francisco from 2014 to 2015.42 The indictment charged that Ali Alzabarah, thirty-five, a Saudi engineer, and Ahmad Abouammo, forty-one, a media manager for the company, had used their access to Twitter accounts to forward to Saudi authorities information on 6,000 Saudis and US citizens. Alzabarah had allegedly even downloaded data on hundreds of accounts while on a visit to Saudi Arabia. A third individual, Ahmed Almutairi, who ran a Saudi media marketing company, was charged with acting as the handler of Alzabarah and his go-between with an unnamed Saudi official in charge of the operation in Riyadh. The blockbuster disclosure on the charge sheet was that the mastermind of the operation, identified as “Foreign Official-1,” was the secretary-general of a royal charity founded by “Saudi Royal Family Member-1.” The latter was immediately identified in media reports as MBS and the former as al-Asaker, secretary-general of MBS’s personal charity, MiSK. In fact, when Alzabarah had returned to Saudi Arabia, he too had gone back to work for MiSK. Because both he and Almutairi were no longer in the United States, the only person federal authorities could arrest was Abouammo, who lived in Seattle and had allegedly been paid at least $300,000 for his spying on behalf of the Saudi government. As of early 2021, he was still awaiting trial.

MBS Targets Bezos The riskiest Saudi spy operation targeted Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, the richest US billionaire. Bezos had met MBS in San Francisco in April 2018 during his tour of the United States, and they had been discussing Amazon setting up two data centers in Saudi Arabia. They had also exchanged mobile phone numbers. On May 1, Bezos had received what turned out to be an infected file from MBS’s WhatsApp number. This had led to the extraction of vast amounts of information—100 megabytes per day—from Bezos’s phone, unbeknownst to him. Then on November 8, Bezos had received

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another message from MBS’s account, this time with a picture of Lauren Sanchez, a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair. The saga then became more salacious. In January 2019, Bezos announced he was separating from his wife of twenty-five years, Mackenzie Bezos, just before the National Enquirer tabloid came out with a special edition devoted to his secret love life with Sanchez. Bezos then hired a private investigator, Gavin De Becker, to determine how the National Enquirer had obtained its information. He also hired a cybersecurity firm, FTI Consulting, to carry out a forensic analysis of his phone. Even the United Nations became involved in the incident. Two of its special rapporteurs, David Kaye and Callamard, launched their own investigation. The general conclusion of all these probes was that malware had been installed on Bezos’s mobile phone at the time he had first received the encrypted file on May 1 from MBS’s WhatsApp account. Whether MBS himself or one of his aides had sent it remained impossible to determine. The story only became more convoluted after De Becker claimed the publishers of the National Enquirer had tried to blackmail Bezos with the threat of publishing photos of Bezos and Sanchez unless he issued a statement that the National Enquirer had not obtained any information for its story from “any form of electronic eavesdropping or hacking.”43 In reaction, Bezos went public about his affair with Sanchez and De Becker with his conclusion “with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone and gained private information.”44 Among other evidence they cited was the close relationship David Pecker, chair of the National Enquirer’s owner, AMI, had developed with MBS, including a trip to Saudi Arabia to meet with him. The UN investigators’ report was only slightly less accusatory, stating that their forensic probe “suggests the possible involvement” of MBS “in an effort to influence, if not silence, the Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia.” 45 They had based their conclusion on the finding of FTI Consulting that Bezos’s phone had been hacked “possibly via tools procured by Saud alQahtani, the crown prince’s close aide.”

Impact on Vision 2030 The impact of Khashoggi’s murder on Vision 2030’s prospects was equally devastating. MBS tried to keep foreign investors interested by holding his annual Future Investment Initiative conference and inviting the same array of the world’s top business executives, Trump

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administration officials, and head World Bank and IMF leaders, many of whom had boycotted the 2018 event. Many of the initial boycotters came the following year, as did Trump’s son-in-law, Kushner, and Mnuchin in a show of renewed confidence in MBS. Saudi authorities always managed to announce additional billions of dollars in new investment deals. For example, at the 2018 meeting, they said agreements had been signed for a total of $56 billion in new investments, and in 2019 another twenty-three deals were signed, worth $15 billion. A Saudi government report on overall foreign investment that year said more than 1,100 “licenses” had been issued to investors and 150 “deals” signed, making for “a banner year.”46 These rosy figures, however, were not substantiated by either Saudi or foreign reports of foreign direct investment in the kingdom. For example, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which tracks inflows and outflows of money by region and country, painted a radically different picture. After hovering around $8 billion the last two years of King Abdullah’s reign, foreign investment had plummeted to $1.4 billion in 2017, the year MBS had incarcerated hundreds of businessmen in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on corruption charges. It had increased to $3.2 billion in 2018, the year of Khashoggi’s murder, but the outflow of capital from the kingdom that year had reached a staggering $21 billion, a 191 percent increase over the previous year.47 Saudi figures of foreign investment in 2019 looked more promising: $3.5 billion during the first nine months. But whatever momentum was underway came to an abrupt halt in 2020 as a result of Saudi Arabia’s “oil war” with Russia and a worldwide recession triggered by the coronavirus pandemic. MBS was reported to have commented to a visiting business delegation in the wake of Khashoggi’s killing, “No one will invest for years.”48 He was specifically speaking about his favorite gigaproject, NEOM, but as of early 2021, the other two Red Sea resort projects had hardly moved beyond the drawing board or infrastructure preparation, either. Only the new entertainment city at al-Qiddiya, outside Riyadh, showed signs of life. And the only “sci-fi project”—the term used by one Saudi official to describe NEOM—that seemed to be showing some such signs was Virgin Hyperloop. In February 2020, the company signed an agreement with the Saudi Transport Ministry for a “prefeasibility study” for use of the technology to build a nationwide system to carry both cargo and passengers. Its visionary, Branson, had long since resigned as the company’s chair in protest over Khashoggi’s murder.

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For a year, MBS persisted in his denial of responsibility, directly or indirectly, for Khashoggi’s killing, which even he called a “heinous crime.” Almost all evidence, however, pointed to the contrary conclusion. Two of his closest associates had been the masterminds of the operation, and at least five others were his personal bodyguards. The CIA had concluded with medium to high confidence that MBS had given the order. The National Security Agency had even unearthed in its archives an intercept of him threatening to use a “bullet” on Khashoggi if the journalist refused to return voluntarily to Saudi Arabia. The only evidence in MBS’s favor was the absence of a credible and coherent explanation for his murder, which one would have assumed would have been prepared well in advance. Instead, it was so bungled and contradictory over eighteen days that even Trump viewed it as the worst cover-up in history. Had MBS, for all his recklessness, authorized such a high-profile assassination without preparing a credible denial of involvement?

MBS Takes “Full Responsibility” On the eve of the first anniversary of Khashoggi’s death, MBS finally provided a “no-yes” answer. In an interview with CBS News aired on September 30, 2019, anchor Norah O’Donnell asked MBS point blank, “Did you order the murder of Jamal Khashoggi?” His answer: “Absolutely not. This was a heinous crime. But I take full responsibility as a leader of Saudi Arabia, especially since it was committed by individuals working for the Saudi government.”49 MBS then went to great lengths to exculpate himself. How, he asked, could he possibly know “what 3 million people working for the Saudi government do daily?” His reply was more than slightly disingenuous. Certainly, his closest associates, security agents, and bodyguards were hardly bureaucratic nobodies. That he was unaware of preparation for the killing of such a well-known journalist inside a Saudi diplomatic mission seemed equally implausible. The outcome of the Saudi trial of the eleven indicted Saudis, attended only by foreign diplomats sworn to silence, only served to convince MBS’s legions of foreign skeptics of his culpability. The eleven included al-Asiri, deputy chief of Saudi intelligence, but not alQahtani, head of MBS’s campaign to silence all dissidents and critics. Al-Qahtani had been formally dismissed from his job but was still free and working on MBS’s behalf. In late December 2019, a court sentenced five of them, including Mutreb, to death and three others to

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twenty-four years in prison. Among the three acquitted for alleged lack of evidence was al-Asiri. The court also declared that it had found no evidence of premeditation and that the killing had been carried out “on the spur of the moment” when the team’s leader, Mutreb, realized it would be logistically impossible to transport Khashoggi to a safehouse to resume interrogation of him there.50 As of early 2021, none of the five on death row had been executed. Saudi tradition holds that the family of the victim must agree to spare the murderers’ lives and receive compensation. Reports before the trial said Khashoggi’s children were already receiving “blood money” from the Saudi government as compensation, and his one son still living in the kingdom, Salah, continued to express confidence in Saudi justice.51 In May 2020, while Saudis were observing the dawn-to-dusk fast of Ramadan, Salah Khashoggi declared forgiveness of his father’s killers. Noting the prophet’s saying that if a person forgives and makes reconciliation, “his reward is due from Allah,” this son said on Twitter, “We the sons of the Martyr Jamal Khashoggi announce that we pardon those who killed our father, seeking reward [from] God Almighty.”52

Khashoggi’s Legacy There is another analogy between Khashoggi’s murder and King Henry II’s killing of Archbishop Becket. The Catholic Church subsequently declared Becket a martyr and even elevated him to the rank of a saint. MBS has also made Khashoggi a martyr, if not a saint, at least among journalists and human rights organizations around the world, where his name is unlikely to be forgotten for as long as MBS rules Saudi Arabia. Indeed, its next king will live under an indelible stigma throughout his forthcoming reign, which could extend for half a century. Already Khashoggi has been memorialized in the documentary movie The Dissident, which appeared at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020, with his wife Hatice and close collaborator Abdulaziz recounting the high points of his life and death. The date of his murder is becoming an annual event to salute him as a martyr to freedom of the media around the world. 1. “Saudi Embassy Hosts First Annual Saudi-US Partnership Dinner in Washington,” Al Arabiya English, March 22, 2018. 2. Jamal Khashoggi and Robert Lacey, “Why Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Should Visit Detroit,” Washington Post, March 20, 2018. 3. Mohammed Alissa, interview with the author, Washington, DC, February 6, 2019.

Notes

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4. Turki Aldakhil, “Mohammed Surur Passed Away, but Sururism Lives On,” Al Arabiya English, November 21, 2016. 5. For a summary of his comments, see Jamal Khashoggi, “A New President and the Middle East,” Washington Institute for Near East Policy, November 15, 2016. 6. Jamal Khashoggi, “Saudi Arabia Wasn’t Always This Repressive. Now It’s Unbearable,” Washington Post, September 18, 2016. 7. For more details of Jamal Khashoggi’s book project, see David B. Ottaway, “Khashoggi’s Vision for a New Saudi Arabia,” Washington Post, April 6, 2019. 8. Mark Mazzetti, “Year Before Killing, Saudi Prince Told Aide He Would Use ‘a Bullet’ on Jamal Khashoggi,” New York Times, February 7, 2019. 9. Reda el-Mawy, “Saudi Arabia’s Missing Princes,” BBC World Service, August 15, 2017. 10. Jamal Khashoggi, “What the Arab World Needs Most Is Free Expression,” Washington Post, October 17, 2018. 11. Jamal Khashoggi, “Let’s Break the Impasse, Let’s Fix What Needs Fixing in Saudi and Iran,” Middle East Eye, February 19, 2019. 12. Hatice Cengiz and Democracy for the Arab World Now, Inc. v. Mohammed bin Salman et al., Case 1:20-cv-03009, US District Court for the District of Columbia, filed October 20, 2020. 13. Associated Press, “In Last Words, Khashoggi Asked Killers Not to Suffocate Him,” New York Times, September 10, 2019. 14. Nic Robertson, “‘I Can’t Breathe.’ Jamal Khashoggi’s Last Words Disclosed in Transcript, Source Says,” CNN, December 10, 2019. 15. “Khashoggi Murder Tape Will Never Be Made Public: Turkish Source,” Middle East Eye, October 29, 2018. 16. Kevin Sullivan, Loveday Morris, and Tamer el-Ghobashy, “Saudi Concede Khashoggi Was Killed,” Washington Post, October 20, 2018. 17. Ben Hubbard and David D. Kirkpatrick, “Saudis Shift Account of Khashoggi Killing Again, as Five Agents Face Death Penalty,” New York Times, November 15, 2018. 18. Roberta Rampton, “Trump Says ‘Rogue Killers’ May Be Behind Khashoggi Disappearance,” Reuters, October 15, 2018. 19. Saudi Embassy, “Public Prosecution: Briefing on the Investigation Results,” November 15, 2019. 20. Ibid. 21. Mark Lander and Edward Wong, “Trump Says Saudi Account of Khashoggi Killing Is ‘Worst Cover-Up’ in History,” New York Times, October 23, 2018. 22. “Statement from President Donald J. Trump on Standing with Saudi Arabia,” Whitehouse.gov, November 20, 2018. 23. UN Human Rights Council, “Annex to the Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions: Investigation into the Unlawful Death of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi,” June 19, 2019. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. US Department of the Treasury, “Treasury Sanctions 17 Individuals for Their Roles in the Killing of Jamal Khashoggi,” November 15, 2018. 27. Donna Abu-Nasr, “Saudi Prince Is ‘Toxic,’ Graham Says as Pressure Rises on Trump,” Bloomberg News, October 16, 2018. 28. “Statement from President Donald J. Trump on Standing with Saudi Arabia.” 29. “European Parliament Resolution on 25 October 2018 on the Killing of Journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul,” Europarl.europa.eu.

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30. “Saudi Crown Prince in UAE at Start of Arab Tour,” Asharq Al-Awsat, November 22, 2018. 31. “In Pictures: Saudi Crown Prince Arrives in Bahrain,” Gulf Daily News, November 26, 2018. 32. “Saudi Arabia Mulls Building Causeway to Egypt,” Middle East Monitor, November 27, 2018. 33. “King Mohammed VI Snubs Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,” www.moroccoworldnews.com/2018/11/258877/king-mohammed-vi-morocco -mohammed-bin-salman/. 34. Senior Saudi prince, interview with author, Washington, DC, November 6, 2019. I cannot name him because of the Chatham House rules barring identification of the speaker. 35. David Ignatius, “How the Mysteries of Khashoggi’s Murder Have Rocked the U.S.-Saudi Partnership,” Washington Post, March 29, 2019. 36. Mustafa Abu Sneineh, “Revealed: The Saudi Death Squad MBS Uses to Silence Dissent,” Middle East Eye, October 22, 2018. 37. Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt, and David D. Kirkpatrick, “‘Tell Your Boss’: Recording Is Seen to Link Saudi Crown Prince More Strongly to Khashoggi Killing,” New York Times, November 12, 2018. 38. See Bill Marczak, John Scott-Railton, Adam Senft, Bahr Abdul Razzak, and Ron Deibert, “The Kingdom Came to Canada: How Saudi-Linked Digital Espionage Reached Canadian Soil,” October 1, 2018, www.citizenlab.ca. 39. See Hatice Cengiz and Democracy for the Arab World Now, Inc. v. Mohammed bin Salman et al. 40. “Norway Blocked Saudi Request to Give Diplomatic Immunity to Suspicious ‘Security Team,’” Middle East Eye, December 15, 2020. 41. Dr. Saad Aljabri v. Mohammed bin Salman, Case 1:20-cv-02146-TJK, US District Court for the District of Columbia, filed August 6, 2020. 42. US Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, “Two Former Twitter Employees and a Saudi National Charged as Acting as Illegal Agents of Saudi Arabia,” November 7, 2019. 43. Gavin de Becker, “Bezos Investigation Finds the Saudis Obtained His Private Data,” Daily Beast, March 31, 2019. 44. Ibid. 45. UN Office of the High Commissioner, “U.N. Experts Call for Investigation into Allegations That Saudi Crown Prince Involved in Hacking of Jeff Bezos’ Phone,” January 22, 2019. 46. “Investment Highlights: Winter 2020—A Special Report by InvestSaudi,” www.investment-highlights-winter-2020-en-digital.pdf. 47. https://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/wir2019_en.pdf, Annex, 214. 48. Simeon Kerr and Anjli Raval, “Khashoggi Death Condemns Saudi Megaplan to Backburner,” Financial Times, December 12, 2018. 49. “Full Transcript of Saudi Crown Prince CBS Interview,” Arab News, September 30, 2019. 50. “Death Sentence for Five, Jail Terms for Three in Khashoggi Murder Trial,” Arab News, December 23, 2019. 51. Greg Miller, “Khashoggi Children Have Received Houses in Saudi Arabia and Monthly Payments as Compensation for Killing of Father,” Washington Post, April 1, 2019. 52. “Jamal Khashoggi’s Son Salah Says Family ‘Forgives’ Killers,” Al Jazeera, May 22, 2020.

9 The Quest for Great Power Status Saudi Arabia has long sought recognition as one of the world’s great powers, and Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is the perfect personification of that historic quest, with new determination and assertiveness. The kingdom has by far the largest economy of all Arab countries and is the only one included in the ranks of the G20, the organization of the world’s twenty biggest economies. The kingdom even hosted the group’s annual meeting in 2020, the first ever in the Arab world. Saudi Arabia’s position as the top oil exporter has built it into a financial powerhouse, with the fifth largest foreign reserves globally in 2020, down from third earlier. That wealth also enabled it to become the world’s largest purchaser of arms between 2015 and 20191 and to spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to turn itself into a military powerhouse.2 Finally, it has enormous soft power over 1.3 billion Muslim believers as the birthplace of Islam and custodian of its two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, visited by millions of pilgrims every year. Despite these impressive assets, the kingdom has failed more often than not to convince other countries to follow its lead, even within the Arab and Muslim worlds. Its massive accumulation of arms over decades has not produced the wherewithal to project itself convincingly as a military power. Its kings have been unable even to impose their will on the poorest of Arab countries, their neighbor Yemen, let alone to stand up on their own militarily to Iran, their number one rival for regional primacy. Saudi Arabia had a golden opportunity in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings to seize the mantle of leadership. The three historic powerhouses of the Arab world—Egypt, Syria, and Iraq— had collapsed as a result of internal political strife and, in the case 139

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of the latter two, prolonged civil war. To the surprise of outsiders, the eight monarchies all survived the Arab Spring. They proved far more resilient and adept at managing the street activists than the Arab republics did. Among those monarchies, Saudi Arabia emerged the strongest, and after 2015 it had a rising new dynamic leader, MBS, intent on asserting Saudi leadership—and his own—of the shattered Arab world. Why this failed to happen is the focus of this chapter and raises a number of crucial issues and questions. For example, why was Saudi Arabia unable to shape the course of events in Yemen in its favor, and why did it even lose ground to Iran there? Why did it fail to impose its leadership not only on the Arab world but also the coalition of Gulf Arab monarchies, its closest natural allies? Why and how did Saudi policy lead to the breakup of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), its most important security alliance, into warring factions? The causes of the kingdom’s failure were multiple. Some predated the rise of MBS under his father, King Salman, who came to the throne in January 2015. The limits of traditional Saudi “checkbook diplomacy,” wherein bribes and grants were used to help buy friends and buy off enemies, were already apparent. So, too, was the lack of energy in the Saudi diplomatic establishment to follow through on initiatives, with rare exceptions. The most notable of these had been the Taif Agreement, hammered out under intense Saudi pressure on a half dozen warring factions in Lebanon to bring an end in 1989 to the prolonged civil war in that country. Another notable exception was the kingdom’s role within the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). As that group’s number one exporter, Saudi Arabia was usually able to forge at least a short-term consensus among its thirteen members over production and price levels. But it couldn’t enforce those agreements, and its leverage over OPEC began waning, probably permanently, with the 2014 crash in oil prices. The kingdom’s declining influence was reflected in its need to bring Russia, a non-OPEC member, into negotiations starting in 2016 to set those levels. The shortcomings in Saudi leadership were laid bare as never before with the 2011 uprisings across the Arab world. First King Abdullah and then King Salman accelerated Saudi intervention abroad in an attempt to shape the outcome of power struggles or civil wars in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon. For the first time, the Saudis formed and led Arab coalitions to intervene militarily first in Bahrain and then Yemen. In the latter case, they threw to

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the wind their own bitter experience under the kingdom’s founding father, King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud. He had sent troops to Yemen in 1934, only to see them become bogged down in endless tribal warfare and order them home, his military mission unaccomplished.

The Birth of the GCC For the past forty years, the bedrock of Saudi regional security and chief instrument for asserting Saudi regional leadership has been the GCC. It was formed in May 1981 as a defensive alliance of the six Gulf Arab monarchies in the wake of Iran’s Islamic Revolution and the onset of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). As these two transformations unfolded over the years, both threatened the survival of the five recently independent and defenseless emirates and even the GCC’s one well-established kingdom in Saudi Arabia. Iran’s new leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had called for the overthrow of monarchy as a form of government and challenged Saudi custodianship of Mecca and Medina. He cursed the al-Saud as “traitors to God’s great shrines” and denounced “the superstitious faith of Wahhabism” until the day he died and even after in his last will and testament.3 As for the IranIraq War, the Iranians eventually began attacking the oil ships of the GCC monarchies, and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein pressured them ever harder to support him financially and militarily. In the early 1980s, the Gulf Arab monarchies were fearful of offending either of their warring neighbors and, aside from Saudi Arabia, intensely worried about their very survival. At that time, other than Saudi Arabia, the five other GCC members were still viewed as fragile backwater emirates with no ability to protect themselves. They had lost the assured protection of Great Britain with their independence in 1971 and were still uncertain of the new US role in the Gulf. Their fears were on full display when I attended the first and second GCC gatherings in 1981 in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Riyadh, respectively. The GCC had produced a bland charter, platitudes about common interests, and remarkably little news other than its members’ decision to exclude Iraq, at that point their main defender from Iran. I wrote about being surprised to see no mention in their charter, or royal speeches, of forming a military alliance to protect themselves from attack from either Iran or Iraq.4 It was as if they were hoping the GCC could fly under the radar, and that would suffice to avoid provoking an adverse reaction from these two big, warring neighbors.

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Surprisingly, the most divisive issue at their first GCC meetings was whether to allow the United States to establish military bases in their countries.5 Oman had provoked the issue by signing an agreement with Ronald Reagan’s administration giving a newly created US Rapid Deployment Force access to its facilities. It had also participated in the force’s first military exercise in the region. The GCC members, it seemed, felt just as threatened by a spillover from the US-Soviet Cold War closing in on the Gulf as from the Iran-Iraq War. Equally surprisingly, in retrospect, Saudi Arabia led the opposition to a US military presence in the Gulf. Its foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, told me in an interview that US bases would serve only as a “lightning rod” for the Soviets. It was best, he said, that the US military presence remain “over the horizon,” on ships and on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.6 The final declaration at the GCC’s second summit, in Riyadh, emphasized the need to keep the Gulf “free of international rivalry, especially in regard to the presence of naval fleets and foreign bases.”7 It must be remembered that the US-Soviet rivalry was at that time just beginning to make itself felt on the Persian Gulf. In January 1980, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, outgoing President Jimmy Carter had put Moscow on notice that the United States would use military force to defend its interests there. He had even announced the creation of the Rapid Deployment Force to back up the so-called Carter Doctrine. Whether US interests went beyond keeping the Soviets out of the Gulf to include protection of the Gulf monarchies from either Iran or Iraq was still far from clear. The Reagan administration, over strong objection from Israel and its supporters in Congress, had sold five Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS), surveillance and combat control aircraft, to Saudi Arabia in 1981 and sent four there, staffed by the US Air Force, in a show of US resolve to defend at least the kingdom if not the other GCC monarchies. As it happened, what dragged the United States deeper into protecting the GCC states was not the Soviet but the Iranian and Iraqi threat. President Ronald Reagan’s administration began in 1987 to put US flags on Kuwaiti, Saudi, and other Gulf Arab oil tankers to protect them from Iranian—and in some cases even Iraqi—attacks. Then in 1990, Iraq invaded and occupied all of Kuwait, resulting in the United States sending 500,000 troops to Saudi Arabia and organizing a combined Western and Arab coalition to liberate that country and restore the ruling al-Sabah family to the throne.

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The GCC Fails Its First Test The Gulf War proved that the GCC on its own was powerless. It had taken on a military dimension starting in 1984 with the establishment of a combined army called the Peninsula Shield Force. It was largely a Saudi-centric operation aimed at consolidating the tiny militaries of the other GCC monarchies under Riyadh’s military and political command. The Peninsula Shield Force’s headquarters was at the King Khalid Military Base at Hafar al-Batin, in northeastern Saudi Arabia; its commander was a Saudi; and the units of its initial 10,000-troop force remained on standby in each member’s homeland rather than forming an integrated army based in Saudi Arabia. During the Gulf War, the puny GCC force as such saw little fighting, its units melding into the overall thirty-five-nation coalition force known as the Operation Desert Shield army. It consisted of 700,000 Western and Arab soldiers operating under a joint US-Saudi command, and its victory, mostly a result of US might, also boosted Saudi Arabia’s image as a military power. Its cocommander had been Prince Khalid bin Sultan, son of the Saudi defense minister, and the Saudis had been responsible for mobilizing, and paying for, its Arab contingents. Still, it took the Saudis nine years after the Gulf War, and nearly twenty years after the GCC’s founding, to convince the other members to agree on a commitment to defend each other. Finally, in 2000, they issued a statement declaring that “the member states consider any attack against any one of its members to be an attack against all.”8 The main reasons for the snail-pace progress of the GCC to stand up a credible common military force have remained the same throughout the forty years of its existence. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) set them forth in unvarnished language in a secret 1986 study, and its assessment remains pretty accurate to this day. “Each [member] distrusts the actions and intentions of the others, creating tensions that thwart cooperative efforts,” the report stated.9 Each state was intensely jealous of its national sovereignty and fearful of Saudi attempts to dominate it. The other five members resented Saudi attempts to use the GCC to advance its own national interests and goals at their expense. They resented and resisted what they saw as Riyadh’s “heavy-handed tactics.”10 A 2016 study of the GCC by the RAND Corporation came to the same conclusion, though stated in more diplomatic terms.11 These reasons also help to explain why Kuwait resisted signing a common internal security agreement until 2012, its parliament highly critical of a provision that required each GCC member to turn over perceived opponents of another present on its territory.

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The GCC has made the most progress in dealing with economic issues, creating a system of common tariffs, allowing the free flow of labor and citizens among the six members, and encouraging investments in each other’s economies. The group has even made progress toward building a common electricity grid. In contrast, combating terrorism both united and separated its members. They could agree, for example, that al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) constituted a threat to all of them. But after the 2011 uprisings, they could no longer agree whether the Muslim Brotherhood constituted a “terrorist” organization or later whether Houthi rebels in Yemen should be considered terrorists.

