“He stood up to a superpower and won before the world.”įor mbs, this is a moment of triumph. “He made Biden look weak,” said a Saudi columnist in Jeddah. Even critics at home acknowledged mbs’s victory. But on July 15th he went to make his peace with mbs – trying to avoid shaking mbs’s hand, he instead opted for a fist bump that left the two looking all the chummier. On the campaign trail in 2020 Joe Biden had vowed to turn Saudi Arabia into a “pariah”. War even forced America’s president into a humiliating climbdown.
Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, previously a sworn enemy of the crown prince, embraced mbs in Riyadh in April. Boris Johnson was on a plane within weeks. After Putin invaded Ukraine in February, the price of crude shot up. Today, thanks to another autocrat, Vladimir Putin, the Saudi prince is back in demand. Even the most pro-Saudi leaders turned away. Then, in late 2018, Saudi officials in Istanbul murdered a Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, and dismembered his body with a bone saw. The West, beguiled by promises of change and dependent on Saudi oil, at first seemed prepared to ignore mbs’s excesses. “I’ve survived four kings,” said a veteran analyst who refused to speculate about why much of Jeddah, the country’s second-largest city, is being bulldozed: “Let me survive a fifth.” On my recent trips to Saudi Arabia, people from all levels of society seemed terrified about being overheard voicing disrespect or criticism, something I’d never seen there before. Saudis and foreigners danced barefoot on the sand until dawn, a couple kissed, women stripped down to tank tops and fruit juice laced with alcohol was served at an open bar.īut embracing Western consumer culture doesn’t mean embracing Western democratic values: it can as easily support a distinctively modern, surveillance state.
A few months ago I even went to a rave in a hotel. Previously, the kingdom offered few diversions besides praying at the mosque today you can watch Justin Bieber in concert, sing karaoke or go to a Formula 1 race.
The most visible transformation of Saudi Arabia is the presence of women in public where once they were either absent or closely guarded by their husband or father. His restless impatience and disdain for convention have helped him push through reforms that many thought wouldn’t happen for generations. The millennial autocrat is said to be fanatical about the video game “Call of Duty”: he blasts through the inertia and privileges of the mosque and royal court as though he were fighting virtual opponents on screen. “In effect,” a former Saudi intelligence agent told me, “King Salman is no longer king.”Īt first glance the 36-year-old prince looks like the ruler many young Saudis had been waiting for, closer in age to his people than any previous king – 70% of the Saudi population is under 30. It has been clear for several years that mbs is in charge. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy but mbs’s 86-year-old father, though nominally head of state, is rarely seen in public anymore. mbs, tall and broad-shouldered in a white t-shirt, is pushed to the farthest edge.įast forward to today, and mbs has moved to the centre of the frame, the most important decision-maker in Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter. In the middle is mbs’s cousin, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a billionaire investor dubbed “the Arabian Warren Buffett”. A photo from one of these holidays shows a group of 16 royals posing on a yacht-deck in shorts and sunglasses, the hills of the French Riviera behind them. The Bedouin offspring of Prince Salman stayed in Riyadh to attend King Saud University.Īs young adults, the royals sometimes cruised on superyachts together mbs was reportedly treated like an errand boy, sent onshore to buy cigarettes. Later, his elder brothers and cousins were sent to universities in America and Britain. When mbs visited the palace where his father lived with his first wife, his older half-brothers mocked him as the “son of a Bedouin”. mbs’s mother, Salman’s third wife, was a tribeswoman.
His father, Salman, already had five sons with his first wife, an educated woman from an elite urban family. Home life was tricky for bin Salman, too (he is now more commonly known by his initials, mbs).