The GCC Rejects the Saudi Bid for Unity The GCC fell woefully short of its aspirations for economic unity when it tried to take steps toward a European-like common market with a central bank and a common currency. Saudi “heavy-handed tactics” served to split asunder rather than bring together its members on these issues. In 2009, King Abdullah began pushing for establishment of a GCC central bank with its headquarters in Riyadh. Three weeks after an agreement was announced, the UAE pulled out of any monetary union, its leaders frustrated that Abu Dhabi had not been chosen as the central bank’s location. It was the end of the idea of a central bank and common currency. But King Abdullah did not give up. At the GCC summit in Riyadh in December 2011, he surprised other leaders by declaring it was time to “move from a phase of cooperation to a phase of union within a single entity.”12 This was in the immediate aftermath of uprisings across the Arab world that had toppled the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya and left those in Yemen and Syria fighting for their lives. In reaction, the Saudis pushed for the expansion of the GCC to include the two other Arab monarchies in Jordan and Morocco and squashed the idea of inviting Egypt to join to give it more military weight. The Saudis kept up their campaign for a single entity until latent opposition to the idea burst into the open at an international security conference in Manama, Bahrain, in December 2013. After a senior Saudi official spoke about the “necessity” of a union “imposed by the great importance of the Gulf region,” the Omani minister of state for foreign affairs, Yusuf bin Alawi, made clear that Oman was inalterably opposed. First, he noted that the GCC had failed to build a common market, then stated, “We are not at all with the union.” He didn’t see a desire for “other brothers”

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to move in that direction, either.13 Oman intended to maintain its Swiss-style neutrality in all ongoing regional conflicts and not to become entangled in any. Kuwait, squeezed between Iraq and Iran at the top of the Gulf, was of the same mind but didn’t say so publicly to avoid outright confrontation with Saudi leaders. Oman sounded the death knell on the Saudi quest for a Saudidominated GCC union. The UAE had killed the idea of a common currency when it refused to go along with the Saudi demand that a central bank have its headquarters in Riyadh. All of Saudi Arabia’s GCC partners had dragged their heels on setting up a GCC-wide integrated missile defense system because it, too, would be under Saudi command and thus the Saudis would be able to decide on their own whether to go to war with Iran.

2011 Uprisings Splinter the GCC Challenges to Saudi leadership had clearly begun long before the 2011 uprisings, but they were destined to multiply rapidly afterward. The uprisings brought to the forefront all the fissures in Arab society— republics versus monarchies, Islamists versus secularists, Sunnis versus Shia, militant versus moderate Islamists, liberals versus conservatives, and dictators versus political activists. GCC members, mostly alike in religion (Sunni except for Ibadi Oman and majority Shiite Bahrain), primary tribal identities, and monarchical form of governance, put on a display of their differences before the entire world. To the surprise of outsiders, the eight Arab monarchies performed much better under pressure from street activists than did the Arab republics. The kings even used the uprisings to get rid of old and new enemies. With time, however, they proved united only in their interest to see all the monarchies survive. My main interest here is not to recount the convoluted history of the uprisings but to highlight how Saudi Arabia tried, and failed, to use the uprisings to assert its leadership over the GCC, and the entire Arab world, and to project Saudi military power. When the uprisings broke out in early 2011, King Abdullah moved surprisingly fast, first to protect the House of Saud and then to help other GCC monarchies. This required sending National Guard troops to Bahrain in March 2011 to help the Sunni ruling al-Khalifa family to put down the uprising there by the majority Shia population. The intervention was done under GCC auspices. The UAE also sent soldiers, and Kuwait sent patrol boats to ward off possible Iranian shipment of arms and agents to help the Shiite protesters. The

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GCC also allocated $20 billion over five years to Bahrain and Oman, the poorest of the six GCC members, to help them cope with the economic side effects from street protests. The GCC gave another $2.5 billion each to the monarchies in Jordan and Morocco and, under Saudi prodding, asked them to join the GCC to ensure even more billions in aid. The organization rushed another $12 billion to Egypt to help the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which had eased out President Hosni Mubarak, to prevail over Islamic and prodemocracy protesters. At the same time, King Abdullah helped smooth the ouster from power of President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia by offering him a place of refuge. Altogether, these Saudi-led initiatives did help to stabilize the other Arab monarchies threatened by street protests. They also showed an unprecedented level of military and diplomatic activism by an often somnambulant Saudi leadership in a bid to shape the outcome of uprisings in other Arab countries. There was a motive behind this outburst of Saudi activism other than self-preservation of monarchies: settling scores with Arab republican leaders who had long challenged Saudi assertion of leadership. First, King Abdullah rallied the GCC to call collectively for UN and Western intervention in Libya, where Muammar Qaddafi was fighting for his life and finally lost it in October 2011. In this case, the Saudis were out for revenge because Qaddafi had repeatedly belittled their pretense to leadership and even promoted a plot to assassinate King Abdullah in 2003. Then, the Saudis rushed to support the uprising in Syria, hoping to see the downfall of President Bashar al-Assad, another thorn in the side of the House of Saud. In this case, the Saudis mistakenly thought President Barack Obama, who had also called for al-Assad’s removal, would act to ensure his overthrow. So they backed several Syrian Islamic rebel factions they wanted to become part of any new government there. Unexpectedly, al-Assad outlasted the uprising by securing considerable Iranian and Russian military help and was still in power in early 2021, with no sign he was about to leave. The Saudis had more success in Yemen, where they settled scores with President Ali Abdullah Saleh for his support of Iraq during the 1990–1991 Gulf War. He was eventually pushed out by a combination of unyielding street protesters and a GCC plan that engineered his replacement in 2012 with a new pro-Saudi leader, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, still president of the internationally recognized Yemeni government in 2021. Before long, however, the myriad unresolved conflicts evidenced by the uprisings began to turn against Saudi aspirations for Arab lead-

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ership. King Abdullah died in January 2015 and made way for his designated successor, Salman bin Abdulaziz, to ascend to the throne. This also brought to power King Salman’s ambitious son (MBS), who would prove so reckless and heavy-handed that he alienated even the Saudi kingdom’s closest Arab allies. During the first several years of King Salman’s reign, MBS initiated three major ventures to demonstrate Saudi military power and himself as the new Arab world leader. All ended in disastrous setbacks.

MBS Goes to War in Yemen MBS’s first attempt at power projection came with the onset of civil war in neighboring Yemen, the main outcome of the 2011 uprising there. It led to endless political intrigue and changing alliances, the details of which I intend to spare the reader and concentrate on how it affected MBS’s image-in-the-making as a great Saudi and Arab leader. After three years of near-constant street protests and inconclusive negotiations among warring parties, a faction composed of Zaidi Shiite tribes in northern Yemen, led by the Houthi clan, marched south and took over the capital, Sanaa, in September 2014. They were able to accomplish this feat largely because the fallen president, Saleh, who sought to reclaim his lost power and still commanded key military units, supported the Houthi takeover of Sanaa. The Houthi-Saleh alliance forces then began marching farther south, this time all the way to the port city of Aden, in a clear bid to take over the entire country. The Houthis and the Saudis were already fast foes. Prior to the 2011 uprisings, they had fought six short wars that had both religious and geopolitical overtones. The Houthis were Zaidis, an offshoot of Shiism, and opposed Saudi attempts to promote Wahhabism in their homeland, in Saada Province, bordering Saudi Arabia. (Ironically, the Saudis had historically supported the Zaidi imamate that had ruled Yemen for centuries, only to have been overthrown in 1960 by Yemeni Republicans backed by Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser.) However, the Saudis were convinced the Houthis were expanding their religious, political, and military ties to Shiite Iran. Thus, they saw the rise of the Houthis as part of an Iranian strategy to encircle their kingdom by creating a base for Iranian operations on its southern border with Yemen. Iraq, on its northern border, had already been taken over by a pro-Iranian regime as a result of the US invasion of that country in 2003 to overthrow Hussein. After King Salman took over, he

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immediately appointed his son MBS defense minister. Two months later, on March 26, 2015, as the Houthis were about to enter Aden, MBS managed to form a coalition of nine seemingly willing Arab states to stop the Houthi takeover of all of Yemen. The Saudi-led coalition threw its military weight behind Yemeni factions supporting the internationally recognized government of President Hadi, who fled to Riyadh as the Houthi-Saleh forces reached the outskirts of Aden. I visited the Saudi kingdom in April that year, just after the coalition had begun its invasion, and found a lot of public support for MBS’s decision to launch it. I was told planning had begun almost immediately after the Houthis had seized control of Sanaa in September 2014, four months before King Abdullah died and MBS became defense minister. In any case, Saudis bought MBS’s argument that the Houthis were just a tool of Iran. And they responded positively to his call for Saudi Arabia to stand up to Iranian machinations in the kingdom’s backyard. The Saudi-led invasion sparked a wave of nationalistic fervor of righteousness, doubtlessly what MBS had intended to help him gain popularity and legitimacy as well as sustain public support for a risky venture. Even at the start of the invasion, however, there were signs of trouble ahead for MBS’s leadership bid. One GCC member, Oman, declined to join the coalition, and another, Kuwait, only sent a few planes and no troops. Qatar sent a contingent of 1,000 soldiers, but they remained strictly on the Saudi side of the Yemeni border. The two other Arab monarchies, Jordan and Morocco, also dispatched only planes and advisers. Egypt, another non-GCC member, was at that point under the rule of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi; the Saudis had helped overthrow President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood in 2013. The Saudis had also provided el-Sisi billions of dollars in financial aid. Despite his sizable political and financial debt to the al-Saud, el-Sisi, too, refused MBS’s request for soldiers, no doubt because of Nasser’s disastrous experience in Yemen. He had sent 70,000 troops there to help the Republicans prevail over the Zaidi Royalists in the civil war of the 1960s but found his army bogged down there at the start of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Finally, Saudi Arabia’s closest non-Arab ally, Pakistan, also avoided sending any troops. Its wily prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, decided to seek the approval of his parliament, knowing beforehand it would veto the request, which it did. Before long, the nine-nation, Saudi-led coalition, fighting on the ground to reinstall the hapless President Hadi, was reduced to just

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two core members, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and the thousands of foreign troops they hired to fight on their behalf. The largest contingent came from Sudan, whose president, Omar al-Bashir, was economically desperate and in deep political trouble. He sent 14,000 soldiers, whom the Saudis paid handsomely by local standards, $480 to $530 a month plus extra pay for combat duty and a $10,000 bonus.14 In addition, MBS had sent al-Bashir $25 million as a personal gift to incentivize him to keep providing soldiers. The only non-Muslim country to send soldiers was Eritrea, which provided just 400. In addition, the UAE hired 450 mercenaries from Colombia, Panama, El Salvador, and Chile to fight on its behalf there.

Saudi Disaster in Yemen This first display of Saudi military prowess under MBS proved both a military and a political disaster. The coalition was always “Saudiled” in foreign descriptions of the operation, but in fact the UAE quickly took control of most of the land fighting, except for that along the Saudi border. Both countries undertook to train and pay tens of thousands of Yemeni tribesmen, and both sent units of their Special Forces into the country to provide control and command of this motley army. The UAE engaged 3,500 to 5,000 of their regular troops, far more than the Saudis, whose army and National Guard units remained mostly in static defensive positions along the Saudi side of the border. The Saudi Royal Air Force led the air war, which quickly became badly tarnished by an endless stream of mistaken bombings of civilian targets and thousands of civilian deaths. The Saudi-led coalition at first made progress under its Operation Decisive Storm in pushing the Houthi-Saleh forces out of Aden and then much of southern Yemen. The UAE forces were credited with the single biggest military victory, not over the Houthis but against al-Qaeda, which had seized control of Mukalla, the capital of the Hadhramaut Governorate, in the southeast. In April 2016, a 12,000-troop Yemeni tribal militia force, organized, armed, and commanded by the UAE military, drove al-Qaeda out of the port city. The Saudis were never able to brag about a similar victory on the Yemeni battleground. Indeed, Saudi forces spent most of their time fending off Houthi forays across their border, at times reaching deep inside the kingdom and holding on to some Saudi territory for months. By 2019, the war had settled into a stalemate, with the Houthis still in control of all the north, the capital of Sanaa, and the Red Sea

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port of Hodeidah. But they had long since dispensed with their alliance with former president Saleh. The wily leader had tried to make a separate deal with the Saudis, and the Houthis killed him in December 2017 as he was attempting to flee the capital. In early 2021 the Houthis were locked in battle to seize the city of Marib in north-central Yemen, an important oil and gas center vital to both sides in the war. All efforts by one UN negotiator after another to find a peace settlement had failed, and the Biden administration had taken over that quest. Regarding the fortunes of Saudi Arabia and MBS, four major trends emerged during the first six years of the war in Yemen. First, the Saudis took the brunt of international blame for the destruction of myriad civilian targets and the deaths of thousands of civilians. UN and human rights groups kept up a steady drumbeat of reports on the devastating impact of the war on the civilian population. By early 2020, one group tracking the war estimated that 112,000 people had died, 12,600 of them civilians, in targeted attacks from the air.15 Another 85,000 had died of famine caused by the war. Starting in 2018, UN humanitarian relief agencies began ranking Yemen as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with 24 million of its people— two-thirds of its total population—in need of food and 9.6 million “one step away from famine.”16 An outbreak of cholera starting in 2016 only made the crisis worse, with the World Health Organization reporting close to 1 million cases by September 2019 and 1,350 deaths.17 It was described as the “largest and fasting-growing outbreak of the disease in modern history.”18 A UN report issued in 2018 accused both sides of possible war crimes but laid the main onus on the Saudi-led bombings of “residential areas, markets, funerals, weddings, detention facilities, civilian boats, and even medical facilities,” which had caused the “most direct civilian casualties.”19

Yemen Splinters The second noticeable trend was the increased fragmentation of Yemen into feuding factions, the most important of which called itself the Southern Transitional Council (STC) upon its founding in May 2017. Based in Aden, which also served as the headquarters of the internationally recognized Hadi government, the STC called for the reestablishment of South Yemen separate from North Yemen, the two states that had existed prior to 1990 when they had united into a single entity. South Yemen had been the creation of British colonialism in 1967 and the only declared Marxist state in the Arab

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world—the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. The most remarkable aspect of this resurgent independence movement was that the UAE stood behind it. In fact, the UAE had formed, financed, and trained its Security Belt Forces, a militia fighting the Houthis and al-Qaeda across southern Yemen. Farther north, another UAE-formed militia, the Giants Brigade, was part of the offensive from Aden up the Red Sea coast, which had pushed the Houthis out of one port town after another until it ground to a halt at the gates of Hodeidah. This port was the main transportation hub for offloading humanitarian supplies destined for most of the Yemeni interior. Pressure from the United States, the United Nations, and Western charities, all fearful that a battle to dislodge the Houthis would shut down the supply lines, kept the UAE forces and STC militia from launching a land, sea, and air assault initially planned for December 2017. As of early 2021, Hodeidah was still in Houthi hands. I had followed the evolution of the separatist STC with considerable interest to see how the Saudi government would react; after all, it had supported a short-lived attempt by South Yemen to break away from North Yemen in 1994. I became even more interested when the fledgling STC opened an office in downtown Washington, DC, in 2019. Its two representatives briefed me periodically on the progress its militias were making to consolidate STC control over old South Yemen and take control of Hodeidah. Why they cared about the port city was never clear to me because they claimed the STC did not intend to include it in a new, independent South Yemen. They assured me its borders would remain the same as those before 1990, when Hodeidah had served as North Yemen’s main Red Sea port. They did not hide the UAE’s political and financial support for their secessionist movement and said Saudi Arabia had not tried to block their campaign for international recognition, either. Instead, the Saudi-backed Hadi government had proven the main obstacle. I was told the STC had plans to expand its international campaign for recognition and was in the process of opening other offices in London, Brussels, and Moscow. Cleary, the UAE had made a major commitment to seeing the rebirth of old South Yemen.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE Part Ways The third emerging trend was directly related to the second one: a serious rift in the core alliance between Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

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This became embarrassingly public to the Saudis when in July 2019 the UAE declared it was withdrawing all its troops from Yemen, but said it would continue to support the 60,000 Yemeni tribesmen it had already trained under the breakaway STC’s command. Before long, UAE-piloted warplanes were coming to the defense of those tribesmen when they came under attack from forces loyal to the Saudibacked Hadi government. The two former allies also began fighting for control of the strategic island of Socotra, located in the midst of oil shipping lanes leading to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, at the southern entrance to the Red Sea, one of the world’s key waterways through which 5.5 million barrels of oil passed daily. The rift only grew worse when the STC, already mostly in control of Aden, declared in April 2020 the “self-rule” of the South under its auspices. Although the UAE formally joined Saudi Arabia in denouncing the move, there was little other evidence it had stopped its financial support of the STC. The council’s office in Washington, DC, was still open in March 2021. In December 2019, the Saudis had succeeded in forging a peace agreement between the STC and the Hadi government that did not take hold even partially until the following July. The former was to give up its bid for self-rule in southern Yemen and merge its militia with that of the Hadi government in return for an equal share of ministers in a new coalition government.20 But the STC remained an independent organization with its own militia, clearly intent on pushing later for an independent South Yemen. The splinter of the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen continued apace. In June 2017, Saudi Arabia kicked Qatar out for reasons I discuss later. Then, in February 2019, Morocco ended its involvement, partly in reaction to the Saudi murder of Jamal Khashoggi the previous October. Jordan followed suit and even began showing support for Qatar in its feud with Saudi Arabia. The death knell of the coalition rang when the Arab country with the largest contingent of troops inside Yemen also changed its mind. Following the overthrow of Sudanese president al-Bashir in April 2019, the new government announced in December it was withdrawing 10,000 of the total 14,000 troops it had sent to Yemen. In early 2020, Sudan withdrew the rest of them. With UAE and Sudanese troops gone, MBS found himself with no Arab allies left in his first endeavor to project Saudi power abroad. One consequence was that Saudi Arabia finally had to send more of its own troops. The kingdom sent them, however, not to fight the Houthis but to stop the infighting between its Yemeni allies—the Hadi government and the STC.

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The UAE Eclipses Saudi Arabia The fourth trend that arose from the Yemen war was the emergence of the UAE with a reputation for projecting military power far more effectively than Saudi Arabia. This happened despite UAE nationals numbering only 1.2 million compared to 25 million Saudis, and the UAE maintaining a military one-quarter the size of the Saudi armed forces (63,000 versus 250,000). Its success was the culmination of a long-standing UAE practice of attaching its armed forces as closely as possible to the US military to hone their skills. Unlike Saudi Arabia, the UAE had sent its air force and army to fight alongside the United States wherever possible at the insistence of its strongman, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ), Abu Dhabi’s crown prince. Unlike MBS, he had had a long military career as an air force and helicopter pilot and risen to become deputy supreme commander of the UAE armed forces. UAE soldiers and planes fought alongside US forces in Somalia, Kosovo, Libya, and Afghanistan. The UAE had even become trusted to pilot aircraft providing close-in air support for US troops in Afghanistan. UAE Special Forces had also become the main US partner in tracking down al-Qaeda terrorists inside Yemen. Former US defense secretary James Mattis was so impressed by the military prowess of such a small nation that he referred to the UAE as “Little Sparta,” adding, “They’re not just willing to fight, they’re great warriors.”21 By contrast, the Saudis had concentrated on accumulating arms rather than gaining on-the-ground military experience. The kingdom went on a massive arms purchasing spree, becoming the world’s largest arms importer from 2014 to 2018.22 In 2018, it ranked as having the third highest military budget, just behind those of the United States and China. 23 In those same five years, it devoted nearly $370 billion to military and security expenditures. 24 Twothirds of Saudi arms were supplied by the United States, which had already sold the kingdom AWACS aircraft in 1981, planes that even Israel did not possess. On paper, Saudi Arabia appeared to be a world-class military power. In reality, it remained a paper tiger, and the Yemen war exposed this reality. Aside from its Special Forces, the Saudi army had never been highly regarded by foreign military experts. The Saudi elite branch had always been the air force, of which many pilots were royal princes. But its reputation, too, suffered grievously from the large number of civilian targets mistakenly hit by coalition warplanes, even though it was never clear whether the planes and pilots at fault were Saudi or from other

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coalition members. The reason given to me for not sending Saudi troops inside Yemen was to avoid arousing bitter memories of the 1934 Saudi invasion of the country. The more likely reason, however, was that in the six miniwars fought with the Houthis in their Saada homeland between 2004 and 2009, the Saudi army had suffered more than 130 troops killed. The Saudis rarely published anything about the Saudi on-theground role in Yemen and remained mum as to casualties. Three exceptions were seizing the Hanish Islands in the Red Sea from the Houthis, killing a top Houthi leader, and capturing the leader of ISIS in Yemen. But the Saudis did publicize each Houthi drone and missile strike on Saudi towns and cities (357) and industrial facilities (313) as of June 2020.25 In these cases alone, the kingdom often made public the resulting number of casualties as well as the damage inflicted if it reflected poorly on the Houthis. On several occasions, Houthi missiles had reached the outskirts of Riyadh and once its international airport. They became longer and longer in range and ever more accurate thanks to Iran, which provided many of its own missiles and the technology to improve old Russian Scud missiles sold to the Yemeni government prior to the war.

Analyses of the Saudi Military Failure The best expert analysis of the coalition’s military performance was a fifteen-page “secret report” written in September 2018 by French military intelligence.26 Noting that the coalition had carried out 24,000 air strikes since the start of the war, it ranked the performance of UAE pilots up to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) standards. By contrast, it said that Saudi pilots, despite having received US training in targeting, had performed poorly. As for the Saudi land force, its 25,000 troops—five army brigades and two National Guard ones—had mostly remained in static positions along the Saudi border throughout the war. They had operated “ineffectively,” and their efforts to secure the Saudi border from Houthi incursions or penetrate into Yemen had been “a failure.” The French report said nothing about Saudi war casualties, but a review of what the Los Angeles Times called “an unwinnable war” a year later put the toll at 3,000 dead and 20,000 injured. 27 If accurate, these were astoundingly high figures for an army that had seldom engaged in on-the-ground fighting inside Yemen. Little wonder the Saudi government was keeping casualties a secret from the public.

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Military analysts have attributed the poor performance of the Saudi armed forces to a number of factors, from a lack of a joint operations command bringing together its five branches into a single fighting force and the absence of a professional officer core to poor training and inexperience in mounting expeditionary wars. Certainly, they have not lacked assistance from US and British advisers, contractors, trainers, and maintainers of their infrastructure, warplanes, tanks, and missiles. The US Military Training Mission has been hard at work since 1953 in building the Saudi armed forces literally from the ground up, and its hundreds of rotating advisers and technicians have taken over Eskan Village, outside Riyadh, capable of housing 2,000 people in its forty-four high-rise towers and 840 villas.28 The British also have a huge training mission that, according to one study, numbered 7,000 civilian contractors and 200 military advisers in 2018.29 The Saudi armed forces have not lacked in war materiel, either. As I detailed above, hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into procuring the latest aircraft, tanks, ships, and missiles from the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. One US analyst described the Saudi military as a “glitter force” rather than “an effective fighting force.”30 The Saudi army has remained relatively small, 75,000 troops, compared with the Saudi National Guard, which numbers upward of 100,000. The latter, based on tribal recruits, operates separately from the army and under another royal command. The most elite branch, the air force, has seen its reputation destroyed in the Yemen war because its pilots repeatedly bombed scores of civilian rather than military targets. As for the Saudi army, it has performed primarily as a defensive rather than as an offensive force; it never really invaded Yemen at all. An even more remarkable shortcoming is that the Saudis have never established an unconventional body similar to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, with its Quds Force spearheading secret military operations overseas and training local militias such as Hezbollah in Lebanon to promote its causes in various countries. The Saudi extraterritorial reach has been largely limited to backing militant Islamic groups, as it did for a time in the Syrian civil war, and sending Wahhabi missionaries abroad to proselytize. One factor seldom addressed by analysts in explaining the myriad deficiencies of the Saudi armed forces has been the primacy of royal politics over military professionalism. In recent times, the minister of defense has been a senior prince using that position to build

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a fiefdom primarily as a stepping stone to the throne. None of Saudi Arabia’s kings since Ibn Saud, the kingdom’s founding father, have had any fighting experience or even been officers. Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz, who held that position from 1963 to 2011, had no previous military experience and had been governor of Riyadh. He turned the Defense Ministry into a cash cow, with his full brother, a businessman, as his chief assistant, and rose to become heir apparent in 2005. He died six years later, before he would have become king. His successor, Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz, had also been deputy defense minister and then governor of Riyadh for nearly fifty years, also with no military experience. He, too, eyed the Defense Ministry as a stepping stone to the throne. He was named defense minister in 2011, crown prince in 2012, and king in 2015. Little surprise, then, that one of his first decisions was to name as defense minister his own son, MBS, similarly with no military career but, as events quickly proved, every intention of using this perch to propel himself to heir apparent. The chronic lack of professionalism plaguing the Saudi armed forces clearly traces back in part to the use of the Defense Ministry by its royal commanders for their political ends and fixation on the quality and quantity of arms rather than honing the skills of those assigned to use them.

The MBS-MBZ Relationship MBZ’s decision to withdraw UAE troops from Yemen in summer 2019 stands as a turning point in the fortunes of MBS and must have come as a rude shock to the latter. The two leaders were fast friends and consulted constantly. MBS looked upon MBZ, twenty-four years older and an experienced military strategist and statesman, as his mentor. The relationship between MBZ and MBS was regarded as akin to a father-son one, fascinating Saudiologists to no end. There seem to have been a number of reasons MBZ finally abandoned his “son” in Yemen. First, the war had reached a stalemate, particularly after plans to capture Hodeidah were scotched by the international outcry over the prospect of yet another humanitarian disaster. Secondly, US military advisers had told UAE officers in charge of the assault on the port city that it was a risky venture for which they were not prepared. Thirdly, the UAE had trained tens of thousands of Yemeni tribesmen to act on its behalf to maintain a dominant position in southern Yemen and on the strategic island of Socotra. The island had come to loom large in the UAE plan to

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expand its naval presence in and around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Fourth, MBZ doubtless realized that the small UAE military was exhausting itself in a quagmire not of its making, with little prospect of seeing Saudi Arabia ever prevail over the Houthis in their Saada homeland or force them to leave the capital. Finally, with tensions growing between the United States under President Donald Trump and Iran, so too were the chances of a war in the UAE’s own front yard. It was time to imitate Trump and put “UAE First.” It left MBS alone to deal with the enhanced Houthi military threat to Saudi Arabia and Iranian encirclement.

The Qatar Challenge As the GCC was splitting over the Yemen war, it was splintering even more so over another contentious issue: Qatar’s drive for its own place in the sun independent of Saudi Arabia. This time, MBS had no direct responsibility for its onset. Qatar, a tiny emirate of only 300,000 nationals, had lived quietly during its first twenty-four years of independence in the shadow of its big brother and contentedly followed the Saudi lead. It was attached to Saudi Arabia like the thumb of a hand, and the two were the only Arab countries where Wahhabism was the dominant Islamic creed. Qatar was busy exploiting a vast offshore gas field it shared with Iran. It was on its way to becoming the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas and, on a per capita basis, the world’s richest country. All this harmony in Saudi-Qatari relations abruptly ended in 1995, when Hamad al-Thani, son of Khalifa al-Thani, reigning emir of Qatar, took advantage of his father’s vacationing in Switzerland to execute a bloodless coup. The al-Saud were so upset by this turn of events that they backed a failed attempted countercoup to restore Khalifa to power the following year. Relations only grew more strained after Hamad, determined to see his emirate have a separate voice in the world from Saudi Arabia, launched in 1996 a satellite television station called Al Jazeera. The station and online news agency were novel in the Arab world, the first outlets airing critical views of incumbent Arab leaders and their policies. Opposition activists seeking a place of safe exile began flocking to the Qatari capital, Doha, where they were warmly welcomed. Under Hamad, Qatar also launched a half-dozen attempts to act as a mediator to resolve conflicts in other Arab countries, from Sudan and Lebanon to the fractured Palestinians—a role the Saudis had

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usually played. It even took the bold step to become the first Arab country to allow Israel to open a trade office in its capital. At the same time, Qatar welcomed with open arms the US military when it was forced to leave Saudi Arabia in 2003, becoming the regional headquarters of the US Central Command (CENTCOM) at its Al Udeid Air Base. CENTCOM had responsibility for the US war in Afghanistan against the Taliban as well as its campaign to eradicate al-Qaeda and ISIS. For the first time in US State Department and Pentagon thinking and strategy toward the greater Middle East, little Qatar was challenging the assumption in Washington that Saudi Arabia was the only country that mattered.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar Part Ways With the advent of the 2011 Arab uprisings, Qatar and Saudi Arabia went their separate ways to the point of open and bitter conflict. In Egypt’s uprising, Qatar backed the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of whose leaders, Morsi, won the 2012 presidential elections there. The Saudis, who had been close allies of the fallen president Mubarak, took the side of the Egyptian military, which ousted Morsi in 2013 and consolidated power a year later under General el-Sisi. At that point, thousands of Muslim Brotherhood officials and members fled into exile, many taking up residency in Doha. Thereafter, Qatar and Saudi Arabia found themselves backing different factions elsewhere, in civil wars underway in Syria, Libya, and Yemen and in the conflict between moderate and radical factions of the Palestinian leadership. In the latter case, the Saudis backed the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas and the Qataris the leadership of the hard-line anti-Israeli Hamas. This was the troubled background to the crisis between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which went from simmer to boil in 2013. In this case, the Saudis had the backing of GCC members Bahrain and the UAE but not of Kuwait or Oman. In November 2013, King Abdullah called Emir Hamad to Riyadh and convinced him to sign an agreement committing him to ending his support for all GCC opposition groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, and any faction in the Yemeni civil war posing a threat to neighboring countries, namely Saudi Arabia. When King Abdullah saw no sign that Qatar was fulfilling the so-called Riyadh Agreement, in March the following year he withdrew the Saudi ambassador to Doha, and Bahrain and the UAE also withdrew theirs. According to the Saudi version, Qatar’s

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new emir, Sheikh Tamim, son of Hamad, who had abdicated in his favor in 2013, had also formally pledged to fulfill the terms of the agreement. The crisis eased, and the three aggrieved GCC members sent their ambassadors back to Doha in November 2014. But the Saudis still saw no progress and upped the pressure after King Salman replaced Abdullah, particularly after he named MBS heir apparent in June 2017. This time the crisis was touched off, however, by the UAE, which in May had hacked into the Qatar News Agency and planted fake remarks attributed to Tamim speaking out in support of reconciliation with Iran. In reaction, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE—this time joined by Egypt, equally aggrieved by continuing Qatari support of the Muslim Brotherhood—announced on June 5, 2017, the imposition of a land, sea, and air boycott of Qatar. No Arab states had ever resorted to such a draconian action to impose their will on another. On June 22, 2017, just one day after MBS’s elevation to crown prince, this coalition, known as the Arab Quartet, issued a list of thirteen demands that Qatar would have to meet before it would cancel the blockade. 31 Qatar was given just ten days to comply. These demands incorporated the earlier ones of the Riyadh Agreement but went much further: Qatar was told it had to close down a military base Turkey had established there, declare as “terrorist” organizations and cut all ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic militant groups, hand over a list of “terrorist figures” (fifty-nine named individuals and twelve entities) to their home countries, shut down Al Jazeera, curb diplomatic ties and end all military and security cooperation with Iran, and align its foreign policy with that of other GCC members. The country was even required to submit to monthly audits to ensure it was fulfilling these demands. On July 5, Qatar rejected the ultimatum, and the blockade went forward. As I argued earlier, it would be wrong in this case to blame MBS for initiating a confrontation in the making since 2013, two years before King Abdullah passed away. Still, MBS was hardly a stranger to the escalation of pressure on Qatar. He had been deputy crown prince since 2015 and instrumental in shaping every aspect of Saudi foreign policy thereafter. After the blockade was declared, MBS did everything possible to intimidate Qatar into submission, including promotion of a coup d’état. The Saudis hosted 6,000 members of a Qatari tribe, the al-Ghufran clan of the Bani Mura, which had remained faithful to the deposed

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emir, Khalifa, and fled into exile in the kingdom in 1995. MBS gave its leaders and their cause considerably publicity in the Saudi press and even took them to the United Nations to air their complaints. The Saudi media under the guidance of MBS’s right-hand aide, Saud alQahtani, accused Emir Hamad of conniving with Libya’s fallen leader, Qaddafi, to assassinate the late King Abdullah. The Saudis backed dissident members of the ruling al-Thani family, particularly Mubarak alThani, who called for the overthrow of Emir Tamim.32 The Saudis even promoted a plan to dig a thirty-five-mile canal along the Saudi-Qatari border to physically separate Qatar from the Arabian Peninsula.33 None of these ploys lessened Qatar’s determination to go it alone, and its immense gas wealth made it possible to do so. In December 2019, it seemed the rift might be ending. Emir Tamim received a Saudi invitation to come to Riyadh to attend the annual GCC summit. He didn’t go but in a gesture of goodwill sent his prime minister. After his substitute was suspected of offering concessions to the Saudis, however, Tamim fired him the next month. In response, the Saudi-backed al-Thani dissident, Mubarak, once again called upon Emir Tamim to step down.34 Only upon former US vice president Joe Biden’s triumph over President Trump in the US presidential election of November 2020 did Saudi Arabia finally relent for reasons I discuss in Chapter 10.

MBS’s Misstep in Lebanon Another example of MBS’s bungled attempt to impose his will on other Arab leaders was his scheme to force the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, to resign in November 2017, just after MBS rounded up more than 380 Saudi princes, businessmen, and government officials on corruption charges. MBS probably considered Hariri guilty for similar reasons because his Saudi Oger Construction Company had been part of the vast Riyadh Financial District project, which had gone bankrupt. But what infuriated MBS even more was Hariri’s failure to stand up to Iran’s ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, which came to dominate Lebanese politics and then became an ally of the Houthis in Yemen. On November 4, 2017, the Saudi air defense destroyed a ballistic missile fired by these Yemeni rebels targeting Riyadh. The Saudis accused Hezbollah of providing the missile. The very same day, Hariri, looking and acting like a kidnapped hostage, appeared on Saudi state television to read a state-

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ment, dictated by MBS’s aides, denouncing Iran’s machinations in Lebanon and Yemen. Hariri then announced he was resigning. But he offered no reason for his decision, leaving the very strong impression he had been forced to do so by the Saudis. Hariri’s resignation caused an uproar in Lebanese political circles and in France. President Emmanuel Macron flew to Saudi Arabia in a bid to get Hariri reinstalled as prime minister. After twelve days, Hariri returned to Beirut via Paris to a tumultuous outpouring of support from all Lebanese factions, including Hezbollah. Under popular pressure, Hariri withdrew his resignation and remained prime minister until January 2020. MBS’s reckless and tactless attempt to remove Hariri had backfired spectacularly.

MBS’s Misstep in Sudan Yet another example of MBS’s botched statesmanship came with his handling of the uprising in Sudan that broke out in December 2018. It was a repeat of what the late King Abdullah had done when confronted with a similar event in Egypt seven years earlier, namely backed the besieged incumbent and sided with the military over its civilian opposition. In the case of Sudan, MBS rushed to the rescue of President al-Bashir, a former military leader in deep political trouble after thirty years in power just as Egyptian president Mubarak had been. Supporting al-Bashir, however, was far riskier because he had become an international pariah wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague on charges of war crimes and genocide related to the civil war in Sudan’s Darfur region. Still, MBS decided to support al-Bashir and sent him $25 million as a personal gift to help him prevail over massive and persistent street demonstrations in Khartoum. In the end, the same thing that happened to Mubarak befell al-Bashir. He was forced to resign by his own military in April 2019. When they went to arrest him, security police found $130 million stashed away in his home. Al-Bashir later admitted he had received $90 million in total from the Saudis, first from the late King Abdullah and then MBS.35 That December alBashir was tried and found guilty on charges of corruption and money laundering but only sentenced to two years in prison. The new government promised, however, to send him to The Hague to face the charges of genocide and war crimes. As of this writing, however, he was still serving his sentence in a Khartoum jail.

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MBS Faces Isolation in the Arab World As of early 2021, MBS cut a lonely and highly compromised figure in the Arab world. His name was inexorably attached to three foreign policy disasters, in Yemen, Qatar, and Lebanon, plus the murder of Khashoggi. The impact from the latter on his hopes for Arab leadership I have already discussed in an earlier chapter. Taken together, these four initial challenges had shown MBS to be reckless, impulsive, and vindictive, with little to no concern for weighing the consequences of his actions for Saudi Arabia or himself. He had seen other Arab allies abandon him in Yemen, even his closest and most important one militarily, the UAE. In fact, the UAE rather than Saudi Arabia had successfully illustrated an ability to project military power and won the admiration of the Pentagon. Former CENTCOM chief General Anthony Zinni had already in 2014 begun describing the UAE as “the strongest relationship that the United States has in the Arab world today.”36 As for Qatar, MBS’s drive to force the tiny emirate to submit to Saudi diktat had shattered his own objective for the GCC to become a credible US-supported deterrent and counterweight to Iran. In fact, the blockade had forced Qatar to expand, rather than curb, its ties to Tehran to obtain food imports and find alternative air routes to Europe and North America. It had brought Turkey, a newly declared foe of the Saudis after its unstinting support for the Muslim Brotherhood, to Qatar’s rescue as well. MBS had created a tripartite alliance of the kingdom’s old and new rivals—Iran, Turkey, and Qatar—that the al-Saud had never had to face, or even contemplate, before. MBS’s foreign policy blunders did not stop there. In early 2020, he provided the world yet another example of his impulsiveness and lack of forethought for the consequences of his actions. He triggered an oil war with Russia that, intentionally or not, had devastating side effects on Saudi relations with the United States. This time, MBS jeopardized the support of his only remaining defender in Washington, Trump. The US president had become critical not only to MBS’s political well-being after Khashoggi’s assassination but to his quest for recognition as a world leader. It is to this all-important US-Saudi relationship, the keystone of Saudi security since World War II, I turn next. 1. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2019.

Notes

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2. Estimate based on figures for annual Saudi defense budget from 2015 to 2019, SIPRI Military Expenditure Database and SIPRI Annual Trends in World Military Expenditure, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex. 3. Florence Gaub, “War of Words: Saudi Arabia v. Iran,” European Union Institute for Security Studies, February 5, 2016. 4. David B. Ottaway, “Gulf Arabs Set Framework for Economic, Military Cooperation,” Washington Post, November 13, 1981. 5. David B. Ottaway, “Saudis Decry Oman’s U.S. Ties at Gulf Summit: Security Is Major Concern at Meeting of Persian Gulf Leaders,” Washington Post, November 11, 1981. 6. David. B. Ottaway, “Saudis Wary of U.S. Military Role: Offer to Oman Shows Saudi Ambiguity About U.S. Role in Gulf,” Washington Post, December 2, 1981. 7. David B. Ottaway, “Gulf Arabs Set Framework for Economic, Military Cooperation.” 8. Jeffrey Martini, Becca Wasser, Dalia Dassa Kaye, Daniel Egel, and Cordaye Ogletree, The Outlook for Arab Gulf Cooperation (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016), 7. 9. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), “Gulf Cooperation Council: Progress Toward Integration,” May 1986, sanitized copy approved for release July 16, 2012. 10. Ibid. 11. Martini et al., Outlook for Arab Gulf Cooperation. 12. “Saudi King Abdullah Urges GCC ‘to Move from Phase of Cooperation to Phase of Union,’” Al Arabiya English, December 20, 2011. 13. Habib Toumi, “Divergent Views on Gulf Union Emerge: Saudis Press for Union as Urgent Matter, but Omanis Say They Would Opt Out,” Gulf News, December 8, 2013. 14. David Kirkpatrick, “On the Front Line of the Saudi War in Yemen: Child Soldiers from Darfur,” New York Times, December 28, 2018. 15. Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, “ACLED Resources: War in Yemen,” March 21, 2020. 16. UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, “Crisis Overview,” April 3, 2018. 17. World Health Organization, “Outbreak Update, Cholera in Yemen,” September 1, 2019. 18. Nicole Einbinder, “How Yemen’s Cholera Outbreak Became the Fastest Growing in Modern History,” Public Broadcasting System, October 18, 2017. 19. Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Yemen: U.N. Experts Point to Possible War Crimes by Parties to the Conflict,” August 28, 2018. 20. For more details, see Saudi Embassy, Riyadh Agreement, December 2019; “Yemen’s Riyadh Agreement: An Overview,” Al Jazeera, July 29, 2020. 21. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “In the UAE, the United States Has a Quiet, Potent Ally Nicknamed ‘Little Sparta,’” Washington Post, November 9, 2014. 22. Peter D. Wezeman and Alexander Kuimova, “Military Spending and Arms Imports by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE,” SIPRI Fact Sheet, May 2019. 23. Nan Tian et al., “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2018,” SIPRI Fact Sheet, April 2019. 24. Derived from SIPRI Military Expenditure Database and Annual Trends in World Military Expenditure, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex. 25. “Arab Coalition Intercepts Houthi Ballistic Missiles Targeting Riyadh,” Arab News, June 23, 2020.

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26. “Secret Report Reveals Saudi Incompetence and Widespread Use of U.S. Weapons in Yemen,” Intercept, April 15, 2019. 27. Nabih Bulos and David S. Cloud, “As Top Allies Scale Back in Yemen, Saudi Arabia Faces Prospect of an Unwinnable War,” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2019. 28. “Eskan Village Air Force Base in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,” www.militarybases .com. 29. Mike Lewis and Katherine Templar, “U.K. Personnel Supporting the Saudi Armed Forces—Risk, Knowledge, and Accountability,” Mike Lewis Research, 2018. 30. Becca Wasser, RAND Corporation, cited in Helene Cooper, “Attacks Expose Flaws in Saudi Arabia’s Expensive Military,” New York Times, September 19, 2019. 31. For a list of the thirteen demands, see “Arab States Issue 13 Demands to End Qatar-Gulf Crisis,” Al Jazeera, July 12, 2017. 32. See, for example, “Mubarak al-Thani Says Will Return to Qatar to ‘Cleanse’ It from Ruling Regime,” Al Arabiya English, February 26, 2018. 33. Habib Toumi, “Saudi Arabia Moves Ahead with Salwa Canal Plan,” Gulf News, June 19, 2018. 34. Abdullah al-Hatayla, “Mubarak al-Thani Asks Qatari Emir to Quit,” Okaz and Saudi Gazette, May 3, 2020. 35. Declan Walsh, “Al-Bashir Trial in Sudan Opens with Claim of $90 Million Payment from Saudis,” New York Times, August 19, 2019. 36. Chandrasekaran, “In the UAE, the United States Has a Quiet, Potent Ally Nicknamed ‘Little Sparta.’”

10 The Saudi-US Relationship: Too Damaged to Repair? In March 2020, Saudi Arabia rented twenty supertankers to ship 40 million barrels of oil to ports in the Gulf of Mexico, on the US southern border, seven times the amount from the previous year and far in excess of what the already glutted US market could absorb. The purpose of this Saudi “flotilla,” as it was called by the US media, was to halt the surging US shale oil industry, which had become a threat to Saudi oil supremacy. US technology and ingenuity in oil extraction had made it possible for the United States to overtake the kingdom as the world’s leading oil producer in 2019. It had even become a major crude oil exporter, undermining the ability of the Saudi-led Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to set production levels and prices on its own. The political consequences were far-reaching. For the first time in the history of the seventyfive-year-old US-Saudi relationship, the two partners had become rivals in the world of oil. Oil had become another source of division rather than adhesion. It sparked another round of calls in Congress and Washington policymaking circles for a rethink and reset of an increasingly frayed partnership. The US-Saudi oil rivalry had been in the making since the onset of the shale oil and gas revolution in the mid-2000s. It was the result of hydraulic fracking of shale and rocks and horizontal drilling through them to extract small pockets of oil rather than mining large deposits. US production in 2005 stood at only 5.2 million barrels a day and crude oil imports at more than 10 million a day.1 Three years later, output had risen to 8.8 million barrels a day; in 2019 it stood at 12.3 million and was projected (before the coronavirus pandemic) to reach more than 13 million barrels a day the following year.2 At that point the United States had surpassed both Saudi Arabia and Russia in 165

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production, largely because those two countries were cooperating in production cuts under OPEC-led agreements with Russia and nine other non-OPEC producers. Meanwhile, the United States had become an exporter of crude oil, reaching about 3 million barrels daily to 190 counties in 2019.3 Both Saudi Arabia and Russia suddenly became acutely aware, and upset, to discover US oil challenging their own shares of the world market. This was, in brief, the background to the crisis OPEC and its partners faced over setting production and price levels in early 2020. It was set off by a phone call that ended in a shouting match between Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and President Vladimir Putin on March 6 as OPEC met at its headquarters in Vienna, Austria. MBS wanted the Russians to agree to cut an additional 300,000 barrels a day in their production as part of an OPECled plan to reduce overall production by a further 1.5 million barrels. This was in addition to the cuts of more than 2 million barrels already agreed upon in 2019 to bolster sagging prices. Putin refused what one report described as MBS’s “ultimatum” under threat of Saudi Arabia unleashing a tsunami of oil onto the world market to undercut Russian oil sales.4 Whether MBS already had flooding the saturated US market in mind was unclear but likely. He was certainly aware of surging US production and exports becoming a threat to the kingdom’s own oil power. The Saudis had already used the same tactic of flooding the market with cheap oil to cripple US shale producers from 2014 to 2016 with some effect, though those producers had survived by drastically cutting costs. MBS certainly knew that the Russians, now seeing US oil headed for China in competition with their own, were using their demand for the United States to cut its production as an excuse for not reducing their own. In any case, Saudi Arabia declared its intention to carry out a huge production increase starting in April 2020, from 9.7 million barrels to 12.3 million a day. In mid-March, the Saudis began chartering a flotilla of supertankers to haul crude oil to the United States. In addition, to ensure that its oil would find US buyers, the kingdom offered a discount on the price of its light crude oil of $3.75 per barrel. All the evidence pointed to Saudi Arabia having every intention of trying once again to cripple the US shale oil industry and eliminate the United States as a competitor. The White House and Congress reacted furiously—with the exception of President Donald Trump, at least initially—to the Saudi assault on US shale oil producers. With his single-minded focus on

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improving his chances for reelection in November, he at first welcomed the advent of cheap oil. “We’re going to fill [the strategic reserve] right up to the top, saving the American taxpayers billions and billions of dollars, helping our oil industry [and furthering] that wonderful goal . . . of energy independence.”5 His attitude changed 180 degrees after thirteen Republican senators from shale oil states began voicing their anger and threatening retaliation against Saudi Arabia. On March 13, they wrote a letter to MBS pointing out the disastrous effects increased Saudi production was having on US producers just as prices were going into a tailspin with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States. When that had no effect, in early April they voiced their anger over the phone first to Saudi ambassador Princess Reema bint Bandar and then to Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman, MBS’s older half-brother. Among their proposals for retaliation were a withdrawal of US troops, warplanes, and Patriot missiles recently sent to defend the kingdom from Iran, imposition of tariffs on Saudi oil, and forced redirection of the twenty supertankers to other markets. Senator Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, warned the Saudi ambassador that what action her kingdom took to rectify the situation “will determine whether our strategic partnership is salvageable.”6 In April 2020 the Saudi “oil war” against Russia and the United States came to a climax as the Covid-19 pandemic brought the entire world economy to a halt. Worldwide demand for oil plummeted 30 million barrels, nearly one-third the total. The US price for oil in May, set by a Texas benchmark, dropped to as low as $10 a barrel, and the North Sea Brent international one fell to its lowest level in twenty years. Fortune called it “Black April,”7 and the former director of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, labeled it “the worst year in the history of global oil markets.”8 For the first time ever, the price of oil went negative, falling briefly on April 20 to –$37 a barrel in the United States because of a shortage of storage space. Also in April 2020, Trump finally mobilized to apply pressure on both Saudi Arabia and Russia to end their oil war. On April 2, he called MBS to warn he was under pressure from Congress to withdraw US troops from the kingdom if OPEC and its partners did not quickly reach an accord to cut production. MBS was reportedly so shocked by the message that he ordered his aides out of the room so he could talk with Trump privately.9 OPEC and the ten other countries met again on April 9, the same day Trump spoke to both Putin and King Salman, pressing them to close a deal. Three days later,

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OPEC and the other producers did just that. They agreed to cut production by 9.7 million barrels a day in May and June (later they extended it through July) and thereafter reduce the amount in stages over the subsequent two years. Because worldwide demand for oil in May had dropped spectacularly as a result of oversupply and the Covid-19 pandemic—still down more than 20 million barrels— prices remained at rock bottom. In the United States, the cost of a gallon of regular gas was down below $2. A timid start to the reopening of Western economies in May, however, had begun to push oil prices upward again. Still, MBS’s decision to increase production to 12.3 million barrels a day in April and flood the US market in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic had ended the surging US oil industry. Almost two-thirds of oil drilling rigs closed down, and US production dropped abruptly from more than 13 million barrels a day in February to 11.5 million in May. It fell slightly further to 11 million barrels by the end of 2020. MBS had achieved at least one of his goals, knocking out the engine of the US rise to oil self-sufficiency and curbing its ambitions to become a major oil exporter in competition with Saudi Arabia.

Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Party of the US-Saudi Alliance On February 10, 2020, Saudi Arabia went to great lengths to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s historic meeting on Valentine’s Day in 1945 with King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud on a US warship, the USS Quincy. It had taken place, of all unlikely times and places, in the Great Bitter Lake, along Egypt’s Suez Canal, as Roosevelt was returning from Yalta, where he had discussed the dawning of a postwar world with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Roosevelt’s meeting with Ibn Saud marked the entry of Saudi Arabia into the US vision of that emerging new world order and the start of the oldest US partnership with any Arab country in the Middle East. Seventy-five years later, at the residency of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, located on leafy Chain Bridge Road overlooking the Potomac River, a crowd of US aficionados of the kingdom gathered to mark the occasion. They listened to Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan and Roosevelt’s grandson, Delano, reminisce about the “special relationship” tying the two nations together for so many decades and the imperative need to keep it alive. The one offbeat note was the absence of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, or any senior State

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Department official, to speak with similar enthusiasm and appreciation for the relationship. Across town, a well-known and respected former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Saudi analyst, Bruce Riedel, had chosen the same occasion to call the “bargain” struck between Roosevelt and King Saud in 1945 “out of date.”10 Riedel had taken up a post at the prestigious Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, and had written a book there tracking the fluctuations in relations between every US president and Saudi king since. He had concluded that the relationship was badly in need of a rethink with the rise of MBS to the throne. In the wake of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, MBS was “toxic” and his reputation “permanently stained,” according to Riedel. The foundation stone of the US-Saudi alliance, Saudi oil in return for US security, no longer existed. The United States didn’t need Saudi oil anymore, and it had failed to provide for the kingdom’s protection when Iran had attacked Saudi oil facilities with drones and missiles in September 2019. Among the “fundamental changes” Riedel proposed was bringing home US troops Trump had sent belatedly to protect Saudi Arabia after the Iranian attacks. And, according to him, Trump should shut down Saudi diplomatic facilities in the United States to show US displeasure at the killing of Khashoggi along with MBS’s incessant harassment of his opponents and critics living in the United States. Riedel didn’t quite say it openly, but he seemed to be saying it was time for the United States and Saudi Arabia to go their separate ways as they almost had just before and after 9/11.

Ups and Downs in the Relationship For nearly half a century, I have watched the US-Saudi relationship go through cyclical ups and downs like the price of oil on the world market.11 The apex of close cooperation had been reached during the 1990–1991 Gulf War and the nadir with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States involving fifteen Saudi nationals. I have also observed the emergence of a trend line marked by fewer, fleeting “ups” and more prolonged and deeper “downs.” What was once called a “special relationship” has been downgraded in diplomatic parlance to the vague expression “partnership,” and the term “allies” has all but disappeared. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, scores of conferences have taken place at Washington think tanks under the title, literally or figuratively, “Is Saudi Arabia a Friend or Foe?” The Saudis have tried tirelessly to revive

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memories of the best of times in the relationship under the mantra Together We Prevail, constantly citing the US-Saudi joint victory over Iraq in the Gulf War as prime proof. But other memories of the worst of times keep intruding, namely the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Saudi contribution to Islamic extremist ideology, the disastrous Saudi-led war in Yemen, and finally the gruesome murder of Saudi journalist Khashoggi. The Saudis have also been sorely tested in their faith in the United States. The former Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, was probably the most pro-US envoy ever to serve in Washington. Yet he once detailed to me how the late King Abdullah, when he was still crown prince but de facto ruler, came to the point of an open break with the United States. The cause was President George W. Bush’s perceived extreme pro-Israeli bias and indifference to Palestinian suffering under Israeli rule. Just before 9/11, a furious Abdullah had written a letter to Bush asserting that because their two countries no longer shared a common interest in solving the Palestinian problem, “You go your way, I go my way.”12 As it happened, Saudi Arabia and the United States nearly did go their separate ways, not because of the Palestinian issue but 9/11. Saudi-US relations have never since recovered despite the best efforts of the Saudis to regain Washington’s confidence. In the wake of another disaster for USSaudi relations, Khashoggi’s murder, King Salman had turned to Bandar bin Sultan’s daughter, Princess Reema bint Bandar, in the hope of salvaging them. In August 2019, he dispatched her to Washington on what appeared to be a near “mission impossible.” There have been various pillars underpinning the US-Saudi relationship over the past decades. They include oil, arms sales, US and Saudi security, the war on terrorism, the dollar, and finally personal ties between US presidents and Saudi kings. Over time, each has seen changes in value and in many cases a distinct lessening of common interest. The question is: Are there enough pillars still standing to forge a new kind of relationship? Or is it time, as the late King Abdullah once threatened, for the two countries to go their separate ways? The role of oil has undergone a spectacular change from binding to splitting the two sides apart. Throughout the Cold War, the mantra of the relationship had been “oil for security,” meaning the assurance of Saudi oil for the US market in return for US protection of the kingdom from its foreign foes—first the Soviet Union, then Iraq, and more recently Iran. The United States and Saudi Arabia were seen as

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natural complementary partners, the former being the world’s largest consumer of oil and the latter its foremost exporter. During the twenty-three years Bandar bin Sultan was ambassador, oil was often at the center of his discussion with five US presidents. In fact, he told me that every incumbent of the White House had asked his government to ensure low oil prices around presidential election time. His strategy had been to keep Saudi Arabia the number one source of foreign oil for the United States to guarantee him access to both Republican and Democratic presidents. Interestingly, the White House has occasionally called on the Saudis not to increase production to keep prices low but to decrease the level to keep prices high in order to help keep US producers from going bankrupt. I accompanied President George H. W. Bush when he was still vice president on a trip to Saudi Arabia in April 1986, during which he pleaded with King Fahd on behalf of US oil companies to cut Saudi production so falling prices would reverse course and ensure their well-being.13 At the time, the Saudis were in a price war with other OPEC members and trying to impose their will by flooding the market with cheap oil to force them to cut their production. Four months later, OPEC did just that, by 5 million barrels a day, and prices bounced back. Bandar bin Sultan’s policy of keeping Saudi Arabia the number one US source of foreign oil worked only until the early 2000s, when Canada and Mexico began taking turns in edging it out. Saudi oil imports that had averages around 1.5 million barrels a day in the “Bandar era” slowly dropped after 2005 by two-thirds to reach less than 500,000 barrels in 2019. (During the first week of January 2021, the United States took no oil from the kingdom for the first time in thirty-five years.) Nonetheless, the advent of the Trump administration brought the return of Saudi oil to the forefront of US-Saudi relations, though for quite different reasons than market demand. By 2014, Saudi Arabia had long ceased to be able to dictate prices on its own and started reaching out to Russia, the world’s second largest exporter, and other non-OPEC producers to set them. As I noted earlier, the Saudis had to deal not only with OPEC’s thirteen members but ten other producers. Starting in 2016, agreements on production and prices came to be set by this loose grouping. Within three years, however, even OPEC and its partners were struggling to do this as the United States suddenly became the world’s largest producer and a major oil exporter in its own right. The United States is a wild card, its government unable to negotiate agreements. This is because the US oil

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industry consists entirely of private companies. Scores of new ones cropped up with the advent of shale oil, all far beyond the control of any administration in Washington. By contrast, most other oil-producing countries had national companies subject to government diktat, or, like Russia, they had companies private in name but very much under the presidential thumb. All these trends reduced Saudi sway over the world oil market and over OPEC. They all came into play in early 2020, even before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, which sent the world economy into freefall starting in March. Demand for oil dropped up to 30 million barrels overnight just as Saudi Arabia was once again in an oil war, as it had been in 1986 and 2014, this time with two major non-OPEC producers, Russia and the United States. Once again, the White House was pressing the Saudis to force OPEC to cut production to save US oil companies from bankruptcy. This time, however, the magnitude of the US “ask” was far different. In 1986, an OPEC cut of 5 million barrels was enough to send prices soaring back up. In 2016, in the first OPEC and nonmembers’ agreement, the cutback was 1.8 million barrels. On April 13, 2020, the group of more than twenty producers said they would reduce production a massive 9.7 million barrels a day, more than five times as much as in 2016. But this reduction was to last for only three months in face of a pandemic promising to keep worldwide demand far lower for far longer. The Saudis seemed to recognize that the proposed cure would not accomplish their mission. They announced less than a month later an additional unilateral cut of 1 million barrels. Then in January 2021, they did it again, and by the same amount, after OPEC and Russia failed to agree on any reduction and the latter actually increased its production slightly. The net effect of these various developments was to make oil a highly contentious issue in US-Saudi relations in a radically altered world market neither side could control. The Saudis could no longer impose their will on OPEC because of its dependence on ten other countries, particularly Russia, and the two old “partners” were now fierce competitors for shares of the world oil market. At the same time, Saudi Arabia had come to threaten the survival of the US shale oil industry. Even if that were not the case, it was becoming questionable that Saudi Arabia could any longer work its will unilaterally, given the new realities of the world oil market. The oil pillar of the US-Saudi relationship was no longer capable of playing its old, binding role.

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The Strange Nature of US-Saudi Relations The other side of the oil-for-security formula was also in serious doubt. In the seventy-five-year history of the relationship, the United States had never offered Saudi Arabia a written commitment to its defense or security. It had not even signed a defense cooperation agreement, as it had with all other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Nor had Saudi Arabia ever wanted to become a non– North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally the way Kuwait and Bahrain had. The closest any US administration had ventured to a defense commitment was the so-called Carter Doctrine, issued in the last weeks of Jimmy Carter’s administration, warning of US military action if the Soviet Union sought to move into the Persian Gulf. Ultimately Iraq, not the Soviet Union, triggered the first and only major projection of US military might in defense of Saudi Arabia, during the 1990–1991 Gulf War. In that case, there was not even a status-offorces agreement regulating jurisdiction over the 500,000 troops stationed on Saudi soil. The George H. W. Bush administration had just signed a single-page letter committing the United States to withdraw all its forces upon Saudi request. Nonetheless, Saudi Arabia had become totally dependent on the United States for arms, training, and maintenance of its military establishment with a permanent US Training Mission in Riyadh aiding its army and air force and the Saudi Arabian National Guard Modernization Program aimed at improving protection for the House of Saud. The Saudi air- and missile-defense systems, from command and control to hardware, were all provided and maintained by the United States as well. All specifications for the nuts and bolts holding together the Saudi military establishment were based on US standards. US officials used to describe the kingdom to me as a landbased aircraft carrier ready and waiting to receive US planes and soldiers at a moment’s notice. The Saudi effort to offset its overwhelming dependence on US arms consisted primarily of procuring British Tornado and Typhoon warplanes; French Mirage warplanes, naval ships, and armored personnel carriers; and Chinese mediumrange missiles and, more recently, drones. The scale of Saudi purchases of US arms was enormous, and the kingdom had become the number one foreign client of the US militaryindustrial complex by the mid-2000s. Between 1970 and 2009, the Saudis had signed agreements for the purchase of $92 billion worth of arms. Thereafter, it skyrocketed. 14 A line-by-line list of possible sales to Saudi Arabia between 2009 and 2016 put together by the US

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Congressional Research Service (CRS) calculated a total of nearly $140 billion. Little wonder, then, that the same CRS report noted that Middle Eastern states led by Saudi Arabia “play a critical role in sustaining this [US aerospace and defense] industry.”15 President Trump had exaggerated when he said in May 2017 that Saudi Arabia had agreed to $110 billion worth of new arms purchases because $38 billion of that had already been negotiated by Barack Obama’s administration. Nonetheless, the Trump administration did go on to sell the kingdom seven Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) batteries (for $15 billion), four combat frigates (for $11 billion), and massive numbers of guided and unguided bombs (for $8 billion) the Saudis were consuming in vain pursuit of victory in the Yemen war. Altogether, the United States accounted for 73 percent of all Saudi arms imports from 2015 to 2019.16 Arms sales certainly united Saudi Arabia and the US militaryindustrial complex. But they have frequently been a source of disunity in US relations with Israel and between the White House and Congress. Over time, the former conflict has lessened, whereas the latter has grown much worse, to the point of Congress demanding at least a suspension, and upon occasion an end, to the sales. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan had had to commit his personal prestige, and much of his political capital with Congress, to overcome the vehement opposition of Israel and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to the sale of Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft to the Saudis. To the Israelis, they threatened the “qualitative edge” in weaponry over that of their Arab enemies every US administration had promised to maintain. For the Saudis, it was a show of US commitment to the defense of the kingdom in place of a written guarantee of any kind. The heated lobbying for and against the $8.5 billion sale came down to “Reagan or Begin,” the mantra used by the pro-Saudi faction to stop a veto by Congress.17 Reagan won this battle, but he gave up on another in 1986 also strenuously opposed by Israel and AIPAC, the sale of air-to-air missiles, in the face of strong opposition in both the House and Senate. The battle over arms sales, intertwined with US commitment to Saudi security, came to a head over the Yemen war. This time Israel was no longer the stumbling block. Congress was up in arms over US support for the Saudi-led invasion that had led to a humanitarian catastrophe and a military stalemate. Responding to innumerable congressional resolutions, the Obama administration had stopped refueling Saudi and other warplanes bombing civilian as well as mil-

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itary targets. The main sale of US arms in question had become billions of dollars in munitions, mainly guided and unguided bombs responsible for the high toll of civilian casualties. Congress had managed to halt temporarily their sale, but Trump was determined to keep them flowing to show his own continuing personal support for MBS. Thus in May 2019, Trump used his presidential powers to declare a “national emergency” to bypass Congress and expedite $8 billion of munitions to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the two core members of the coalition, to help them fight “the malign influence” of Iran.18 A month before Trump left office, his administration proposed the sale of an additional $478 million worth of precision-guided bombs to the Saudis. Congress held it up, and within three weeks of taking office, the Biden administration announced a halt to all “offensive” weapons sales relating to the Saudi military campaign in Yemen.

The Yemen War and Iran Highlight Different Interests The Yemen war brought starkly to the forefront the lack of common security interests between the United States and Saudi Arabia. Although the House of Saud viewed the war as almost existential, the United States viewed it as just one of many battlefields in the war against Islamic terrorists and a sideshow to Trump’s focus on keeping Iran from becoming a nuclear power. The Yemen war, however, was hardly the only issue driving the two countries apart when it came to the US vision of a regional security architecture. As I discussed in Chapter 9, other GCC members had long resisted a Saudi-controlled common missile-defense system, and the Saudi feud with Qatar that broke out in 2014 spelled its death knell. Qatar had become more, not less, dependent on Iran, whereas Kuwait and Oman remained steadfastly neutral in the US-Saudi push to escalate a confrontation with Iran. Other events were also conspiring to drive a wedge in the USSaudi security relationship. Events in September 2019 demonstrated that even the tough-talking Trump was not ready for a military confrontation with Iran. They called into question the US commitment to Saudi security and even US military capability to protect the kingdom from an Iranian attack. In the early morning of September 14, Iran orchestrated a daring raid on Saudi oil facilities in the Eastern Province. Disguising it as a Houthi operation from Yemen, to the west, Iran launched two waves of as many as twenty-five cruise missiles and

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drones from the east and north, some flying across Kuwait. Seventeen of them found their targets, hitting storage tanks and processing facilities at Abqaiq and the newly expanded Khurais oil field. The attack knocked out 5.7 million barrels of oil, more than half the total then being produced. Just as significant, neither the United States nor Saudi radar and missile-defense systems had detected the missiles and drones coming or even were able to fire off a single shot. It was a shocking revelation of the shortcomings of US-Saudi defense of the crown jewels of the kingdom. Even more embarrassing was the US-Saudi inability to provide convincing proof of Iran’s direct responsibility to the international community. Trump’s reaction, or lack thereof, must have shocked the Saudis. First, he tweeted that the US military was “locked and loaded,” waiting for verification of Iran’s role to respond. Then he began offering excuses for not launching a retaliatory attack. He didn’t want to start a war with Iran, he said, noting “that was an attack on Saudi Arabia. That wasn’t an attack on us.”19 He was clearly decoupling the United States from Saudi security. In the end, Trump settled for imposing more sanctions on Iran and sending 1,800 troops, F-15 warplanes, and two Patriot antimissile batteries to bolster Saudi air defenses. The Saudis had already welcomed in July the first contingent of troops and fighter jets to be stationed at Prince Sultan Air Base, south of Riyadh, after a sixteen-year absence. Eventually, as many as 3,500 US troops returned to the kingdom. But the damage had been done. The search for a credible US-backed deterrence to Iran became more problematic after the September attack on Saudi oil facilities. The Iranians had demonstrated their ability to avoid detection of their ground-hugging drones and cruise missiles, which flew under the radar and fire of the Patriot, the best antimissile defense weapon in the US arsenal. Their ingenious strategy was the same as that used to confront US warships in the Gulf: a mass of small speedboats armed with explosive charges and missiles attacking from different directions simultaneously. The Iranians had also laid bare Trump’s thinking about defending the Saudi kingdom: he would do it only if US interests were directly at stake. The Saudis now knew they could not count on the Trump administration to defend them in a crisis short of the Iranians also attacking US interests. Pentagon officials devised a new term for the US-Iranian standoff: “contested deterrence.”20 It must be said that, given Trump’s general disinterest in foreign policy, he had gone to great lengths to try to mediate the Saudi-Qatari feud to establish a more credible US-backed GCC deterrence against

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Iran. He jawboned both sides in innumerable phone calls to their leaders, sent his secretaries of state and defense to Riyadh and Doha to press for a compromise, and hosted Qatari emir Sheikh Tamim at the White House, where he praised him for his contribution to the war on terrorism after initially criticizing Qatar for harboring Islamic extremists. Shortly after Trump took office, he even pushed for a GCC summit at Camp David, the presidential retreat outside Washington, DC. None of these calls and entreaties bore fruit until the last months and weeks of his administration. Starting in mid-2020, Trump escalated the pressure on Saudi Arabia and the UAE to lift their air blockade of Qatar, this time pointing out to them that the Qataris had been obliged to pay $100 million a year to Iran for overflight rights to avoid going through their airspace, undermining his campaign to isolate Tehran. Finally, just two weeks before Trump left office, first Saudi Arabia and then the UAE and the other two countries lifted their blockade and renewed diplomatic ties with Qatar. Trump had also proposed a wider NATO-style Middle East Strategic Alliance (MESA) made up of the six GCC states plus Jordan and Egypt. It was an iteration of the first Bush administration’s post–Gulf War plan for a similar grouping that would even have included Syria. That plan had gotten as far as these countries’ leaders meeting in the Syrian capital in March 1991 and issuing the Damascus Declaration of Coordination and Cooperation, a blueprint for a common security structure, among other common ventures. But the plan never saw the light of day. Trump, however, was determined to succeed where Bush had failed. In May 2017, he had chosen Saudi Arabia to make his first trip abroad, thanks to a slick Saudi lobbying campaign led by MBS and his new fast friend in the White House, the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. While Trump was basking in an elaborate royal welcome, the Saudis orchestrated a summit for Trump to meet scores of Muslim leaders and launch a new Saudi-led antiterrorist coalition. They also organized a smaller summit of GCC leaders and those of Egypt and Jordan to proclaim the Riyadh Declaration, announcing their intention to launch MESA. Yet despite the best efforts of Trump and his top aides, MESA also had not seen the light of day by the time Trump left office four years later. In the end, Trump’s Middle East policy would not coerce Iran into renegotiating the 2015 nuclear deal, which he himself had undermined by withdrawing from it three years later. Iran did not budge under his “maximum pressure” campaign of escalating economic and financial sanctions. In fact, it showed its defiance by renewing its

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nuclear activities, building a new generation of centrifuge machines to produce enriched uranium ever closer to a nuclear bomb grade level, reactivating other plants it had closed down, and digging a new underground facility. Trump also did not succeed in establishing a more credible military deterrent of GCC countries to stand up to the Iranian threat. Indeed, the GCC was in tatters. Nor did Trump accomplish his oft-declared goal of withdrawing the United States from the region’s “forever wars,” though he had greatly reduced the US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan to 2,500 troops in each country by the time of his departure. Instead, Trump’s signature accomplishment was to be the breakthrough in the establishment of relations between Israel and a number of Arab states.

The Israel Option Takes Shape On August 13, 2020, Trump announced triumphantly from the White House that Israel and the UAE had reached agreement on “full normalization of relations” in return for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “suspending” his plan to annex the West Bank. It was, the US president intoned, “a significant step towards building a more peaceful, secure, and prosperous Middle East,” and he fully expected a number of other Arab and Muslim countries to follow suit. Egypt and Jordan had already signed peace accords with Israel in 1979 and 1994, respectively. But it had been twenty-six years before another Arab country took the same step. The Abraham Accords Peace Agreement: Treaty of Peace, Diplomatic Relations, and Full Normalization Between the United Arab Emirates and the State of Israel was formally signed at the White House on September 15, with Trump overseeing the occasion and Netanyahu and UAE foreign minister Abdullah bin Zayed alNahyan there as signatories.21 The Abraham Accords did not exactly lead to a cascade of other agreements, but Bahrain followed suit at the same time as the White House ceremony for the Israel-UAE signing, then Sudan (October 23), and finally Morocco (December 10) before Trump’s term ended. In all cases, Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, had played the key role of facilitator and mediator. He had failed, however, to persuade Saudi Arabia, the main hoped-for prize of the US-Israeli diplomatic endeavor, to sign, but the fact that the UAE and more notably Bahrain had done so was widely viewed as an indication of its approval and intention to also do so eventually. Even more indicative was the reported secret visit of Netanyahu to Saudi Arabia, where he had met MBS in NEOM in November 2020.

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Gulf Arab States Embrace Israel Warmly These agreements certainly changed the geopolitical map of the Middle East, inserting Israel into the Arab world in a way it had never been before. The Palestinian cause suffered a devastating blow, as did the 2002 Saudi-engineered Arab peace proposal demanding Israeli recognition of a sovereign Palestinian state simultaneously with normalization. The biggest difference between Israel’s peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, however, was that aside from Sudan, these Arab states warmly embraced Israel and immediately began signing other agreements to facilitate trade, tourism, security cooperation, and possibly even the shipment of UAE oil across Israel to the Mediterranean Sea. Within three months of signing the Abraham Accords, 50,000 Israeli tourists had rushed to visit the UAE, and its airline Flydubai had opened fourteen flights a week between Dubai and Tel Aviv. But the prospects for a booming trade in tourism between Israel and the Gulf Arab states dimmed after the Israeli National Council in late March 2021 issued a warning to Israelis not to visit because of a terrorist threat from Iran specifically targeting them.22 There could be little doubt Trump and Kushner had played key roles in bringing about these accords. But in all cases except Sudan, they had been in the making for years through high-level secret and open meetings and burgeoning trade ties. Qatar had established trade relations with Israel in 1996. The UAE had allowed Israel to send representatives to the International Renewable Energy Agency, based in Abu Dhabi, and Netanyahu had visited Oman quite publicly in October 2018. Only Sudan had ever been in a state of war with Israel. Ironically, what accounted for the timing was not only the intense pressure from the Trump administration. It was also realization after the Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities that the United States was not prepared to retaliate, and risk war, with Iran. Trump’s refusal confirmed the widely held fear among Gulf Arab states that the United States was indeed disengaging from the Middle East. And it increased their quest for another military powerhouse, such as Israel, to come to their defense. As I commented at the time, Israel has what the GCC states need most to defend themselves against other Iranian attacks: its Iron Dome airdefense system and Barak-8 interceptor, developed to deal specifically with periodic Palestinian rockets and missiles.23 Meanwhile, Trump was following his predecessor, Obama, in executing a “pivot to Asia.” His primary preoccupation became China, first with a trade battle and then with an across-the-board conflict with China exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. The virus

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had originated in Wuhan, China, and Trump blamed the Chinese government for allowing it to spread and plunging the United States into its worst depression since the 1930s, a nightmare for any incumbent president facing reelection within six months. The Trump administration’s national defense strategy had already named China and Russia as the main, immediate challenges to the United States, not Iran, Iraq, or Syria. Further evidence of the wobbly US commitment to Saudi Arabia surfaced in May 2020, when the Pentagon pulled out two batteries of Patriot missiles protecting Saudi oil facilities but left two others guarding US troops at the Prince Sultan Air Base. Two US fighter squadrons and some of the 3,000-plus US troops were also being withdrawn.24 Explaining the decision, a Pentagon official said there was no longer “an immediate threat to American strategic interests.”25 The withdrawals signaled once again that US and Saudi security interests were not one and the same.

The Biden Era Dawns The inauguration of Joe Biden into the White House on January 20, 2021, only raised more doubts about the future of US-Saudi relations. During the Democratic Party primaries, Biden had promised to make MBS “pay the price” for murdering Khashoggi and turn him into an international “pariah.”26 On the second anniversary of Khashoggi’s assassination, Biden had promised to reassess relations; end US support for the Saudi war in Yemen; defend the rights of activists, dissidents, and journalists; and “make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.”27 Avril Haines, Biden’s director of national intelligence, promised “absolutely” at her Senate confirmation hearing that she would declassify the intelligence community’s report on MBS’s role in ordering Khashoggi’s killing.28 True to her word, on February 25, Haines’s office made public the US intelligence community’s unvarnished assessment: MBS had “approved” the operation “to capture or kill” Khashoggi. It had reached this conclusion based on his command of all decisionmaking in the kingdom, his control of all its security and intelligence agencies, the involvement of his close aides, and his support for “violent measures to silence dissidents abroad.”29 The next day, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken announced the US government was imposing visa restrictions on seventy-six Saudis it had found involved in seeking to silence Saudi dissidents, activists, and journalists living abroad. It was also creating a “Khashoggi ban” applicable to the officials of other

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governments engaged in “extraterritorial counter-dissident activities.”30 The one very notable exception to the travel ban was MBS. Blinken defended the decision to spare the crown prince saying the United States wanted to “recalibrate” the relationship but not provoke a “rupture.” The United States continued to have “significant ongoing interests” in Saudi Arabia and remained committed to its defense. MBS was not to be branded officially a pariah in Washington, but the only US official authorized to speak to him would be his exact counterpart, Secretary of Defense Gen. Lloyd J. Austin.31 What would happen when MBS ascended the throne remained to be seen. But it seemed unlikely Biden would be hosting him at the White House anytime soon.

The Search for Other Security Partners As I described in the introduction to this book, uncertainty about US fidelity has long been a constant factor in the Saudi psyche and foreign policy calculations. This goes a long way toward understanding the kingdom’s persistent search for other allies to offset its heavy reliance on the United States. As the late Saudi foreign minister Saud el-Faisal once told me half-jokingly, the kingdom as a Muslim country had the right to up to four wives, even if the Saudi tie to the United States was as enduring as a Catholic marriage.32 The search for other “wives” has mainly been reflected in the Saudi shopping for warplanes and other military materiel from other Western nations, principally Great Britain and France. But when the Reagan administration refused to sell Saudi Arabia US Pershing missiles in the mid1980s, the Saudis had turned to China, with which it did not even have diplomatic relations at that point. Their purchase of the Chinese medium-range CSS-2 missile, capable of carrying nuclear warheads, caused a major crisis in their relations with Washington and almost a war with Israel.33 Even more shocking to US policymakers was the discovery that the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, had been the principal initiator of the deal, making a secret trip to Beijing from Washington the CIA had never known about until spotting the presence of Chinese missiles after they had arrived safely in the kingdom. The Saudis have since begun developing their own missile capability with Chinese help. In January 2019, the Washington Post published satellite images of a Saudi missile factory in al-Watah, southwest of Riyadh, where Chinese experts were presumed to be helping.34 Strangely, there had still been no reports of test flights of either the Chinese CSS-2 or a Saudi version of it.

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The China Option Step by step, China thereafter became the al-Saud “second wife,” though also one of uncertain loyalty. The two countries finally established diplomatic relations in 1990, one of the side effects of the Gulf War. King Abdullah visited China in 1998, when he was still crown prince, and made it his first visit abroad in 2006 after he ascended to the throne. The first Saudi to talk publicly about a “strategic relationship and partnership” between Saudi Arabia and China was former Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi, while he was attending the World Petroleum Congress in Shanghai in 2001. By then, al-Naimi had already made five trips to China dating back to 1992.35 A formal “comprehensive strategic partnership,” the highest in the Chinese hierarchy of alliances, was signed in 2016 as China pushed its Belt and Road Initiative to link its trade and political influence across Eurasia to the Mediterranean.36 Figures for Saudi Arabia’s exports and imports show that by 2018, China had become its major partner for both, with the Saudis buying almost three times as much from China as from the United States ($38 billion versus $13 billion).37 Oil even more than missiles became the centerpiece of the relationship as China surpassed the United States as the world’s biggest importer (10 million barrels a day in 2019), taking more and more Saudi oil. The Saudis, in return, invested in various oil refineries and petrochemical projects in China to ensure a market share for their oil. This had started in 2007, when Saudi Aramco and Exxon Mobil together invested $3.5 billion to triple the capacity of an oil refinery in Fujian, in southeastern China, to 240,000 barrels a day. MBS signed the latest Saudi investment while on a state visit to China in February 2019, this time for a $10 billion joint venture in a refining and petrochemical complex. Of most concern to the Trump administration, however, had been MBS’s decision to sign up the Chinese company, Huawei Technologies, to build Saudi Arabia’s 5G infrastructure. MBS had paid no attention to Trump’s campaign to convince US allies that Huawei Technologies represented a security threat because of its close links to the Chinese government. The missing link in the booming Saudi-Chinese relationship was, and still is, the security aspect. The Chinese once again came to the rescue of Saudi Arabia after the United States refused to sell the kingdom another of its advanced weapons, this time surveillance and attack drones. Still, although supplying Saudi Arabia with missiles and drones, China has yet to provide Saudi Arabia an alternative to the uncertain US security umbrella. In fact, China has done its best to treat

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the kingdom’s archrival, Iran, on equal terms. China is buying increasing amounts of oil from Iran and signed a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Iran the same year it did with Saudi Arabia. The meaning of a Chinese-Iranian agreement under which China promised to invest $400 billion in Iran in return for an assured supply of oil over twenty-five years has been much debated in Washington think tank circles. One study concluded that China was actually treating Iran as “last among equals” in its Middle East policy.38 Still, China did formally, and very publicly, sign the agreement in March 2021 while Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi was visiting Tehran. And he had not signed any similar accord during his stopover in Riyadh two days earlier. So far, China has not offered any protection from the threat of Iranian attack to either Saudi or other Gulf Arab countries’ oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. It has, however, begun establishing its military presence in the region for the first time, sending warships to battle pirates off the coast of Somalia and establishing a naval base in Djibouti, near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the southern end of the Red Sea. Whether the Chinese-Iranian agreement reflects a new tilt by Beijing toward Tehran, it should certainly raise concerns among Saudi leaders about regarding China as a “second wife.” One report said China had offered “deepening military cooperation” in return for a guarantee of cheap Iranian oil over the next twenty-five years for the fast-expanding Chinese market.39

The Russia Option Russia presented to Saudi Arabia an even more problematic alternative to the United States. It, too, had had no active diplomatic relations with the Saudi kingdom until the end of the Cold War, and Saudi Arabia showed no interest in reactivating the ones frozen in place since 1932 until the Gulf War. Even then, the relationship was initially purely transactional in nature: Russian support for a UN resolution blessing the US-Saudi coalition war against Iraq in return for Saudi willingness to restore diplomatic relations with Moscow. The Saudis also gave Russia a $1 billion grant as part of the deal. Still, there was little interaction between Riyadh and Moscow until the early 2000s, when Russia suddenly began challenging Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer. At that point, the Saudi attitude began to change noticeably, starting in March 2003, when al-Naimi went to Moscow to invite Russian oil companies to come explore for

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oil in the kingdom. The invitation came in the wake of failed negotiations with US companies to do exactly that. Just one Russian company, Lukoil, signed an agreement and began drilling for oil in the Rub al-Khali Desert, in southeastern Saudi Arabia. (It never found oil.) In September 2003, Crown Prince Abdullah created history by becoming the first senior Saudi royal ever to visit Moscow. These visits marked the start of Saudi-Russian talks on cooperation to establish oil production levels, but it would take until 2016 to happen. In the interim, Saudi and Russian leaders began visiting each other’s capitals. In February 2007, Putin became the first Russian president to set foot on Saudi soil, and in July the following year the two countries signed their first-ever military cooperation agreement. The rising Saudi potentate, MBS, went to Moscow on a secret mission in June 2015, partly to arrange for King Salman’s visit, which finally took place in October 2017, the first Saudi monarch to set foot on Russian soil. MBS was back to Russia for the World Cup soccer competition in June 2018, more talks with Putin on energy and military cooperation, and to arrange for Putin to come again to Riyadh. This finally happened in October 2019. What had all this intense mutual courtship produced? I have already discussed the OPEC agreements on production cuts involving Russia starting in 2016. This has been the most important outcome by far. There were myriad other bilateral agreements and the establishment of a Joint Intergovernmental Commission on Trade, Economic, Scientific, and Technological Cooperation. And the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) agreed to join the Russian Direct Investment Fund in a partnership to launch infrastructure and agricultural projects inside Russia, the Saudis committing $10 billion to the joint venture. What didn’t happen was most significant and became clear during Putin’s trip to Riyadh in October 2019.40 No mention was made of a Saudi purchase of the much-vaunted Russian S-400 missiledefense system nor of any other major Russian arms such as helicopters, tanks, and aircraft, all under discussion between the two sides for years. There was no mention of a Saudi decision to have Russia build its first two nuclear reactors. The Trump administration had made it clear that the S-400 was a red line for US-Saudi relations, and it was strongly backing US companies bidding to build those nuclear reactors. As I wrote at the time, MBS had decided “to stick with Trump . . . despite the risk of US abandonment in a future crisis with Iran.”41 In fact, Trump had just done that: he had failed to

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protect Saudi oil facilities or retaliate against Iran for its devastating attack on them the previous month. Despite these glaring US failures, MBS (also defense minister) did not accept Putin’s offer to sell the kingdom the Russian Pantsir-M air-defense missile and artillery system. Instead, MBS turned to France and bought the French Jaguar radar system to beef up the US one. Clearly, MBS was not interested in seeing Russia become Saudi Arabia’s “third wife” when it came to the kingdom’s security.

The Arab Coalition Option The Saudis have always looked upon their purported Arab “allies” as secondary sources of security. Well they might, as alliances among Arab countries have proven notoriously contentious, of short duration, and of ever-changing character. As defense minister, MBS had formed three coalitions to fight the kingdom’s real or perceived enemies—Islamic extremist groups, Yemeni Houthis, and Qatar. He had announced in March 2015 the formation of the first one, eight Arab or Muslim countries willing to join Saudi Arabia in the invasion of Yemen. A few months later, in December, he created the Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition, which eventually grew to include forty-one Muslim countries, led by a Pakistani former chief of staff and based in Riyadh. The third one, set up in June 2017, became known as the Arab Quartet. It consisted of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, and Egypt, and it had imposed an air, land, and sea blockade against an erstwhile “ally,” Qatar. None of these Saudi-led coalitions has served to enhance the projection of Saudi military power beyond its borders and seemed often to exist more on paper than on the ground. While on a visit to Saudi Arabia in December 2019, I had asked to visit the antiterrorism coalition, but my request went unanswered. If this coalition had carried out any operations, it was a well-kept secret. In contrast, the Saudi-led coalition combating Iranian-supported Houthi rebels in Yemen had fought together for four years to reach a stalemate, falling into disarray in mid-2019. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia’s two closest allies, Egypt and the UAE, had abandoned what had become another Middle East “forever war.” As for the quartet, its efforts to change Qatar’s policies had achieved no success after three and a half years, and its boycott finally lifted in January 2021. The only Arab country whose allegiance MBS could count on was the island monarchy in Bahrain, deeply indebted to the Saudis for suppressing the Shiite rebellion there in 2011.

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The Pakistan Option Muslim Pakistan was the sole regional power with a proven record of sustained military support for the Saudis, going back to the early 1960s, when it had helped train the first Saudi pilots on British fighter jets. It had sent as many as 15,000 troops to bolster Saudi defenses in the 1980s, provided about as many during the 1990–1991 Gulf War, and held regular joint military exercises with Saudi forces. In 2018, Pakistani officials disclosed that Saudi Arabia had sent 10,000 soldiers to be trained in Pakistan and that in turn Pakistan had sent a brigade of combat troops to bolster Saudi defenses along the Yemeni border.42 Most importantly, there have been persistent reports of nuclear cooperation, with Saudi Arabia paying part of Pakistan’s expenses to develop nuclear weapons. Former Saudi crown prince and longtime defense minister Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz had been allowed to visit Pakistani nuclear facilities in 1999, whereas Pakistani authorities had never permitted US officials to do so. It has long been assumed, but never confirmed, that the two countries have a secret pact under which Pakistan would provide Saudi Arabia nuclear warheads for its Chinese missiles if the need ever arose.43 Despite this long, close, and substantive military relationship, there has also been concrete evidence of limits to the Pakistani commitment to the House of Saud. Like Egypt, Pakistan turned down MBS’s request to join the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen or to support the Arab Quartet blockade of Qatar, where a Pakistani military mission continued to train Qatari armed forces. Pakistan has not shown any interest in siding with Saudi Arabia against Iran. Again, like Egypt, Pakistan has received massive financial and economic aid from Saudi Arabia but sought to maintain a policy of neutrality in the kingdom’s struggle against Iran for regional hegemony. Pakistan comes as close as any nation to being Saudi Arabia’s “second wife.” But their relationship, like most marriages, has had its ups and downs, too. In mid-2020, the Saudis failed to support Pakistan against India in a diplomatic struggle over whether the Indian part of disputed Kashmir should still be considered an autonomous region. When Pakistani officials openly criticized Saudi Arabia, Riyadh reacted by demanding their government pay back immediately one-third of a $3 billion loan extended to Pakistan in 2018 and ended long-term credit to Pakistan for the purchase of Saudi oil. 44 Although a “divorce” seemed unlikely, Pakistan still was no alternative to the United States when it came to providing the security guarantee the Saudis seek.

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The Israel Option Israel suddenly emerged in 2020 as a potential security alternative to the United States with the rash of Arab states signing normalization accords. If Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump had had their way, Saudi Arabia would have already been among them. There had long been media reports of both public and secret meetings between Israeli and Gulf Arab officials, including Saudi ones. Israel Radio reported that MBS himself had flown to Israel for secret talks in September 2017, a report the Saudis quickly denied.45 However, there was nothing secret about Netanyahu’s visit to Oman in October 2018 or his declared intentions to see Israel establish diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. In November 2019, Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, disclosed a US-Israeli project to get the Gulf Arab nations to sign a nonaggression and economic cooperation pact with Israel “on the White House lawn” before Trump ran for reelection in 2020.46 MBS did not sign on, but he showed his goodwill toward Israel most prominently in helping Trump’s son-in-law, Kushner, draft the Trump plan for a settlement of the Palestinian issue. He not only endorsed the most pro-Israeli peace settlement ever put forward in decades of negotiations, but also he called Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to Riyadh to try to convince him to accept Israelidictated terms.47 These included no Palestinian capital for an independent state in Jerusalem proper and incorporation of key Israeli settlements and the Jordan Valley into Israel. The would-be US peace plan was unveiled, after two years of Kushner’s jawboning Gulf Arab leaders and Jordan to accept it, at a ceremony led by Trump and Netanyahu at the White House in January 2020. It was essentially dead upon arrival. No Palestinian official showed up, and among Arab states only Oman, Bahrain, and the UAE sent their ambassadors. Saudi Arabia stood out as a noticeable no-show, given MBS’s efforts to promote the plan with Palestinian leadership. Trump had systematically undermined his own efforts to obtain Saudi support, first by endorsing Netanyahu’s declaration of all Jerusalem as Israel’s eternal capital in December 2017 and then his annexation of the Golan Heights in March 2019. The Trump administration’s dogged effort to gain Saudi endorsement for its “deal of the century” was further undermined by Netanyahu’s declaration of intent in July 2020 to annex Israeli settlements on the West Bank and in the Jordan Valley. International pressure, including from the Trump administration, at least delayed this from happening, but the Israeli leader did not renounce his goal of eventually doing so.

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Divisions Within the House of Saud The idea of crossing the Rubicon to embrace Israel provoked a battle royal inside the House of Saud. King Salman had publicly disagreed with his son’s tilt toward accepting the Trump-Netanyahu Palestinian peace proposal and remained steadfast in his commitment to the 2002 Saudi-drafted Arab League one. This had called for Israel to accept its borders as they were before the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital as a precondition for normalization of Arab-Israeli relations. In addition, two former Saudi ambassadors to Washington, Prince Bandar and Prince Turki, had come out publicly on opposite sides of the issue, the former excoriating Palestinian leaders for multiple missed opportunities to gain their own independent state and the latter insisting no normalization before that happened.48 MBS, in contrast, kept preparing the Saudi public for an opening to the Jewish state regardless of a resolution to the Palestinian question, even promoting a sympathetic portrait of Jews for the first time in televised soap operas aired on state-controlled television during Ramadan of 2020. What did MBS expect to gain in security for his kingdom in return? Could Israel ever replace the United States? It seemed highly doubtful the kingdom would ever allow Israeli soldiers, warplanes, or air-defense missiles to be stationed on Saudi soil the way it had US ones during the 1990–1991 Gulf War and welcomed back in 2020. But for MBS, Israel loomed as the best channel back into the good graces of the new US president and Congress as well as a powerful lobby in Washington supportive of continued sale of US arms to Saudi Arabia. Israel also was far more committed to confronting Iran than the United States had proven to be. But Israel might also become a source of increased insecurity for the kingdom if MBS were to become complicit in an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The most likely scenario seemed to be Saudi Arabia allowing Israeli warplanes on their way to Iran to pass through Saudi airspace. The cost to the kingdom might well be high, though, as the Iranian bombing of Saudi oil facilities in September 2019 had made clear. Would Israel ever come to the defense of Saudi Arabia in case of another Iranian attack? For MBS and Saudi Arabia, the unknowns and risks of an open alliance with Israel remained numerous. US Commitment Increasingly Doubtful However, the durability of the United States to the security of Saudi Arabia under MBS seemed increasingly questionable. Trump had

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proven unwilling to risk another “forever war” on behalf of the Saudis unless US interests were also clearly at stake. This was the case for the unique and highly risky operation in January 2020 to assassinate by drones Major General Qassim Suleimani, head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force, while on a visit to Baghdad. Trump, like the Pentagon, held him responsible for the death of scores of US soldiers since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 using Iranian-backed Iraqi militia groups and Iranian-provided improvised explosive devices (IEDs). After initially retaliating with more attacks on bases where US troops were stationed, Iran called them off, apparently to avoid giving Trump a pretext to retaliate before he left office. The extent of the US commitment to Saudi Arabia has varied over time, but one key determinant has always been the state of personal relations between the US president and Saudi king at any given time. This was strikingly apparent during Trump’s tenure in office, when Congress and the US media were becoming ever more hostile toward MBS. A majority in both houses of Congress, including seven Republican senators, passed three resolutions or bills to stop arms sales to the kingdom over the Yemen war. But Trump in July 2019 vetoed them, and their supporters lacked the two-thirds vote necessary to override his action. Later, Trump resorted to an emergency declaration to bypass the opposition even to provide Saudi Arabia war munitions. It was not the first time Congress and the president had been at odds. I recounted earlier how Reagan had had to lobby personally on a slogan of “Reagan or Begin” to override stiff congressional opposition to the AWACS sale in 1981 and failed five years later to win approval of a missile sale. What has noticeably changed in the antiSaudi campaign inside the United States is the sheer number and persistence of unresolved issues serving to throw into question the entire US-Saudi relationship. US courts are still dealing with lawsuits by the families of 9/11 victims charging Saudi government complicity. Congress passed in September 2016 the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which lifted Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic immunity over President Obama’s veto to allow the lawsuit to go forward. The Saudi government challenged the legislation, but US courts in 2018 backed Congress. Thus, nearly twenty years later, the 9/11 families were still pursuing their lawsuit, keeping Saudi Arabia’s alleged involvement in terrorism against US citizens alive. Meanwhile, there had been a tsunami of resolutions and bills in Congress demanding Saudi Arabia does, or doesn’t do, one thing or

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another to restore the US-Saudi relationship. Many required the US government to identify and punish those responsible for Khashoggi’s murder; some even called for MBS to be held personally responsible. The House Foreign Affairs Committee passed unanimously a bill in March 2021 that would ban MBS from ever entering the United States. Others, such as the No Nuclear Weapons for Saudi Arabia Act of 2018, aimed to prevent the bypassing of US laws on sharing nuclear technology with the Saudis unless they agreed not to enrich uranium or separate plutonium on their own. Still others demanded the release of Saudi women thrown into jail for advocating for their right to drive before MBS had lifted the ban in June 2019. One Senate bill, the Escape of Saudi Nationals Act, aimed at punishing the Saudi embassy in Washington for allegedly aiding Saudi citizens charged with crimes to flee the United States to avoid prosecution. Yet another called for reform of the Saudi education system to purge schoolbook texts of religious extremism. Finally, two lawsuits had been filed in the US District Court in Washington, DC—one by Khashoggi’s wife and another by a high-ranking Saudi intelligence officer—the first demanding MBS be held responsible for Khashoggi’s assassination and the second for attempting the same. Trump was always a thin reed for the Saudis to depend upon to uphold the fraying US-Saudi relationship. The president seemed to care only about the size of Saudi arms purchases he could announce at photo ops, embarrassing MBS by holding up a huge chart of Saudi arms purchases for the whole world to see at a meeting with MBS at the White House in March 2018. Trump pressed King Salman and MBS relentlessly first to lower and then to raise oil prices to help him politically at home. At one point, Trump insulted the whole House of Saud, declaring “it might not be there for two weeks” if the United States were to withdraw its military support.49 And Trump belittled MBS personally by bragging he had “saved his ass” from the rage in Congress over his role in Khashoggi’s assassination.50

The MBS-Trump Relationship Acutely aware of his predicament, MBS curbed his impulsive instinct and demonstrated an unusual cautiousness in dealing with Trump, his last and best hope of maintaining the battered US-Saudi relationship in some form. He never criticized Trump publicly or threatened to use the Saudi oil weapon against the United States. To the contrary, he tried to manipulate prices upward or downward as

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Trump asked of him, partly because it usually also suited Saudi economic interests at the time. Another step Saudi Arabia might have taken was to stop pegging the Saudi riyal to the dollar (it has stayed at 3.75 riyals to one dollar for decades) or cease payment for its oil in dollars alone, which would have dealt a serious blow to its role as the world’s primary currency. But MBS did neither. There were other notable steps he took to avoid the risk of infuriating Trump and causing abandonment by the United States. He did not buy Russian weapons, and he did not turn to Russian companies to build a Saudi nuclear reactor, at least not as long as Trump was in office. And MBS welcomed back US troops to the kingdom in 2019 after the late King Abdullah (while still crown prince) had insisted they leave in 2003. There also might well have been a visceral glue to the TrumpMBS relationship stemming from their similar histories and character traits. Both had come to power against great odds and were out to break the icons and norms of behavior in their respective polities. Both were narcissistic braggarts and suffered from outsized hubris. Both resorted constantly to vastly exaggerated claims; everything they did was the biggest or best ever. Both experienced an Icarian moment when their high-flying ambitions for greatness were thwarted, MBS as a result of his role in Khashoggi’s murder and Trump his second impeachment trial for inciting an insurrection by his followers, who occupied the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. Both were showmen rather than statesmen. Both loved the pageantry of summits and disregarded the absence of any substance to them. They played up symbolic gestures, such as the two of them with their hands on a globe during Trump’s visit to Riyadh in May 2017. It was as if to say, as the Saudi mantra proclaimed of the US-Saudi relationship, Together We Prevail over the entire world. The similarities also extended toward those who stood in their way, or dared to criticize, their judgment or policies; they never forgot or forgave them and demonstrated unlimited vindictiveness toward them.

Rethinking the US-Saudi Alliance It was difficult to predict where the US-Saudi relationship was headed at the time of this writing, just a few months after Biden had taken office. MBS carried a stigma from Khashoggi’s murder that would make him a toxic visitor to Washington and difficult to embrace at the White House. Biden, like Trump and Obama before him, seemed

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likely to pursue the withdrawal of US troops from the “forever wars” of the Middle East and continue their “pivot to Asia.” This is precisely what one report in early April 2021 confirmed, outlining plans for the withdrawal of some US troops, aircraft, ships, and Patriot missiles from the Persian Gulf—affecting Saudi Arabia in particular.51 Biden certainly differed from Trump as well on how to deal with Iran, favoring Obama’s approach of reconciliation rather than confrontation. It seemed dubious, however, that Biden was any more ready to go to war than his two predecessors had been, certainly not in the name of MBS’s primary cause of rolling back Iranian expansionism in the Arab world. However, a more vocal and critical appraisal of Saudi policies and practices by the Biden administration seemed likely, notably when it came to political and human rights. What elements of the past US-Saudi relationship, then, should be salvaged? The case for a rethink and reset of the US-Saudi relationship had become compelling. It promised to be difficult. As I have detailed, the two have become outright competitors in the world oil market, with Saudi Arabia now a threat to the US drive for energy independence. There is no agreement either on the role, or extent, of the United States in ensuring Saudi security today. Biden seemed likely, like his two predecessors, to seek the extrication of the United States from the morasses of the Middle East. Defining a new relationship would also prove challenging if MBS’s reckless and impulsive behavior over the past five years were to continue. He had made some moves to correct some missteps, suing for peace in Yemen and lifting the blockade on Qatar. He had also bowed to US pressure to release from prison both Loujain Hathloul, a leading Saudi feminist activist, and Walid Fitaihi, an outspoken Saudi American doctor who ran a hospital in Jeddah. But the radically different ages, demeanors, and temperaments of MBS and Biden seem likely to remain a major obstacle to the two leaders ever binding. This would make finding a new foundation stone to the overall US-Saudi relationship, already a formidable task, only more difficult. At the start of this book, I set forth the notion that the Saudi fear of abandonment by the United States is deeply embedded in the Saudi psyche. It has only been made worse by the kingdom’s unfulfilled quest to find a credible substitute for its security. Thus, this fear has more reason than ever for looming large in the Saudi mind today. The commander of the US Central Command in 2020, General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., argued that the main remaining US interest in Saudi Arabia was no longer oil or counterterrorism. It was to prevent China or Russia from replacing the United States as the chief

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provider of Saudi arms in the new “Wild West” of competition emerging across the Middle East among these three nations.52 With his constant harping on Saudi Arabia’s massive purchases of US arms, Trump seemed to agree. Biden, in contrast, has already made clear in Yemen that the United States cannot detach itself from responsibility for the misuse of US arms in Saudi ventures abroad. As of this writing, two core questions remained: What will replace the old oil-for-security formula to anchor the future US-Saudi relationship? Can the United States separate its dealing with MBS from its policy toward the kingdom? Clearly, Saudi Arabia under MBS will constitute a daunting challenge for US policymakers for years to come. 1. Roger Rapier, “How the Shale Boom Turned the World Upside Down,” Forbes, April 21, 2017. 2. Kimberly Amaded, “U.S. Shale Oil Boom and Bust,” Balance, May 1, 2020. 3. US Energy Information Administration, “Oil and Petroleum Products Explained,” October 3, 2019. 4. David Hearst, “Exclusive: Saudis Launched Oil Price War After ‘MBS Shouting Match with Putin,’” Middle East Eye, April 21, 2020. 5. Thomas Franck, “Trump to Buy Oil for Strategic Reserve to Aid Energy Industry: ‘We’re Going to Fill It,’” CNBC, March 13, 2020. 6. Kylie Atwood and Jeremy Herb, “US Oil State Senators Threaten to Rethink Ties to Saudi Arabia in Fiery Call with Ambassador,” CNN, April 11, 2020. 7. Katherine Dunn, “‘Black April’: EIA Warns of ‘Staggering’ Demand Drop in Global Oil Markets,” Fortune, April 15, 2020. 8. David Hodari and Ryan Dezember, “Oil Demand Projected to Fall by Record Amount,” Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2020. 9. Timothy Gardner, Steve Holland, Dmitry Zhdannikov, and Rania El Gamal, “Special Report: Trump Told Saudi: Cut Oil Supply or Lose U.S. Military Support-Sources,” Reuters, April 30, 2020. 10. Bruce Riedel, “75 Years After a Historic Meeting on the USS Quincy, U.S.-Saudi Relations Are in Need of a True Re-Think,” Brookings Institution, February 10, 2020. 11. For a history of these ups and downs in the US-Saudi relationship from 1973 to 2005, see David B. Ottaway, The King’s Messenger: Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America’s Tangled Relationship with Saudi Arabia (New York: Walker, 2008). 12. Ibid., 150. 13. Ibid., 68–69. 14. Clayton Thomas, “Arms Sales in the Middle East: Trends and Analytical Perspectives for U.S. Policy,” Congressional Research Service, October 11, 2017. 15. Ibid. 16. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), “Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2019,” March 2020. 17. For more details on President Ronald Reagan’s battle to sell AWACS to Saudi Arabia, see Ottaway, King’s Messenger, 50–53.

Notes

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18. Zachary Cohen and Ryan Browne, “Trump Declares Emergency to Expedite Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia and UAE,” CNN, May 24, 2019. 19. “Trump Says ‘No Rush’ to Respond to Attacks on Saudi Oil Facilities,” Los Angeles Times, September 16, 2019. 20. This was the term CENTCOM commander General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. began using to describe Iran’s evolving war tactics after its September 2019 attack on the Saudi oil facilities. See United States Institute of Peace, “CENTCOM: Iran Recalculating Strategy on U.S.,” Iran Primer, June 12, 2020. 21. Abraham Accords Peace Agreement, https://www.state.gov/wp-content /uploads/2020/09/UAE_Israel-treaty-signed-FINAL-15-Sept-2020-508.pdf. 22. Yaniv Kubovich, “Israel Issues UAE Travel Warning, Citing Iranian Plans to Target Israelis Abroad,” Haaretz, March 29, 2021. 23. David Ottaway, “Will New Diplomatic Openings Lead to Israeli Military Aid to the Gulf Arab States?” Wilson Center Viewpoint Series, September 15, 2020. 24. Associated Press, “U.S. Pulls Patriot Missiles, Fighter Aircraft from Saudi Arabia,” Military Times, May 7, 2020. 25. Ellen R. Wald, “Trump’s Removal of Troops Is Also About Oil,” Forbes, May 7, 2020. 26. “Joe Biden, in Departure from Obama Policy, Says He Would Make Saudi Arabia a ‘Pariah,’” Intercept, November 21, 2019. 27. “Anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi’s Murder—Statement by Vice President Joe Biden,” https://joebiden.com/2020/10/02/anniversary-of-jamal-khashoggis -murder-statement-by-vice-president-joe-biden/. 28. Stephanie Kirchgaessner, “Biden Administration to ‘Declassify Report’ on Khashoggi’s Murder,” Guardian, January 19, 2021. 29. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Assessing the Saudi Government’s Role in the Killing of Jamal Khashoggi,” February 25, 2021. 30. Antony J. Blinken, “Accountability for the Murder of Jamal Khashoggi,” State Department press statement, February 26, 2021. 31. Antony J. Blinken, “Secretary Antony J. Blinken at a Press Availability. Remarks,” State Department, February 26, 2021. 32. Ottaway, King’s Messenger, 226. 33. Ibid. 69. 34. Paul Sonne, “Can Saudi Arabia Produce Ballistic Missiles? Satellite Imagery Raises Suspicions,” Washington Post, January 3, 2019. 35. For more details, see Ottaway, King’s Messenger, 225. 36. For more details on China’s Belt and Road Initiative as applied to the Middle East, see Jonathan Fulton, “China’s Changing Role in the Middle East,” Atlantic Council, Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, June 2019. 37. Observatory of Economic Complexity, “Saudi Arabia 2018,” www.oec .world.com. 38. Lucille Greer and Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, “Last Among Equals: The China-Iran Partnership in a Regional Context,” Wilson Center, Occasional Paper Series no. 38, September 2020. See also Afshin Molavi, “Enter the Dragon: China’s Growing Influence in the Middle East and North Africa,” Hoover Institution, https://www.hoover.org/research/enter-dragon-chinas-growing-influence -middle-east-and-north-africa. 39. Farnaz Fassihi and Steven Lee Meyers, “Defying U.S., China and Iran Near Trade and Military Partnership,” New York Times, July 11, 2020. 40. David B. Ottaway, “Saudis Stick with Trump Despite Sellout of Syrian Kurds,” Wilson Center, Middle East Program, October 16, 2019.

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41. Ibid. 42. “10,000 Saudi Soldiers Being Trained in Pakistan,” Middle East Monitor, February 19, 2018; “Pakistan Sends Combat Troops to Saudi Southern Border,” Pakistan Today, March 3, 2017. 43. For more details on the Saudi-Pakistani nuclear cooperation, see Ottaway, King’s Messenger, 228–229. 44. Arhama Siddiqa, “Pakistan Ties with Saudi Arabia Suggest a Marriage Where Divorce Is Not Possible,” Middle East Monitor, September 1, 2020. 45. “Israel Has Held Secret Talks with SA over Iran Threat, Says Minister,” Reuters, November 20, 2017. 46. “Israel Reportedly Aiming to Sign Treaty with Gulf States at White House,” Middle East Eye, November 6, 2019. 47. Ann Barnard, David M. Halbfinger, and Peter Baker, “Talk of a Peace Plan That Snubs Palestinians Roils the Middle East,” New York Times, December 4, 2017. 48. David Ottaway, “Battle Royal over Israel in the House of Saud,” Wilson Center Viewpoints Series, December 16, 2020. 49. Nada Altaher and Tamara Qiblawi, “Trump Says Saudi King Wouldn’t Last ‘Two Weeks’ Without US Support,” CNN, October 3, 2018. 50. J. Edward Moreno, “Trump Reportedly Said He Protected Saudi Crown Prince from Congress: ‘I Saved His Ass,’” Hill, September 10, 2020. 51. Gordon Lubold and Warren P. Strobel, “Biden Trimming Forces Sent to Mideast to Help Saudi Arabia,” New York Times, April 1, 2021. 52. Department of Defense News Transcript, “MEI Engagement with General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr.,” June 10, 2020.

Part 3

Conclusion

11 Prospects for Reform . . . and Repression A senior Wahhabi imam once described Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) as Islam’s latest mujaddid, or great reformer, whom Sunni Muslims believe Allah sends once every century to revive their religion.1 MBS has indeed presented his mission partly as restoring “moderate Islam” to Wahhabism, claiming that was the dominant characteristic of the creed before Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution pushed the al-Saud into enforcing its toughest social strictures. The idea that MBS believes he is on a divine mission, and the twentyfirst century’s mujaddid, might seem somewhat fanciful outside Saudi Arabia. But it certainly fits into his image of himself as the reincarnation of the Saudi kingdom’s founding father, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud. And it echoes his declared mission of cleansing Wahhabism of its ultraconservative interpretation of Islam, if not explicitly that of building a far more secular, ultramodern Fourth Saudi Kingdom. I have suggested that MBS brings to mind the Greek mythological figure Icarus, both in his ambition for greatness and in his early fall from international grace. From the start, MBS exuded an unbridled hubris and flaunted his intention to fly as high as possible in setting goals for his Vision 2030. He was once asked about the danger of setting fanciful goals, to which he replied, “You have to aim high, and you have to try to achieve as much as you can. . . . We aim high. . . . If you achieve 50 percent, great! Better than achieving nothing. So there is no problem in aiming high.”2 Ironically, MBS was speaking to a group of US reporters just three days after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi on October 2, 2018. That event proved to be his Icarian moment and sent this high-flying crown prince crashing down, along with his dreams for Arab and global leadership. It is too early to predict MBS’s chances for redemption from the initial string of disasters in his foreign policies. At home, however, he 199

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has already worked some inalterable political changes and set loose a social revolution of unprecedented scope. Principally, he has scrapped the centuries-old compact between the al-Saud and the Wahhabi establishment, which constituted the central pillar of the kingdom’s political system. MBS has launched a full-scale assault on Wahhabi dominance over Saudi society by sharply curtailing the clerics’ authority and declaring Western-style entertainment no longer haram, or religiously forbidden. What’s more, he has organized a tsunami of foreign bands, singers, and pop stars to change radically the kingdom’s once painfully austere Wahhabi landscape. He has even begun institutionalizing Western notions of entertainment by building an entire city in the image of Disney World, only bigger, outside Riyadh. In addition, he has declared other Wahhabi bugaboos of Western culture, such as celebrating Valentine’s Day and having a Christmas tree, no longer haram. MBS has unleashed a social revolution that is distinctly secular in content and flavor.

The Wahhabi Backlash, Past and Present Many Saudis and foreign Saudiologists, including me, had anticipated a Wahhabi backlash to MBS’s full frontal assault on the kingdom’s puritanical clerics.3 After all, the most serious attacks, such as the 1979 takeover of the Mecca Mosque and the sahwa movement of the mid-1990s, had come from ultraconservative Wahhabi elements upset with alleged al-Saud corruption of Saudi society. But in the first five years of MBS’s social revolution, no backlash occurred. Only one incident of an attack on any of the scores of performances had been noted, not by a Saudi Wahhabi but by an outraged Yemeni citizen who stabbed three participants in a musical play being held in Riyadh in November 2019.4 Even more surprising has been the lack of adverse reaction to MBS’s lifting of the ban on women driving and progressive elimination of the system of male guardianship, the bedrock of the Saudi social system. This had given Wahhabi clerics—and fathers, husbands, and even sons—wide powers over Saudi women and limited women’s role in society. As I noted in an earlier chapter, the late King Abdullah had already started reining in the authority of these clerics, most notably appointing thirty women to the shoura council and allowing women to vote in and stand as candidates for municipal elections. MBS carried through on these reforms and accelerated others, such as expanding vastly women’s access to the job market and ending the ban on their driving. The Wahhabi establishment had held

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up the long-delayed liberation of Saudi women for decades. To his credit, he has put an end to their vise-like grip over them. Why had there been no Wahhabi backlash? Traditionally, the Wahhabi hierarchy has bowed to the ruling al-Saud on matters of state, even approving the late King Fahd’s decision to allow 500,000 Christian US soldiers into the kingdom during the 1990–1991 Gulf War. In return, the al-Saud had defaulted to the clerics on enforcing a strict code of behavior on Saudi society. MBS was negating this time-honored quid pro quo, stripping the Wahhabi establishment of much of its political and social power. So why hadn’t the clerics moved to defend their loss of power and status? Why had they so meekly accepted the downgrading of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) and loss of authority for the mutaween, its zealous religious police? Why hadn’t they opposed the invasion of Western culture, which they had so vehemently condemned as the ultimate corrupter of Saudi mores?

Official Wahhabi Clerics Line Up Cynical Saudis used to remind me that the clerics are basically civil servants, dependent on the government for their well-being and salaries. They obeyed the king basically out of fear of losing their daily bread. When they did on rare occasions speak out against the first timid reforms, they lost their posts or were demoted in the religious establishment. If they wanted to stay in good standing with their al-Saud rulers, they toed the official line. A good example of this subservience was Sheikh Abdulrahman al-Sudais, the chief imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. He had compared MBS to this century’s mujaddid, and in a sermon seventeen days after Khashoggi’s murder, he warned his listeners that allegations MBS had been behind it were a conspiracy against Islam and a threat to his reforms.5 Independent Clerics Silenced If the official Wahhabi establishment has traditionally been subservient, independent Saudi clerics, in contrast, have been repeatedly in rebellion against al-Saud authority. The sahwa movement of the mid-1990s was an example par excellence of this. It nurtured its grievances on the large US military presence in the birthplace of Islam during the Gulf War, and the government had to suppress it by throwing its leaders in jail for five years. One of them, Salman al-Oudah, was

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back in prison again in 2017 after publicly encouraging King Salman to make peace with Qatar after the Saudi-led Arab Quartet had imposed its blockade. Al-Oudah was accused of being a Muslim Brotherhood member, as were a half dozen other outspoken religious scholars and clerics also thrown into prison. Not all of these independent Wahhabi clerics, however, were systematically antagonistic to MBS. He successfully courted the cleric with the largest online audience of any of them—Sheikh Mohamad al-Arefe. He counted 20 million followers on Twitter and had gained an international reputation for being outspokenly anti-Jewish, antiChristian, and anti-Shia, for which he had been banned from Great Britain. MBS converted al-Arefe into a supporter of his reforms. He had himself photographed standing and smiling together with alArefe as proof to his followers the sheikh stood behind him.6 In this manner MBS either silenced, imprisoned, or converted the kingdom’s independent clerics to his side. In this manner, too, he unblocked the main obstacle to the social modernization of Saudi Arabia.

Youth and Women Replace Clerics as Power Base As I argued earlier, MBS was also replacing the Wahhabi establishment as the main political base of the House of Saud. This seemed a risky endeavor, the outcome of which was difficult to predict at the time of this writing. Instead of relying on Wahhabi clerics and their millions of followers, MBS was building a new base composed of Saudi youth and women thirsting for the reforms he promised and quickly began to implement. The glue for this new base was Saudi nationalism with MBS as the great reformer. It was the Saudi version of populism usually associated with secularism in the West and even the Arab world (Tunisia’s Habib Bourguiba, Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein). In the Saudi case, populism was increasingly secular in cultural values as MBS loosened the grip of Wahhabi clerics over society. The clash of cultures was becoming stark and undeniable. I referred in an earlier chapter to eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington, who warned of the high risk of failure for modernizing monarchs. They would be caught between the social forces of the old order opposing reform and the new ones created by it, and they ran a high risk of being overthrown by the latter. He called it “the king’s dilemma.” He wrote his book a decade before Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, but the fate of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last

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shah, would prove another prime example after the fall of monarchs in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan he cited as proof. Still, there have been a number of cases in the Middle East of bold modernizing leaders, including monarchs, who have managed to survive the new social and political forces birthed by their own reforms. How and why they succeeded might provide some clues as to MBS’s chances for avoiding the dustbin of history.

Other Middle East Reformers One way to begin thinking about MBS’s prospects is to compare him with other Middle East leaders already acknowledged as great reformers, or at least important agents of modernization. In this manner, the similarities and differences become clearer even if any prediction should contain numerous caveats, given that MBS is only at the start of a reign that could last a half century. I have restricted the main barometers for measuring reform to matters of society and religion because these were the most delicate ones past reformers had to contend with in pursuit of modernizing their countries. Otherwise, they have all been autocrats, whether kings or elected presidents, and limited their political reform at best to adopting the trappings of Western democracy, such as parliaments and political parties, while imposing their will through a single-party system and police states. Habib Bourguiba The earliest Arab reformer of note in contemporary times was doubtlessly Bourguiba, a lawyer who led Tunisia to independence from French colonial rule in 1956 and stayed on as its first president until 1987. He unquestionably became a dictator. He allowed only one party, his Neo Destour, to operate and would brook no opposition from either secularist or Islamic opponents to his diktat. He was also a showman. One of his most memorable “shows” was to demonstrate his disdain for Ramadan by drinking on state television a glass of orange juice during the holy month of fasting in 1964. By then, Bourguiba had long since earned his place in history. One of his first acts as president after Tunisia’s independence was to decree by far the most progressive Code of Personal Status in the Arab world at that time and even until this day. It did away with polygamy and arranged marriages and gave women equal status to men in matters of divorce, child custody, and many other family issues.

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It fixed the minimum age of marriage for women at fifteen and for men at eighteen and made it a civil matter that had to be registered with civilian courts. In fact, religious courts and Shari’a law were scrapped. Face veils for women were also banned in all state institutions, including schools. About the only issue left untouched was the inheritance law, solidly rooted in the Koran, which stipulated that sons had the right to twice the amount as daughters. To this day, the Tunisian family code remains the most progressive of those of all Arab countries, though even the advent of multiparty democracy with the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings there has not led to equality of men and women with regard to inheritance. The Tunisian uprising led to enormous contention over the socalled Bourguiba model of governance, based on the principle of a civil state and separation of state and mosque. Democratic elections brought to the forefront of Tunisian politics the Islamic Ennahda movement (later a party), which denounced the model as a legacy of French colonialism and strict French adherence to laicism, secularism in state and society inherited from the 1789 French Revolution. Islamists in Tunisia had opposed the Bourguiba model since they formed the Movement of Islamic Tendency in 1981, which became Ennahda eight years later. Its activities were banned and its leaders imprisoned, or else they fled into exile until the uprising in 2011. A reborn Ennahda emerged as the largest of myriad political parties and pushed to overturn the Bourguiba model during a struggle over the country’s postuprising constitution. But the secular parties with which Ennahda found itself obliged to rule in coalition governments ensured that an unaltered 1956 Code of Personal Status remained the law of the land. Overall, the outcome has been the full integration of Tunisia’s Islamists, once banned from the country, into the political system and relatively peaceful cohabitation with the country’s secularists.

Gamal Abdul Nasser Another Arab leader of far greater renown across the Arab world was Egypt’s Nasser, a military dictator who led the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952 and ruled until his death in 1970. He was a populist par excellence who eliminated the monarchy, exiled King Farouk, nationalized the big landowners and enterprises, and brought farmers and workers into parliament. He also nationalized the land belonging to Muslim foundations, earning him the enmity of religious leaders. His ringing call for Arab nationalism and socialism,

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broadcast daily over the Egyptian radio station Voice of the Arabs, won him enormous appeal throughout the Middle East. Even his defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War did not dent his popularity at home and abroad. His name will forever be linked to the massive Aswan Dam in Upper Egypt, which for the first time in Egyptian history regulated the flow of the Nile River, guaranteeing water for millions of farmers and multiple crops throughout the year. The greatest challenge to Nasser and his reforms came from the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic group founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, a schoolteacher and preacher who had established a nationwide organization and attracted millions of followers. The Muslim Brotherhood had attempted to assassinate Nasser in 1954, and in response he launched a brutal campaign to eradicate the group, imprisoning thousands of its members and closing down all its activities. Thousands of other brethren fled to Saudi Arabia, where they would merge their thinking with Wahhabism to generate a new breed of Islamic political activists known as neo-Wahhabis. Nasser also had to deal with Egypt’s powerful Al-Azhar University, a 1,000-year-old institution with a reputation for being the Arab world’s leading religious authority. Nasser brought its imams and scholars and their activities under direct government control and then used this venerable institution to counter the Muslim Brotherhood. In the process, he ended Al-Azhar University’s long-established independence. He purged those professors who opposed his reforms and promoted those who supported them, thereby using the university and religious center to legitimize his rule and reforms. Another legacy of Nasser’s rule was the establishment of the powerful Security Investigations Service (SSI), which became a kind of antireligious police tasked primarily with keeping track of the Muslim Brotherhood’s underground activities and arresting its remaining activists. (Egypt’s communists and other leftists were lesser targets.) Together with his General Intelligence Agency, better known as the Mukhabarat, Nasser built a police state that became another kind of model for Arab world leaders. It was organized and trained by Soviet KGB and East German Stasi security specialists and expanded to include its own courts and spies operating in every neighborhood. SSI was under the Interior Ministry, which also had control of the Central Security Forces formed by Nasser to put down riots and demonstrations. When I went to study Arabic in Cairo during the summer of 1969, I was told that every street had an SSI spy watching it and that the doorman at every apartment building reported to the security

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agency on any suspicious activities by residents and visitors. I found all these practices still very much in force while living there from 1981 to 1985 as the Washington Post’s bureau chief, though I never experienced a run-in with the SSI or Mukhabarat. For reform-minded Arab leaders, whether to suppress Islamists or seek their cooperation has remained a painful dilemma. Nasser’s two successors, Presidents Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, sought alternatively to suppress and co-opt the Muslim Brotherhood by allowing its members to operate illegally and eventually to run as independents in parliamentary elections starting in 2000. Five years later, they had gained eighty-eight seats, constituting the largest opposition faction. The Muslim Brotherhood then used the 2011 uprising, which it had at first opposed, to come to power briefly under one of its leaders, Mohamed Morsi, who won the presidential election the following year. After he was in office less than a year, however, the military orchestrated another uprising, this time against the Muslim Brotherhood, and removed Morsi from office in July 2013. General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who became president in June 2014, then launched a new cycle of repression against the Muslim Brotherhood, imprisoning upward of 40,000 of its members, banning all its activities, closing down all its companies, and confiscating all its finances. Other than the small, quietist Salafi Party, Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood remained outside the political system, with no sign the military regime under el-Sisi had any intent to ever allow them even a toehold.

King Mohammed VI Before leaving the Arab world, there is one more reformer of note, this time a monarch rather than a civilian or military leader: King Mohammed VI of Morocco. This king is particularly interesting because of the ways in which he has dealt simultaneously with social and political reforms as well as with their Islamic opponents. He has had one great advantage in promoting reform, namely that the Moroccan king is also regarded as a religious leader. He carries the title of Commander of the Faithful, based on a claim that the Moroccan ruling Alaouite dynasty dates back to the Prophet Mohammed himself. Morocco is also unique among the eight Arab monarchies in that political parties and unions have been part of the political landscape for decades, even before its independence in 1956. There is also an elected parliament, and multiparty coalition governments have become the norm.

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Mohammed VI ascended to the throne in 1999 upon the death of his father, Hassan II, who had belatedly in his thirty-eight-year reign begun to open the door to social reforms.7 Hassan II had allowed feminists to form the National Union of Moroccan Women and, under pressure from international organizations, encouraged the growth of other civil society groups. This had resulted even before his death in demands for the reform of the Mudawana, the Moroccan personal status, or family, code. And he had co-opted the leftist opposition by calling back from fifteen years in exile the leader of the National Union of Popular Forces, Abderrahmane Youssoufi, to become his prime minister. At the same time, he burnished his religious credentials by building a $500 million mosque in Casablanca, the largest in Africa at the time. Thus, when Mohammed VI became king in 1999, the door for social and political reform had already been opened. One early outcome was a lively debate about reforming the Mudawana to promote the feminist cause. He allowed huge demonstrations for and against it, the latter led by conservative Islamists. He then called upon parliament to consider the proposed reforms of a special commission he had appointed. After long debate, the legislature overwhelmingly approved a reformed Mudawana in January 2004. It was a rare example in the Arab world of reform instituted from on high while encouraged and carried out in the guise of reform from below. The new Moroccan family code was only slightly less progressive than the Tunisian one in terms of making women the equal of men in matters of marriage, family, and divorce. It outlawed polygamy, though a judge was empowered to approve multiple spouses provided the first wife agreed. The minimum age for marriage was set at eighteen for both men and women, but a judge again could allow a younger age. Like the Tunisian code, however, its main shortcoming was its failure to establish equality between the sexes in matters of inheritance. The 2011 uprising in Morocco had a far different outcome than elsewhere in the Arab world aside from Tunisia, where it had resulted in a multiparty democracy and an end to dictatorship. The Moroccan monarchy emerged intact, and Mohammed VI successfully carried out political reform in the same manner his father did, from above with a veneer of public participation. This time the king appointed a commission to draft a new constitution then submitted to parliament for debate, amendment, and approval before holding a referendum. The king was described as the supreme arbiter of a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy, and he was still Commander of the Faithful and

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head of the Senior Council of Ulema, composed of the country’s leading Islamic scholars. There was no real dissolution of his powers. However, the king made one major concession to the Islamists. The constitution stipulated that the prime minister had to come from the party that won the most seats in parliament. Because the Islamic Party of Justice and Development (PJD) was expected to win in new elections, it meant Morocco was likely to have an Islamic prime minister. This is indeed what happened as a result of the November 2011 elections, in which the PJD won nearly 23 percent of the vote, twice as much as the next leading party. Its leader, Abdelilah Benkirane, was duly named prime minister, and he remained such until March 2017, when he was replaced by another PJD leader, Saad-Eddine Othmani, who had earlier been foreign minister. The main point to be drawn from the Moroccan example was that a modernizing monarch could survive a popular uprising if he were quick-witted, proactive, and politically astute. King Mohammed VI had carried out the whole process of political reform in less than five months from the time the first demonstrations broke out on February 20. In this manner, he got most of the protesters off the street. He had also split the Islamists between those willing to participate in the political system, namely the PJD, and the Salafist Justice and Spirituality Party, banned because it refused to recognize the king as the Commander of the Faithful. Still, these Islamists espoused a quietist form of Salafism that did not support the violent tactics of alQaeda or the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS). The integration of the PJD did not lead to the adoption of an Islamic agenda. Instead, it produced various coalition governments with secular parties that checked its ambitions in this regard in addition to the king himself. Morocco also stands as an illustration of how social and political reform could be carried out by a monarch without having to suppress Islamist parties or create an Egyptian-style ubiquitous police state. Still, King Mohammed VI has had his problems. He had to deal with a mini-uprising in 2018 by the minority Berber population living in the northern Riff Mountains, along with increasing criticism of his rule from the liberal media. This led to escalating royal authoritarianism on his part after twenty years on the throne but still no serious challenge from Islamists to his social and political reforms.

Kemal Atatürk Two non-Arab modernizers who have had a resonance in the Arab world were Mustafa Kemal Atatürk of Turkey and Pahlavi of Iran.

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Both produced paradigms of governance, the former a successful model of radical secularism and the latter a failed modernization by a monarch as Huntington had predicted. Atatürk belonged to the post– World War I era and Pahlavi to the post–World War II one. Their two countries, Turkey and Iran, would become archrivals, as they had been historically, in trying to influence the shape of a new Arab world following the 2011 uprisings. I do not intend to offer a detailed review of their respective careers and histories but only to highlight what made them a success or failure in their common goal to modernize, by which they meant explicitly Westernize, their countries and how each dealt with the main common obstacle to this endeavor, namely, their respective Islamic establishments and factions. Atatürk played the dominant role in the history of the Middle East in the post–World War I era.8 He was the founding father of today’s Turkish nation, born out of the shards of the defeated Ottoman Empire in 1923 through prolonged negotiations with the victorious Western powers and military battles with Great Britain, Greece, and Armenia. After he had achieved this goal, Atatürk went to work with lightning speed to establish a secular order, bringing Western culture and standards to his new nation and suppressing the Islamic opposition to his project of modernization. In brief, within the space of three years he abolished the caliphate of the Muslim world that since 1517 had had its seat in Constantinople (Istanbul today), dissolved religious Shari’a courts and schools as well as the powerful Sufi religious orders, imposed Western-style dress on Turkish men and banned the face veil for women, outlawed the Ottoman Fez hat as a symbol of Turkish backwardness, adopted the Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, decreed a civil family code based on the Swiss one, gave women the right to vote, and established a secular school system. In 1928, he had the Turkish parliament, the Grand National Assembly, remove the last reference to Islam from the constitution. Kemalism, as his ideology became known, was based on six principles: republicanism, populism, nationalism, statism, laicism, and reformism. It became a de facto single-party republic, a democracy in name and formal institutions but a dictatorship in practice. All reform came from the top down, even Atatürk’s push at one point to create a multiparty system. As was to be expected, Atatürk’s shock-and-awe approach toward transforming Turkey into a secular and Westernized state provoked a backlash from various quarters led by Islamists of various creeds and the country’s Kurdish minority as well. Atatürk had to send the army to crush an open rebellion in 1925, led by the Kurdish leader Sheikh

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Said of Palu, who had wrapped himself in the green banner of Islam to promote his basic cause of Kurdish nationalism. His rebellion was brief, and Said surrendered, only to be tried and executed along with thirty-six other top leaders of his secessionist movement. But Atatürk’s main tool for suppressing religious opposition was to have the Grand National Assembly pass the draconian Maintenance of Order Law in 1925, which he used to close down the opposition Progressive Republican Party, consisting of some of his past supporters who differed with him on his policy of economic statism and practice of dictatorial rule. Atatürk used the law to silence all opposition and publications critical of his program, using independent tribunals set up in 1920, during the war for independence, to try anyone who opposed him. In short, he succeeded in imposing sweeping radical social, religious, and economic reforms on his backward country, but he had to manipulate laws, create special courts, and use force when necessary to accomplish this.

King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi The last shah of Iran also had set his compass on Westernization of a backward nation born of a proud hegemonic empire, Persia, just like Atatürk’s Turkey had been out of the Ottoman one. But Pahlavi lacked the legitimacy Atatürk had enjoyed as a major war hero and founding father of the Turkish nation. Pahlavi came to power in 1941 and had to deal with the occupation of both Soviet and British forces in his country during World War II. Then he was challenged by his fiery nationalistic premier, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who in 1951 had nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In the ensuing political turmoil, the shah had to flee the country two years later, only to be reinstalled in power through the secret machinations of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Great Britain’s equivalent Secret Intelligence Service.9 This left him with a stigma he never really lived down of appearing to be an Anglo-American puppet, which helped to undermine his legitimacy in the eyes of Iranians. The shah did his best, however, to overcome this stigma by seeking to become the great modernizer of Iran. He clearly had illusions of grandeur both for himself and for his country. His declared goal was to turn Iran’s feudal society into one of the world’s top five economic powers by the end of the twentieth century. He even dreamed of making it a nuclear power. In 1963, he launched in a series of edicts what

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he called his White (bloodless) Revolution, which called for sweeping land reform to benefit the landless peasantry and the sharing of profits and equity of private companies by their workers. He also set out to build a modern welfare state, expanding the health and education system to the entire Iranian population. And he emancipated women, giving them both the right to vote and to stand for office. Lastly, he vastly expanded the Iranian armed forces, which he equipped with $10 billion ($50 billion in 2020 dollars) worth of the latest US arms. He sought to burnish his image abroad as a great reformer and historic nationalist figure by holding an elaborate celebration in 1971 marking the 2,500th year of the Persian Empire’s founding by Cyrus the Great. He spent several tens of millions of dollars to build an entire tent city and invite 500 international celebrants to Iran’s ancient capital, Persepolis, to admire his new modern Iran in the making. The costly extravaganza made the Guinness Book of World Records but alienated Iranians with his pretentions of being the reincarnation of Cyrus the Great and waste of government money to promote himself as a global leader. The White Revolution, as we know, did not turn out as the shah had intended and even proved his undoing. His reforms did give land to nearly 2 million peasants, launched the country’s industrialization, and quadrupled its per capita income. But it also forced millions of peasants into the cities, where they became a mass of jobless and discontented poor blaming the shah for their plight. The population of Tehran doubled in a decade to more than 4 million people. A Washington Post reporter on a visit there in November 1978 wrote about a society in social and economic turmoil. Strikes, riots, or protests had become a daily affair, and there was “a real potential for civil war in the offing.”10 The shah personified the “king’s dilemma.” His reforms had made enemies of both old and new social forces they had set loose in the country. These included feudal landlords stripped of their wealth and Shiite clerics opposed to the emancipation of Iranian women and often deprived of their landholdings, too. The powerful merchants based in the traditional bazaars opposed the shah’s modern shopping centers, which were undercutting their business, as well as his attempt to fix their prices to stop galloping inflation. At the same time, the peasants and workers he had hoped would become the social base of his regime turned against him, leaving the great modernizer increasingly dependent on his army and above all SAVAK, his brutal intelligence and security agency.

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Right from the start, the cleric who would prove his nemesis, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, came out against the White Revolution. He organized a boycott by clerics in Qom of the referendum the shah called to approve the revolution and led the attack on his Westerninspired reforms. In the end, Iran’s clerics, landlords, bazaar merchants, students, liberals, and communists alike all worked to bring down the shah. He fled the country in January 1979, never to return again. Khomeini quickly replaced him to become the grand ayatollah of the country’s political and religious establishment and abolished the monarchy to make way for a theocracy. The secular White Revolution had ended by birthing an Islamic Revolution.

MBS’s Prospects I have reviewed briefly the history of these successful and failed reformers in order to place MBS in a broader historical perspective. If nothing else, they offer a view into the tactics used—some successful, others not—to bring about reform as a basis for assessing MBS’s prospects. I am fully cognizant that times and circumstances in each country have varied widely as have the strengths and weaknesses of each reformer. Not surprisingly, I have found probably as many dissimilarities as similarities between MBS and these earlier iconic figures. To begin with, although they all had to deal with Islamist opposition, none was as formidable as the Wahhabi establishment of Saudi Arabia, with its long history of serving as the primary pillar of the alSaud kingdom and its success in blocking all social reforms, including making sure Saudi women would be the last to drive a car anywhere in the world. Still, these earlier examples allow us to compare how various modernizing leaders have handled the Islamic challenge in radically different ways, from outright exclusion to total integration into the political system. Weighing against MBS’s success are certainly the following factors. He does not begin to have the stature of a national hero such as Atatürk, Bourguiba, and Nasser enjoyed. He simply became heir apparent at the age of thirty-two, with no achievements to his name, because his father happened to become king, and he was willing to ride roughshod over far more eligible senior princes, including two crown princes. MBS does not have a political party or elected parliament to rally support behind him. Atatürk had the Grand National Assembly and the Republican People’s Party, Bourguiba the Neo Destour, and Nasser the Socialist Arab Union. Even Morocco’s King Mohammed VI had the Authenticity and Modernity Party, formed by

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his close adviser Fouad Ali el-Himma, to do battle with the Islamist PJD at election time. And the shah had formed the Iran Novin Party and then the Resurgence Party to promote himself and his reforms. By contrast, the Saudi would-be great reformer has gone to the opposite extreme of seeking to suppress all political activity of any kind, foremost from would-be political parties and independent civil society groups. His supporters form an inchoate mass of youthful followers and women whose social media accounts remain under close scrutiny for any sign of the slightest discontent or criticism. Also weighing against MBS is a record of unmitigated disasters in foreign policy, from the Saudi interventions in Yemen and Lebanon to the murder of Khashoggi and the air, land, and sea boycott of Qatar. As of the time of this writing, he had shown few qualities of a true statesman and cast vast doubts abroad about his character and judgment for becoming one. His misadventures had cost him most of his allies, including his closest, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which had abandoned him in Yemen. His relations with the most important big power for Saudi security, the United States, had become extremely tenuous and his standing in Washington that of a pariah after Khashoggi’s assassination. As a result of these multiple missteps, MBS had only deepened the ingrained Saudi fear of abandonment by the United States without finding another foreign power to take its place. However, MBS’s imposition of reform from above and use of police-state tactics to suppress all dissent seemed strikingly similar to how successful reforms had been carried out in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey alike. Indeed, there seems to have been a close correlation between reform and repression in the modernization process over the past century across the Middle East. The one notable exception has been Tunisia, where the 2011 uprising led to the end of dictatorship and a true multiparty democracy. There was another interesting similarity between MBS and Atatürk, Bourguiba, and Nasser: MBS had used the same shock-and-awe tactics against his rivals and potential opponents by moving swiftly at the start of his reign to impose his reforms. Also perhaps playing in MBS’s favor was the probability he would not seek such a radical secularization of society as Atatürk and Bourguiba had undertaken. He has broken the Wahhabi grip over society but not ordered women to stop wearing face veils or challenged Ramadan practices the way Bourguiba had. Saudi Arabia remained a very religious society. Furthermore, MBS, if he becomes king, could not forget that his formal title would become Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques or that Saudi Arabia plays host to millions of pilgrims

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every year. He has launched a secular social revolution just as Atatürk and Bourguiba had. But his reforms, so radical by Wahhabi standards, have long since become the norm even in other neighboring Arab monarchies. Of the six principles underlying Atatürk’s Kemalism of a century ago, MBS would seem to agree on just three—populism, statism, and reformism but certainly not laicism.

Comparison to Nasser MBS shares with Nasser his confrontation with the Muslim Brotherhood, which the al-Saud blamed for politicizing Wahhabism and creating a new breed of neo-Wahhabi activists that challenged the family’s rule of the kingdom. MBS, like Nasser, has branded the Muslim Brotherhood a “terrorist” organization and enemy of the House of Saud. And there are shades of Nasser’s tactics in his dealing with the religious establishment, insisting its Wahhabi clerics line up in support of his reforms just as the Egyptian dictator had required of al-Azhar University. In foreign policy, MBS and Nasser also shared one costly strategic blunder: invading Yemen. Both found it a quagmire and disentanglement from its civil war painful and costly. Nasser could at least claim that in the end, his side, the Yemeni Republicans, won over the Saudi-backed Royalists. In the case of the present Yemeni civil war, MBS seems to be repeating the failure of King Ibn Saud: like the Yemeni Royalists of the 1960s, the Saudi-backed side is losing to Houthi rebels. Overall, however, the parallels between the two leaders end in Yemen. MBS has so far failed to gain any of Nasser’s pan-Arab and international stature. Comparison to Mohammed VI Perhaps the two most intriguing parallels are to Mohammed VI of Morocco and the last shah of Iran because they are, or were in the latter case, modernizing monarchs just as MBS seems intent upon becoming. The first parallel, to King Mohammed VI, has more dissimilarities than similarities, however. It is true that both rule over centuries-old monarchies and successfully staved off all challenges springing from the 2011 uprisings across the Arab world. But the Moroccan king is an undisputed religious figure, Commander of the Faithful, whereas MBS is not; he is simply Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques with no claim to religious authority. This makes his task of demanding that his Wahhabi clerics adopt a “moderate” form

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of Islam far more difficult. MBS quickly dropped his attempt to have himself described as this century’s mujaddid. In other respects, Morocco was already far ahead of Saudi Arabia in terms of societal and political norms, and it had long ago adopted Western forms of entertainment and dealing with Western tourists, including allowing alcoholic beverages in the kingdom. Finally, the initiative for reform in Morocco came as much from civil society groups as from the king, though he had made it possible to happen. Reform came about both from the top and the bottom. In Saudi Arabia, MBS has been determined to present himself as the lone shaker and mover of reform, while crushing and preventing all activism from the bottom.

Comparison to the Shah Was the last shah of Iran the closest parallel to MBS? There certainly were similarities. Both lacked legitimacy because of the way in which they came to power, though for quite different reasons. The shah owed his throne to the United States and Great Britain, MBS to manipulation of his aging father and sheer boldness and ruthlessness. Both the shah and MBS promoted radical reforms from above and set up police-state bodies, the SAVAK in Iran and the Presidential Security Agency in Saudi Arabia, to suppress all opposition. Both promoted fantastical visions of their goals, the shah to lift his feudal nation to among the world’s five leading economic powers, MBS to turn his kingdom into one of the four leading financial centers and an incubator of twentyfirst-century, cutting-edge technology. Both also took on their respective religious establishments and made enemies of their business communities, thousands of bazaar merchants in the shah’s case and close to four hundred of the richest businessmen in MBS’s. Finally, both imagined themselves as the reincarnation of a great national hero, Cyrus the Great for the shah and King Ibn Saud for MBS. Yet, there were significant differences between these two royal reformers as well. First and perhaps most important was character. The shah proved indecisive in times of crises, all too worried about the possible consequences of his actions, particularly toward the end of his reign in dealing with strikes and protests. MBS has already demonstrated the opposite trait, showing himself to be impulsive and headstrong in making quick decisions with little regard for the potential negative consequences of his actions. The character of the opposition to their respective rules was different, as was how they dealt with it. The shah never succeeded in bringing the Shiite religious establishment or the bazaar merchants

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under control, whereas MBS did succeed in his fast-moving shockand-awe tactics in cowing both Wahhabi clerics and the business class into submission. The shah had to deal with an ever wider and more open opposition from the country’s clerics, workers, urban and rural jobless, liberals, and communists alike. MBS, by contrast, so far has succeeded in suppressing criticism from all and any quarters at home and forced the opposition into exile abroad. Partly this difference in their oppositions stemmed from totally different political systems. The shah had to deal with an elected majlis and political parties, even a communist one, whereas MBS did not, for the simple reason parties are prohibited and the shoura council is appointed. Unlike the shah’s reforms, MBS’s have earned him notable popularity among the youth and the new, fast-expanding class of male and female university graduates—at least initially. This leads to another observation, namely that the shah’s reign lasted for thirty-eight years, from 1941 to 1979, before he was ousted, whereas MBS’s is just beginning, still only crown prince at the time of this writing. And MBS is unlikely to ever face calls for the complete abolition of the monarchy, as the shah did, and a mass uprising like the shah’s reforms provoked seems equally unlikely in Saudi Arabia. Yet, there were other signs pointing toward troubling similarities in the circumstances of these two monarchs. As we noted earlier, MBS has already made enemies of some of the same social groups the shah did—the clerics and businessmen. The university-educated class of Saudis MBS is counting on as his base of support has hailed his social revolution. But the unemployment rate remained above 11 percent and went as high as 15 percent during the 2020 pandemic. A stubbornly stagnant economy made far worse by the pandemic did not augur well for the prospects of hundreds of thousands of new university graduates. For the first time in Saudi history, a sizable diaspora of discontented, educated Saudis was active abroad, publicizing as never before the violation of human rights and total absence of political rights at home. Meanwhile, the compact underlying Saudi public passivity to royal absolute rule—free education, health care, and ensured employment in return for subservience—was breaking down. The huge subsidies for water, gasoline, and electricity older Saudis had enjoyed were disappearing. The cost of buying consumer goods took a turn for the worse when the government tripled the value-added tax from 5 to 15 percent in July 2020. A little-noticed barometer of overall economic well-being I have tracked over the years is the system of citizens’ accounts. These are bank accounts into which the government pours billions of riyals monthly in cash payments for economically stressed

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Saudis to help offset the rising cost of living. In 2020, 12.5 million Saudis, half of all nationals, had enrolled to obtain these payments. The shah’s example remained a stubborn reminder that economic factors such as high unemployment and a fast-rising cost of living can have a major impact on undermining the popularity of a modernizing ruler. A stagnant economy, high unemployment, rapid cost-of-living increases, and reduced welfare-state benefits seem perfect ingredients for stoking discontent and activism at some point.

Known Unknowns of MBS’s Fate In pondering MBS’s prospects, we are left with numerous “known unknowns.” Chief among these is whether he will maintain his grip on power after his father-king dies. He has won the allegiance of some important branches of the royal family but alienated others. It is difficult for outsiders to assess the balance or whether he will keep sufficient support within the House of Saud after his father’s passing. He is still showing signs of doubt himself. In March 2020, he put under house arrest his two most threatening rivals—Prince Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN), his older cousin and deposed crown prince, and Prince Ahmed, his father’s full brother and former interior minister. MBS is still seeking to discredit MBN, charging him with the embezzlement of $15 billion in secret government funds during his eighteen years at the head of the Interior Ministry.11 The MBS-MBN feud is still alive, and its lasting consequences remain to be seen. The second biggest unknown is whether MBS’s rule will degenerate into a Nasser-style police state. This might enable him to hold on to the throne in the short term, but continued failure to deal with multiple challenges at home and abroad might eventually erode the effectiveness of such methods and his support within the House of Saud. Already, parallels are being drawn in the US media to the blood-tainted police state of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But the Iraqi dictator had managed to hold onto power for twenty-four years (1979–2003) despite a Kurdish secessionist movement and devastating wars, first with Iran and then with the United States over his invasion of Kuwait.12 The main parallels to Saddam Hussein were that MBS had laid the foundation for a similar ubiquitous police state, launched an invasion of a neighbor, and proclaimed his intent to take his fight against Iran to its own soil. There is reason to believe MBS’s reign might indeed degenerate into a royal version of Hussein’s regime. Perhaps he will end by projecting a double image, another Saddam Hussein as viewed from abroad and a great reformer as seen at home.

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Another factor making a judgment of MBS’s prospects so problematic is that in some important aspects, he stands out as unique among Arab and Middle East reformers. No other ruler came to power at such an early age with such a tabula rasa of previous accomplishments. Saudiologists are left with nothing to judge him by other than the first five years of his iconoclastic debut on the Saudi political scene. These years have produced conflicting, and often disturbing, evidence of his character. He has shown himself to be highly impulsive, ruthless, self-centered, greedy, and extremely vindictive. He has made clear his price for reform will be unprecedented repression. Perhaps he will behave in a different manner after he has ascended to the throne and feels politically secure. Until then, we are left to divine his prospects on the basis of a troubling start to the reign of an upstart young prince with unbridled ambition to become a global leader and the founding father of a new Saudi Arabia. 1. Sheikh Abdulrahman al-Sudais, the chief imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, made this comparison during his sermon on October 19, 2018. For the controversy his statement caused, see Khaled Abou El-Fadl, “Saudi Arabia Is Misusing Mecca,” New York Times, November 12, 2018. 2. Stephanie Flanders, Vivian Nereim, Donna Abu-Nasr, Nayla Razzouk, Alaa Shahine, and Riad Hamade, “Saudi Crown Prince Discusses Trump, Aramco, Arrests: Transcript,” Bloomberg News, October 5, 2018. 3. See David Ottaway, “Will Saudi Arabia’s Social Revolution Provoke a Wahhabi Backlash?,” Woodrow Wilson Center Viewpoints Series, May 2018. 4. Agence France-Presse, “Saudi Stabbings: Three Theatre Performers Attacked During Show,” Guardian, November 11, 2019. 5. El-Fadl, “Saudi Arabia Is Misusing Mecca.” 6. See, for example, “As Jerusalem Burns, Pro-MBS Saudi Cleric Focuses on . . . Clean Socks,” al-Araby, December 11, 2017. 7. John Burns, “Morocco’s King Loosens His Grip, and Holds On,” New York Times, June 28, 1999. 8. For the history of Atatürk recounted here, I have relied mainly on Lord Kinross, Ataturk: The Rebirth of a Nation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964) and Touraj Atabaki and Eric J. Zurcher, Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization Under Ataturk and Reza Shah (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004). 9. For a good account of Central Intelligence Agency involvement in restoring the shah, see Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007). 10. Jay Ross, “Iran: Modernization, Repression, and Now, Reaction,” Washington Post, November 6, 1978. 11. For details of the charges against MBN, see David Ignatius, “The Dazzling Rise and Fall of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Nayef,” Washington Post, July 5, 2020. 12. Jackson Diehl, “Our New Saddam Hussein,” Washington Post, July 7, 2019.

Notes

A Brief Bibliography

Atabaki, Touraj, and Eric Zurcher. Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization Under Ataturk and Reza Shah. London: I. B. Tauris, 2003. Attiah, Karen. Say Your Word, Then Leave: The Assassination of Jamal Khashoggi and the Power of Truth. New York: Dey Street, 2021. Bsheer, Rosie. Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. Fatany, Samar H. Modernizing Saudi Arabia. San Bernardino, CA: Fatany, 2013. Foley, Sean. Changing Saudi Arabia: Art, Culture, and Society in the Kingdom. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2019. Fraihat, Ibrahim. Iran and Saudi Arabia: Taming a Chaotic Conflict. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Frankopan, Peter. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Ghattis, Kim. Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East. New York: Henry Holt, 2020. Hiro, Dilip. Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Struggle for Supremacy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019. Hope, Bradley, and Justin Scheck. Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman’s Ruthless Quest for Global Power. New York: Hachette, 2020. Hubbard, Ben. MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman. New York: Tim Duggan, 2020. Jordan, Robert W., and Steve Fiffer. Desert Diplomat: Inside Saudi Arabia Following 9/11. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2015. Kechichian, Joseph A. Faysal: Saudi Arabia’s King for All Seasons. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. Kinross, Lord Patrick. Ataturk: The Rebirth of a Nation. Istanbul: K. Rustem and Brother, 1964.

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A Brief Bibliography

Koelbl, Susanne. Behind the Kingdom’s Veil: Inside the New Saudi Arabia Under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Miami, FL: Mango, 2020. Lacey, Robert. Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia. London: Penguin Books, 2010. ———. The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Saud. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981. Lippmann, Thomas. Crude Oil, Crude Money: Aristotle Onassis, Saudi Arabia, and the CIA. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2019. McFarland, Victor. Oil Powers: A History of U.S.-Saudi Alliance. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Menoret, Pascal. Graveyard of Clerics: Everyday Activism in Saudi Arabia. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. Ottaway, David B. The Arab World Upended: Revolution and Its Aftermath in Tunisia and Egypt. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2017. ———. The King’s Messenger: Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America’s Tangled Relationship with Saudi Arabia. New York: Walker, 2008. Ottaway, David B., and Marina Ottaway. A Tale of Four Worlds: The Arab Region After the Uprisings. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019. al-Rasheed, Madawi. Salman’s Legacy: The Dilemmas of a New Era in Saudi Arabia. London: Hurst, 2018. ———. The Son King: Reform and Repression in Saudi Arabia. London: Hurst, 2021. Riedel, Bruce. Kings and Presidents: Saudi Arabia and the United States Since FDR. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2017. Rundell, David H. Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads. London: I. B. Tauris, 2020. Thompson, Mark C. Being Young, Male and Saudi: Identity and Politics in a Globalized Kingdom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Ulrichsen, Kristian Coates. The Changing Security Dynamics of the Persian Gulf. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Varagur, Krithika. The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project. New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2020. Wald, Ellen R. Saudi, Inc.: The Arabian Kingdom’s Pursuit of Profit and Power. New York: Pegasus, 2018.

Index

Abbas, Mahmoud, 66 abdication, Salman’s, 70, 118 Abdulaziz, Omar, 131, 136 Abdulaziz Ibn Saud. See Ibn Saud Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud: al-Qaeda attack on Saudi targets, 43–44; Arab uprisings, 54–56, 140–141, 145–147; arrest of activists, 83–84; assassination plot, 160; education reform, 51–52; as Fahd’s regent, 32; financial status, 36; GCC central bank, 144; MBS eliminating challengers to the succession, 33–34; MBS’s falling out with, 18; Moscow visit, 184; QatarSaudi rift, 158–160; reforms, 45, 48–50, 53–59; reign and death, 19–20; semiautonomous ministries, 30–31; Sino-Saudi relations, 182; succession, 13–14, 62; US-Saudi relations, 170; white elephant projects, 104–105 Abercrombie-Winstanley, Gina, 67–68 Abouammo, Ahmad, 132 Abraham Accords Peace Agreement, 178 absolute monarchy, 77–78 Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq, 39 activists: emergence of the Saudi diaspora, 86–88; MBS’s arrest of women, 77–78, 85–86; MBS’s misuse of Saudi artists, 88–90; MBS’s suppression of, 78–79, 83–85. See also diaspora Afghanistan, Soviet invasion of, 142 al-Ahmed, Ali, 87

Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, 30, 33, 65, 68–69 AI technology: NEOM, 17, 96 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS), 5, 142, 153, 174, 189 Ajmani tribesmen, 15 Al Jazeera television, 157 Alaoudh, Abdullah, 87 Al-Arab business news channel, 118 Al-Azhar University, Egypt, 205 al-Faisal branch of the family: Khashoggi’s connection to, 117–118; MBS support, 38–39 Algosaibi, Ghazi, 45 Alissa, Muhammed, 53, 80, 117 Aljabri, Saad, 131 Allegiance Council, 13, 25, 29, 33, 35, 47, 50–51, 65 al-Mughassil, Ahmed, 121 Almutairi, Ahmed, 132 Alqst (human rights group), 87 al-Rumayyan, Yasir, 99–100, 104–105, 107 Al-Watan newspaper, 117 Alzabarah, Ali, 89, 132 Amaala resort project, 97, 101 Amazon: Khashoggi’s murder, 105–106; spy operation targeting, 132–133 ambition, MBS’s, 16–18, 199 America Media Inc. (AMI), 113, 133 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), 174 Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, 210 Arab Quartet, 185–186

221

222

Index

Arab Spring: GCC, 145–147; Morocco, 207–208; Qatari-Saudi rift, 158; reform as counter to, 79; Saudi leadership failure, 139–141; setting back reforms, 54–56; survival of the monarchies, 76, 140 Arab-Israeli War (1967), 188, 205 Aramco, 3. See also Saudi Aramco al-Arefe, Mohamad, 202 arms sales: AWACS, 5, 142, 153, 174, 189; future of the US-Saudi alliance, 193; MBS’s French connection, 75; RussianSaudi partnership, 184; Saudi Arabia as great power, 139; UAE military strength, 153–154; US-Saudi relations, 5–6, 114, 142, 153, 174, 189; Vision 2030 provision, 106 The Art of War (Sun Tzu), 16 arts: MBS’s misuse of Saudi artists, 88–90 al-Asaker, Badr, 89, 130–132 al-Asiri, Ahmed, 123–125, 128, 130, 135–136 al-Assad, Bashar, 146 al-Assaf, Ibrahim Abdulaziz, 83 assassination: Faisal, 38, 46, 92; Iran’s Suleimani, 189; plot against Abdullah, 160; the plot against Khashoggi, 122– 124. See also Khashoggi assassination Aswan Dam, 205 Atatürk, Kemal, 208–210, 212 Austin, Lloyd J., 181

Badawi, Raif, 57–58 Badawi, Samar, 57 al-Baghdadi, Iyad, 131 Bahrain: al-Arab business news channel, 118; Arab Quartet, 185; Arab uprisings, 145–146; Israel agreement, 178; Khashoggi’s murder, 128; leadership failures during the Arab uprisings, 140– 141; MBS support, 185; Qatar-Saudi rift, 158–159; street protests, 54–55; USIsraeli peace project, 187 Bandar bin Sultan: al-Saud schism, 32–33; corruption, 38; oil for security, 171; Saudi rift over Israel, 188; Sino-Saudi arms sales, 181; US gala for MBS, 114; US-Saudi relations, 170 Bani Mura (Qatari tribe), 159–160 al-Banna, Hassan, 205 Baraka al-Yamaniyah, 32–33 al-Bashir, Omar, 149, 161 Basic Law of Governance, 47–48 bastard, 33 Bechtel corporation, 103 Becket, Thomas, 124, 126, 136 Ben Ali, Zine el Abidine, 146 Bezos, Jeff, 105–106, 115, 132–133

Bezos, Mackenzie, 133 Biden, Joe: US-Saudi relations, 8, 180–181, 191–193 bin Baz, Abdulaziz, 81 bin Alawi, Yusuf, 144 bin Laden, Osama, 20, 43 bin Salman, Abdulaziz: family and background, 15; government reform, 52– 53; MBS support, 39; Saudi Aramco IPO, 97; US-Saudi oil war, 167 bin Talal, Waleed, 83 Birol, Fatih, 167 Black Panther (film), 90 Blinken, Antony J., 180–181 bloggers, 88 Bloomberg, Michael, 89, 115 Bourguiba, Habib, 203–204, 212–213 boxing, 90–91 Branson, Richard, 106, 114–115, 134 Bush, George H. W., 2, 114, 171, 173 Bush, George W., 50–51 business sector: MBS’s similarities to Iran’s Pahlavi, 216

Callamard, Agnès, 126 Canada: Khashoggi’s murder, 128; MBS tracking dissidents, 131 capitalism, state, 108–109 Carey, Mariah, 91 Carter, Jimmy: oil for security, 173; Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 142 Carter Doctrine, 173 Cengiz, Hatice, 122, 131, 136 censorship law, 57–58 Center for Studies and Media Affairs, 130– 131 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): deposing the shah of Iran, 210; GCC assessment, 143; Khobar Towers bombing, 121; MBN’s appointment to the succession, 14–15; MBS involvement in Khashoggi’s murder, 90, 125, 135; MBS’s surveillance abroad, 131 centralization of power, MBS’s: eliminating challengers to the succession, 33–36; the king’s dilemma, 76–77; rivalry with MBN, 21–22; ruthlessness of, 18 character and leadership, MBS’s, 215–216 charitable work, 18 checkbook diplomacy, 140 China: Khashoggi’s murder, 128; PIF investment, 107; as Saudi security partner, 182–183; US “pivot to Asia,” 179–180; US-Saudi alliance under Biden, 192–193 citizen, defining, 77–78 civil war, Saudi, 30

Index clerics, Wahhabi: controlling education, 52; Khalid’s proposed reforms, 38–39; loss of political power base, 202–203; MBS support, 39–40; MBS’s entertainment tsunami, 91–92; MBS’s religious authority, 214–215; MBS’s social reforms, 200–202; MBS’s suppression of, 78–82; possible coup against Salman, 68–69; Salman’s disagreement with MBS over, 67–68; Saudi art movement, 88; Saud’s removal from power, 32; social media mobilizing support for, 58. See also mutawa Clinton, Hillary, 57 Clinton administration, 7 Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (CPVPV), 53–54, 79, 201 common market, 144–145 consensus, rule by, 31–33, 37, 61, 63–65 consolidation of power, MBS’s, 37–40 coronavirus pandemic: entertainment industry, 92; oil war with Russia, 109; Trump blaming China, 179–180; USSaudi oil war, 167 corruption: crackdown on, 34–36; indications of MBS’s, 36–37; royal opposition to Abdullah’s reforms, 48–49; royal stipends, 82–83; Salman’s freedom from, 61; Sudan’s al-Bashir, 161; Sultan branch of the family, 38 counterterrorism law, 84–85 coups and coup attempts: MBS plot against the king, 68–69; Qatar, 157–158; royal coup against MBN, 24–25 Cramer, Kevin, 167 Crimes of Terrorism and Its Financing, 84–85 crony capitalism, 108–109 cyber-hacking, 130, 132–133 Cyrus the Great (Iran), 211

Damascus Declaration of Coordination and Cooperation, 177 Day of Rage, 54–55 death threats, 88 democracy: Salman’s antireform stance, 63 Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), 120–123, 131 democratic elections: Tunisia’s social reform, 204 desert democracy, 3, 17 diaspora: dissident princes, 69; emergence of, 86–88; MBS’s surveillance of dissenters, 130. See also Khashoggi, Jamal; Khashoggi assassination disappeared individuals, 34–35 dismemberment, Khashoggi’s, 123–124, 126 The Dissident (documentary), 136

223

dissidents. See activists diwaniyah, 57 domestic reform, 9 driving, women, 45–47, 55–56, 77–79, 85– 86, 200–201

economic conditions: MBS’s similarities to Iran’s Pahlavi, 216–217; reducing oil dependence, 3–4, 95–97, 106; stagnation, 110–111. See also oil economic development, 2 economic diversification, 20, 108–109 Edge of Arabia (outreach program), 88 education and early life, MBS’s, 15–19 education reform, 38, 51–52 Egypt: Arab Quartet, 185; Arab uprisings, 146; Israel agreement, 178; Khashoggi’s murder, 128–129; Nasser’s social reforms, 204–206; NEOM plan, 103; Qatar backing the Muslim Brotherhood, 158; Saudi invasion of Yemen, 148 energy: NEOM plan, 103; renewable, 110 Ennahda (Tunisia), 204 entertainment industry, 90–92, 100–101, 106–107 Escape of Saudi Nationals Act (2019), 190 espionage: Center for Studies and Media Affairs, 130–131; MBS’s misuse of Saudi artists, 89–90 European Parliament: Khashoggi’s murder, 128 European Union (EU): Saudis’ changing dependence on the US, 5–6

factionalization of the family, 29–30 Fahd bin Abdulaziz, 6, 19, 46–48, 201 Fahd Plan, 6–7 Fahda bint Falah al-Hathleen, 15, 65 Faisal bin Abdulaziz, 30–32, 46, 92 Faisal bin Abdullah bin Muhammed, 53 Faisal bin Farhan, 168 Fakieh, Adel, 83 al-Falih, Khalid, 97, 99 family code of conduct, 29–30 al-Faqih, Saad, 87 al-Fayiz, Nurah, 53 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): MBS tracking dissidents, 131 feminists, MBS’s arrest of, 77–78, 85–86 fiefdoms, 30–31, 37, 40, 76, 156 Fitaihi, Walid, 192 foreign investment: boycotting the Future Investment Initiative, 134; effect of Khashoggi’s murder on, 105–106; Future Investment Initiatives, 22–23, 134; PIF assets, 107; Saudi Aramco IPO, 22–23, 66, 95–100, 107–108

224

Index

foreign labor, 49 foreign policy (Saudi): fear of abandonment, 4–6; Lebanon, 160–161; MBS’s failures, 160–162, 213–214; MBS’s similarities to Nasser, 214; mobilizing Arab states, 6–7; Sudan, 161–162. See also US-Saudi relations foreign policy (US). See US-Saudi relations Fourth Saudi Kingdom, 17, 199 France: Khashoggi’s murder, 128; MBS’s interference in Lebanon, 161; MBS’s political and financial relations, 75–76; Saudi military failure in Yemen, 154– 155; Saudis’ changing dependence on the US, 5–6; UNESCO-MBS partnership, 89 Francis (pope), 80–81 Free Saudi Liberals, 57–58 Freedom Movement, 69 freedom of expression, 122 Freeman, Chas, 31, 40, 64 Future Investment Initiative, 129, 133–134

G-20 countries, 139 al-Gaith, Ibrahim, 54 Gates, Bill, 115 gender mixing, 45, 51, 54–56, 83, 86 General Entertainment Authority, 81–82, 90–91 Germany: Khashoggi’s murder, 128; Saudis’ changing dependence on the US, 5–6 al-Ghamdi, Qasim, 80 gigaprojects, 97; Khashoggi’s criticism of, 115–116; loss of funding after Khashoggi’s murder, 133–135; PIF funding for, 106–107. See also NEOM Global Opinions (Washington Post), 119– 120, 122 governance: Abdullah’s government reform, 52–53; MBS ending consensus in, 31– 33; political reform, 47–48; royal and Wahhabi roles in, 37–40 Graham, Lindsey, 127–128 green hydrogen, 103 Greenblatt, Jason, 114 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC): Arab uprisings, 146; birth of, 6, 141–142; common market, 144–145; MBN-MBS rivalry, 23; powerlessness, 143–144; Qatar-Saudi relations, 157–159; Saudi invasion of Yemen, 147–148; Saudi role in the breakup of, 140; Trump’s Middle East Strategic Alliance, 177; US-Saudi “oil for security” policy, 173–175 Gulf War: Christian troops, 201; Iranian and Iraqi threats, 142; Khashoggi’s coverage, 116; Pakistan’s military support, 186;

powerlessness of the GCC, 143–144; rise of Islamism during, 49; sahwa movement, 78; Saudis’ reliance on the US, 7; US withdrawal, 173; US-Saudi relations, 114, 169–170

Hadi, Mansur, 146, 148–149 Hai’a (CPVPV), 53–54, 79, 201 Haines, Avril, 180 Hamad al-Thani, 157–158, 160 {AU: Move to Ts?} Hariri, Saad, 160–161 Hassan II of Morocco, 207 Hathloul, Loujain, 85–86, 192 Hezbollah, 160–161 hijackings, 1–2 el-Himma, Fouad Ali, 213 Hollande, François, 75 housing shortage, 120 Houthi rebels (Yemen), 21, 147, 149–150 Huawei Technologies (China), 182 human rights: Abdullah’s arrests of activists, 83–84; civilian deaths in Yemen, 150; diaspora activists, 87 Human Rights Watch (HRW), 85, 87 Huntington, Samuel, 76, 202, 209 Hussein, Saddam, 20

Ibn Saud: establishing shoura, 47; governance style, 31; lateral transfer of power, 30; MBS’s ambitions, 9, 16–17; MBS’s divine mission, 199; MBS’s foreign policy failings, 214; succession, 13, 30, 62; Third Saudi Kingdom, 29; US-Saudi relations, 45, 168; Yemen intervention, 141 Icarus (Greek mythological figure), 8–9 Icarus complex, 9–10, 70, 124–125, 129– 130, 191, 199 ikhtilat (gender mixing), 45, 51, 54–56, 83, 86 India: Saudi-Pakistani relations, 186 inheritance law: Morocco’s social reforms, 207; Tunisia’s social reforms, 203–204 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 109– 110, 129 Iran: Arab uprisings, 146; arms sales, 154; effect of Biden’s election, 192; increasing tensions with Saudi Arabia, 21–22; Islamic revolution, 46; MBS’s parallels to Pahlavi, 215–217; military strength, 155; mobilizing Arab states against, 6; Pahlavi’s social reforms, 208– 212; Saudi intervention in Yemen, 147–148; Sino-Iranian oil partnership, 183; Sino-Saudi relations, 183; Suleimani assassination, 189; US

Index nuclear deal, 7–8; US-Saudi interest shaping relations, 175–178 Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), 141–142 Iraq, US invasion of, 7–8, 20 Islamic extremism: al-Qaeda attack on Saudi targets, 43–44; backlash against Turkey’s Kemalism, 209–210; MBS reforms, 46–47; Morocco’s social and political reforms, 208; opposition to Tunisia’s social reforms, 204; rise during the Gulf War, 49 Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition, 185 Islamic Revolution (Iran), 141–142 Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS), 144, 208 Israel: Gulf states embracing, 179–180; House of Saud’s rift over, 188; interfaith relations, 80; MBS’s surveillance of dissenters, 130; Qatari trade, 158; Saudi peace plans, 6–7; as Saudi security partner, 187; UAE agreement, 178; USSaudi arms sales, 5, 174 jihadists, MBN’s campaign against, 14 Jordan: Arab uprisings, 146; GCC, 144–145; Israel agreement, 178; Khashoggi’s murder, 129; Saudi invasion of Yemen, 148, 152 Jordan, Robert, 24 Joshua, Anthony, 91 Jubail, 104 Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (US; 2016), 189

Kashmir, 186 Kemalism (Turkey), 208–210 al-Khair, Waleed Abu, 57 Khaled bin Farhan al-Saud, 69 Khalid al-Faisal: Khashoggi’s connection to, 117–118; proposed reforms, 38; Saudi art movement, 88; social media mobilizing support for reforms, 58 Khalid al-Falih, 97, 99 Khalid bin Bandar, 38 Khalid bin Salman, 15, 39, 47, 67 Khalid bin Sultan, 143 Khalifa al-Thani, 157, 160 Khashoggi, Adnan, 116 Khashoggi, Emad, 116 Khashoggi, Jamal: Abdullah’s government reform, 53; anti-terrorism law, 84–85; background and family, 116; connection to the al-Faisals, 117–118; criticism of MBS’s projects, 115–116; Democracy for the Arab World Now, 120–122; diaspora coverage of, 87; falling out

225

with MBS, 119–120; MBS tracking dissidents, 131; MBS’s foreign policy failings, 213; pre-1979 religious control, 46–47; Salman’s potential for abdication, 37; Waleed appointing, 35; Yemen withdrawal, 152. See also Khashoggi assassination Khashoggi, Salah, 136 Khashoggi assassination: effect on NEOM construction, 105–106; effect on Vision 2030, 133–135; international reaction, 127–129, 169; lasting impact, 129–130; MBS’s image following, 39, 81–82, 124–125, 199–200; MBS’s involvement in, 90, 121, 135–136; the plot, 122–124; Salman’s response to, 66, 69–70; UN account, 126–127; US-Saudi relations following, 8, 170, 180–181, 190 Khobar Towers bombing, 121 Khomeini, Ruhollah, 141, 212 King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue, Riyadh, 50 King Abdulaziz Foundation, 18 King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC), 104 King Abdullah Financial District, 104–105 King Abdullah Scholarship Program, 51–52 King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), 51, 54, 63 “the king’s dilemma,” 76, 202–203, 211 Kushner, Jared, 24, 114, 177, 179, 187 Kuwait, 142–143, 145–146, 158

Lacey, Robert, 17, 62, 64, 115 Lagarde, Christine, 129 language: Turkey’s Kemalism, 209 Lebanon: MBS’s foreign policy failings, 160–161, 213 legal reform, 53 Leonardo da Vinci, 36, 83 lingerie stores, women employees in, 45 Louis XIV Chateau, France, 36–37, 75, 83, 116 al-Luhaidan, Saleh, 55–56, 63 Lukoil (Russia), 184

Macron, Emmanuel, 161 majlis (public meetings), 2–3, 17–18, 48, 63–64 malware, 133 martyrdom, Khashoggi’s, 136 al-Masarir, Ghanem, 88 Mater, Ahmed, 19, 88–89 May, Theresa, 128 McKenzie, Kenneth, Jr., 192–193 Mecca: seizure of the Grand Mosque, 46–47 media and journalists: Al Jazeera launch, 157; Center for Studies and Media

226

Index

Affairs, 130; MBS quashing the mutaween, 80; MBS’s corruption, 36; MBS’s US tour, 113–115; promoting Abdullah’s reforms, 53–54; Salman’s relationship with, 65; Saudi military failure in Yemen, 154; Saudi opposition in exile, 87. See also Khashoggi, Jamal; Khashoggi assassination Middle East Strategic Alliance (MESA), 177 military bases, US, 143, 191–192 military strength, UAE, 153–156 Minaj, Nicki, 91 Mishaal bin Abdullah, 34 Mnuchin, Stephen, 129, 134 moderate clerics, 80–81 Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN): appointment to the succession, 14–15; faltering popularity, 23–24; MBS’s rivalry with, 21–22, 64–65; MBS’s surveillance abroad, 131; removal from power, 32; royal coup, 24–25; succession pedigree requirements, 33 Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Foundation (MiSK), 18–19, 88–90, 115, 132 Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ), 128, 153, 156–157 Mohammed VI of Morocco, 206–208, 212– 215 monarchy: Saudis’ absolute monarchy, 77– 78; surviving Arab Spring, 76, 140 monetary union (GCC), 144–145 monocracy, 40 Morocco: Arab uprisings, 146; GCC, 144– 145; Israel agreement, 178; Khashoggi’s murder, 129; Mohammed VI and the shah of Iran, 214–215; Mohammed VI’s social reforms, 206–208; religious authority, 214–215; Saudi invasion of Yemen, 148, 152 Morsi, Mohamed, 148, 206 Mosaddegh, Mohammad, 210 Movement of Islamic Tendency (Tunisia), 204 Mubarak, Hosni, 56, 206 Mubarak al-Thani, 160 Mudawana family code (Morocco), 207 Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, 39, 44 Muhammed bin Saud, 44 mujaddid (great reformer), 199, 201 Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, 13–14, 30, 32, 64, 69 Muslim Brotherhood: GCC assessment of, 144; Khashoggi’s connection to, 116– 117; MBS’s arrest of activists, 78, 202; MBS’s confrontation, 214; Nasser’s reforms, 205–206; Qatari-Saudi rift, 158–159

Mutaib bin Abdullah, disappearance of, 34– 35 mutawa (religious police), 39, 45–47, 53, 67, 79–82, 201 Mutreb, Maher, 70, 123, 125–127, 130–131, 135–136

Nafjan, Eman, 85–86 Najd Emirate, 29 Nasser, Gamal Abdul, 147, 204–206, 212, 214 National Enquirer, 133 National Security Agency (NSA), 121, 135 National Union or Moroccan Women, 207 Nayef bin Abdulaziz: Abdullah’s anticorruption campaign, 49; Day of Rage protests, 54–55; fiefdom, 30; MBS support, 40; opposition to Abdullah’s reforms, 48, 50, 55–56; succession, 14, 19–20, 33, 62 Nazer, Hisham, 4 NEOM: effect of Khashoggi’s murder on, 105–106; foreign investment, 23; vision for and construction of, 17, 95–97, 102– 103 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 187 al-Nimr, Nimr, 84 niqab, 23, 46, 54 Nixon, Richard, 1 nuclear deal, US-Iran, 7–8, 23, 176–178 nuclear technology, 184, 188, 190

al-Obaikan, Abdel Muhsin, 56 Obama, Barack: Arab uprisings, 56, 146; MBN-MBS rivalry, 23–25; Prince Ahmed’s visit, 65; US-Saudi arms relations, 174–175; US-Saudi relations, 7–8; US-Saudi relations under Trump, 24, 119 Obama, Michelle, 57 Oberwetter, James, 62 O’Donnell, Norah, 135 oil: decreasing dependence on, 3–4, 95–97, 106; embargo, 1–2; Iranian attack on Saudi facilities, 176; MBS-Russia oil war, 109–110; price volatility, 20; royal stipends from, 82–83; Saudi Arabia as great power, 139; Saudis’ increasing economic dependence on, 3–4; SinoIranian partnership, 183; US production, 171–172; US-Russian-Saudi relationship, 162, 172, 183–185, 190; US-Saudi rivalry, 165–167, 170–171; weaponization of, 1. See also Saudi Aramco Oman: Arab uprisings, 146; GCC, 144–145; Qatar-Saudi rift, 158; Saudi invasion of Yemen, 148; US military bases, 142; US-Israeli peace project, 187

Index OPEC, 6; oil war, 172; Saudi failure in the GCC, 140; US-Saudi oil rivalry, 166– 168 Operation Decisive Storm, 149 Operation Desert Shield, 143 Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), 6 Osnos, Peter, 2 al-Otaibi, Mohammed, 123, 127 el-Othmani, Saad-Eddine, 208 al-Oudah, Salman, 78, 201–202

Pakistan: Saudi invasion of Yemen, 148; as Saudi security partner, 186 Palestine: Gulf states embracing Israel, 179– 180; interfaith relations, 80; Salman-MBS disagreement over, 66–67; Saudi rift over Israel, 188; Saudi-Israel peace negotiations, 6–7; US-Israeli peace project, 187; US-Saudi relations, 170 Pecker, David, 113, 133 Pence, Mike, 114 Peninsula Shield Force, 143 petrochemical plants, 4 pivot to Asia, 179–180, 192 police state, MBS’s: Egypt under Nasser, 205; elimination of rivals, 84; political future, 217–218; similarities to Iran, 215; surveillance abroad, 130–131 political legitimacy: MBS and Pahlavi, 215 political reform: Abdullah’s legacy of, 58– 59; Fahd’s Basic Law of Governance, 47–48; MBS, 200; media promoting Abdullah’s reforms, 53–54; Morocco’s Mohammed VI, 206–208; Saudi context, 44 Pompeo, Mike, 114, 168–169 popular support, MBS mobilizing, 29–30 populism: changing the political power base, 202–203; Turkey’s Kemalism, 209 Powell, Colin, 50 Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, 52 protest: activists advocating social reform, 57–58; Arab Spring, 54–55; Iran, 211. See also activists public investment fund (PIF): conversion to state capitalism, 108–109; investment in US media, 115; NEOM funding, 104– 105; reducing economic dependence on oil, 106–108; Russian-Saudi partnership, 184; Saudi Aramco IPO funding, 22–23, 98 Putin, Vladimir, 109, 166, 184

Qaddafi, Muammar, 146, 160

227

al-Qaeda, 149; attack on Saudi targets, 43– 44; MBN’s campaign against, 14 al-Qahtani, Mohammed, 57, 121, 123–128, 130–131, 135–136 al-Qarni, Awad, 78 Qatar, 202; Arab Quartet, 185; coup, 157– 158; MBS’s arrest of activists, 78; MBS’s foreign policy failings, 213; rift with Saudi Arabia, 158–160; Saudi invasion of Yemen, 148, 152; US Gulf War base, 7–8; US-Saudi relations, 176–177 al-Qiddiya gigaproject, 100–101, 134

radical secularism: Turkey and Iran, 209 Reagan, Ronald, 5–6, 142, 174, 181, 189 real estate, 18, 48–49, 75–76 Red Sea Project, 97, 101, 134 Reema bint Bandar, 38, 67, 167 reform: Abdullah’s, 43, 51–52; al-Sheikh support for MBS, 81; assessing MBS’s prospects for success, 212–214; citizen rights, 77–78; curbing privileged royals, 82–83; education reform, 38, 51–52; Egypt under Nasser, 147, 204–206, 212, 214; Iran under the shah, 202–203, 208– 212, 215–217; the king’s dilemma, 76; MBS’s misuse of Saudi artists, 88–90; MBS’s pitch for, 46; MBS’s social revolution, 90–92; 9/11 triggering Abdullah’s, 49–50; royal opposition, 48– 49; Salman’s conservatism, 62–63; Saudi meaning of, 44–45; Tunisia under Bourguiba, 203–204, 212–213; Turkey under Atatürk, 208–210, 212; visions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 95–97. See also gigaprojects; NEOM; political reform; social reform regional security: GCC, 141–142 religious authority, 214–216. See also clerics, Wahhabi religious discrimination: Shia citizen rights, 77 religious regulation. See clerics, Wahhabi Reza Shah, Mohammad, 202–203, 208–212, 215–217 rights, citizen, 77–78 Ritz-Carlton Hotel, 35, 38, 82–83, 108, 134 Riyadh Agreement, 158–159 Riyadh Spring, 50 robots, 96 Roosevelt, Delano, 168 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 45, 168 Ross, Dennis, 119 royal welfare system, 82–83 Ruiz, Andy, 91 Rumsfeld, Donald, 30

228

Index

Russia: Khashoggi’s murder, 128; MBSRussia oil war, 109–110, 162, 166–168, 172; MBS-Trump relationship, 191; oil agreements, 171–172; OPEC negotiations, 140; PIF investment, 107; as Saudi security partner, 183–185; USSaudi alliance under Biden, 192–193 Ryan, Paul, 114

Sadat, Anwar, 206 sahwa (Islamic awakening), 49, 78–79, 201– 202 Salafis, 39, 116–117, 208 Saleh, Ali Abdullah, 146, 150 Salman bin Abdulaziz: abdication, 118; defense leadership, 156; diaspora activists, 87; financial status, 37; Khashoggi’s murder, 69–70; majlis, 17; MBS relationship, 8–9, 37–38, 66–69; MBS-MBN rivalry, 21; MBS’s cabinet appointment, 19; MBS’s political and financial relations with France, 75–76; MBS’s rise to power, 63–65; NEOM construction, 102; Obama meeting, 23; opposition to reform, 62–63; political evolution, 2–3; possible abdication, 70; potential backlash against MBS’s succession, 37–38; removing political threats, 34, 121; royal coup against MBN, 24–25; Russia visit, 184; Saudi intervention in Yemen, 147–148; semiautonomous ministries, 30–31; succession, 13–15, 33, 61–62, 147 Salvator Mundi (painting), 36, 83 Sarah Bint Mashoor bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, 16 Saud al-Faisal, 38, 142 Saud bin Abdulaziz, 31–32 Saud bin Nayef, 19, 40 Saudi Arabian Military Industries (SAMI), 106 Saudi Aramco: economic stagnation, 110– 111; gender mixing, 51; IPO, 22–23, 66, 95–100, 107–108; revenue share, 109; royal control, 47–48; Sino-Saudi relations, 182 Saudi Binladen Group, 108 Saudi Entertainment Ventures (SEVEN), 106 Saudi Oger Construction Company, 108 secularism: MBS’s planned reforms, 213– 214; MBS’s social revolution, 9, 200; Salman and MBS’s views on, 67–68; Turkey and Iran, 209 security: Arab coalition, 185; China as Saudi partner, 182–183; Israel as Saudi partner, 187; Pakistan as Saudi partner, 186; the

role of oil in, 170–171, 173–175; Russia as Saudi partner, 183–185; Saudis’ fear of abandonment, 4–6; Saudis’ search for a US alternative, 181–182; Trump-MBS relations, 188–190; US-Saudi partnership, 20; US-Saudi relationship in Yemen, 175–178 Security Investigations Service (SSI), 205– 206 September 11, 2001: Abdullah’s response, 43, 49–50; nature of the US-Saudi relationship, 1–2, 7, 20, 169–170, 189– 190 Sharif, Nawaz, 148 al-Sheikh, Abdulaziz, 79 al-Sheikh, Abdullah: religious leadership, 39 al-Sheikh, Mohammed: MBS support, 39– 40; oil crash, 97 al-Sheikh, Turki, 39–40, 81 Shia Muslims: Abdullah’s arrest of activists, 84–85; citizen rights, 77; Saudi opposition in exile, 87 al-Shithri, Saad, 51, 63 shoura (decisionmaking process): Fahd reviving, 47–48; importance to Saudi governance, 40; MBS disregarding, 30– 31; MBS’s religious authority, 216; pressing for reforms, 35, 38; Salman discarding, 65 el-Sisi, Abdel Fattah, 103, 148, 206 Six Flags, 90, 101 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), 57 social media: activists advocating social reform, 57–58; diaspora activism, 88; MBS targeting Bezos through, 132–133; Mohamad al-Arefe’s following, 202; replacing majlis, 48 social reform: Abdullah’s legacy of, 58–59; Abdullah’s reforms for women, 45; clerics’ response to MBS’s reforms, 200–202; effect of Arab Spring, 54–56; Egypt under Nasser, 204–206; media promoting Abdullah’s reforms, 53–54; Morocco’s Mohammed VI, 206–208; Saudi context, 44; students’ demand for, 56–57; Tunisia’s Bourguiba, 203–204; Turkey’s Kemalism, 208–210 social revolution, MBS’s, 90–92, 200 Son, Masayoshi, 107 South Yemen, 150–152 Southern Transitional Council (STC), 150– 152 sovereign wealth fund. See public investment fund spyware, 130 student protests: demands for reform, 56–57

Index subject, defining, 77–78 succession: Allegiance Council, 47; coups, 68–69; following Abdullah’s death, 13– 14; history of power transitions, 29; lateral transfer of power, 30; MBS positioning Khalid, 67; MBS’s rise to power, 33–36, 64–65; potential backlash against MBS, 37–38; purity of lineage, 32–33; Salman’s, 61–62; Saud’s ousting from power, 31–32 Sudairi Seven, 13–15, 30, 32–33, 62 al-Sudais, Abdulrahman, 201 Sudan: Israel agreement, 178–179; MBS’s foreign policy failure, 161; Saudi invasion of Yemen, 149 Suleimani, Qassim, 189 Sultan bin Abdulaziz, 30; death of, 62; defense leadership, 156; opposition to Abdullah’s reforms, 48; Saudi-Pakistani relations, 186 Sultan bin Salman, 15, 32, 34 Sultan branch of the family, corruption among, 38 Sultana bint Turki al-Sudairi, 33 Sun Tzu, 16 superspeed technology, 110 Surur, Mohammed, 116–117 Syria: Arab uprisings, 146

Taif Agreement (1989), 140 Talal bin Abdulaziz: MBS eliminating challengers to the succession, 34; pressure for Saudi reforms, 50; removal from the succession, 35 taxes, 109 Tesla, 107 Tharawat company, 15, 37 Tiger Squad, 122–123, 130–131 tourism, 97, 101, 104, 179 trade and commerce: NEOM plan, 103; Sino-Saudi relations, 182 travel bans: after Khashoggi’s murder, 127, 180–181, 190; feminists, 86; MBS crackdown on activists, 85 Trump, Donald, 24; Israeli-Saudi security partnership, 187; Khashoggi assassination, 124–125, 127–128, 134– 135; Khashoggi’s concerns about US-Saudi relations, 119; MBS relationship, 190–191; MBS’s US tour, 113–115; Middle East peace accords, 179; Russian-Saudi partnership, 184– 185; Salman-MBS disagreement over, 66; US military role in Iran, 176–177; US-Israeli peace project, 187; US-Saudi oil relations, 166–168, 171 Tubaigy, Salah, 126

229

Tunisia: social reforms, 203–204 Turkey: Atatürk’s social reforms, 208–210; Khashoggi assassination, 122–124, 128; MBS crackdown on activists, 85 Turki al-Faisal, 38–39, 92, 117–118, 130, 188 Turki bin Abdulaziz, 121 Turki bin Abdullah, 34 Turki bin Salman, 15 Turki bin Talal, 40 Twitter, 89–90, 119, 132

UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 134 UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 89 UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 87 UN Human Rights Council, 126 unemployment: domestic reforms, 56–57, 100 United Arab Emirates (UAE): Arab Quartet, 185; Arab uprisings, 145; interfaith relations, 80–81; Israel agreement, 178; MBS’s foreign policy failings, 213; military strength in Yemen, 153–154, 156–157; monetary union, 144–145; rift with Saudi Arabia, 151–152; Saudi invasion of Yemen, 149; Saudi military failure in Yemen, 154–155; US-Israeli peace project, 187; Yemen’s fragmentation, 151 United Kingdom: Khashoggi’s murder, 128; PIF investment, 107; political support for the shah, 210; Saudi military, 155 United Nations: Bezos scandal, 133; humanitarian crisis in Yemen, 150; Khashoggi’s murder, 126–127. See also entries beginning with UN United States: GCC meetings, 142; indications of MBS’s corruption, 36; interfaith relations, 80–81; MBS tracking dissidents, 131; MBS-Russia oil war, 109–110; the Palestinian question, 66–67; political support for the shah, 210; Qaddafi’s death, 146; Saudi art movement, 88–89; Sino-Saudi relations, 182–183; UAE’s military strength in Yemen, 156–157. See also US-Saudi relations US Central Command (CENTCOM), 158 US Military Training Mission, 155 US-Saudi relations: under Biden, 180–181, 191–193; declining US commitment to, 188–190; Gulf War, 114; Israel agreement, 178; Khashoggi assassination, 127–128; Khashoggi’s concerns about, 119; MBN’s appointment to the succession, 14–15; MBS’s foreign policy failings, 162, 213;

230

Index

MBS’s tour, 113–115; MBS-Trump relationship, 188–191; oil rivalry, 165– 167, 172; PIF investment, 107; pressure for Saudi reforms, 50; the role of oil, 170–175; Saudi Aramco IPO, 98–99; Saudi education reform, 51–52; Saudi military failure in Yemen, 154–155; Saudi rift over Israel, 188; Saudi royal welfare system, 82; Saudi-Qatari feud, 176–177; Saudis’ fear of abandonment, 4–6; Saudis’ search for a US alternative, 181–182; Saudi-US “special relationship,” 45; seventy-fifth anniversary, 168–169; ups and downs, 169–172; US as Saudi security partner, 20; Yemen war, 175–178 US-Soviet rivalry, 142

Valentine’s Day, 45 video games, 16 Virgin Hyperloop, 110, 114–115, 134 Vision 2030: al-Qiddiya, 100–101; economic goal, 95–97; effect of Khashoggi’s assassination on, 133–135; funding, 22–23, 106; Future Investment Initiative, 129; General Entertainment Authority, 81–82; MBS’s ambition, 199; Salman’s support of, 69–70 voting rights for women, 55, 63 Wahhabi Islam: expectation of anti-secular backlash, 200–201; Khomeini’s disavowal of, 141; MBS depowering, 29–30; sahwa during the Gulf War, 49; Saudi meaning of reform, 44–45. See also clerics, Wahhabi Waleed bin Talal, 34–35, 108, 118 Washington Post, 119–120, 122 WhatsApp, 132–133

White Revolution (Iran), 211 women: Abdullah’s education reform, 51– 52; female entertainers, 90–91; gender mixing, 45, 51, 53–56, 83, 86; MBS’s social reforms, 200–201; Morocco’s social reforms, 207; petitioning Abdullah for reforms, 49–50; political power base, 202–203; pre-1979 religious control, 46– 47; right to drive, 45–47, 55–56, 77–79, 85–86, 200–201; right to vote, 55; Salman and MBS’s views on, 62, 67–68; Sophia the robot, 96; support for MBS, 25; Tunisia’s social reforms, 203–204; Turkey’s Kemalism, 209; Wahhabi clerics’ control of, 44–45 workforce: Abdullah’s social reforms for women, 45; foreign labor, 49; gender mixing, 54 World Bank, 109, 129 World Economic Forum (Davos), 96 World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), 90 Yamani, Ahmed Zaki, 1, 5 Yanbu, 104 Yemen: Arab coalition, 185; fragmentation and factionalization, 150–151; leadership failures during the Arab uprisings, 140–141; MBS leading the invasion, 21; MBS-MBZ relationship, 156–157; MBS’s foreign policy failings, 149–150, 213–214; Saudi invasion of, 8, 146–150; Saudi military failure, 149– 150, 154–156, 213–214; succession purity, 32–33; UAE’s military strength, 153–154; UAE-Saudi rift, 152; USSaudi relations, 170, 175–178 youth foundations, 18–19, 202–203 Zaidi Muslims, 147

About the Book

Mohammed bin Salman. A monarch-to-be without scruples? Or a visionary seeking a path to global power? A social reformer determined to bring his country into the twenty-first century? Or just another brutal dictator? A leader on the road to greatness, or one destined to follow in the footsteps of Icarus? Veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent David Ottaway draws on more than a half-century of observation and reporting to shed light on these conundrums at the heart of any attempt to understand Saudi Arabia—and the man who is poised to rule the country for decades to come. David B. Ottaway has been covering Saudi Arabia, as a Washington

Post journalist and Middle East bureau chief and then as a scholar, since the 1970s. At present, he is a Middle East fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

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