He let women drive. Saudi movie lovers are watching Hollywood blockbusters again for the first time in more than three decades. Foreign investment has flooded in. In an ultra-conservative nation, he's advocated for a return to a more moderate form of Islam.
Yet there's a disturbing side to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, say key lawmakers and Middle East experts: He has brutally and ruthlessly purged cabinet ministers, media titans, business leaders, human rights activists and even members of his own royal family. One opinion writer called him the Kim Jong Un of the Persian Gulf for his embrace of the North Korean leader's authoritarian-ruler playbook. Only, with money. And no apparent nuclear ambitions.
Now, the 33-year-old crown prince, the youngest defense minister in the world and effective ruler of one of the last absolute monarchies, is on the verge of collecting another ignoble accolade: A trusted U.S. ally who, if claims made by Turkish officials prove true, presided over journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s death inside Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.
Saudi authorities confirmed early Saturday that Khashoggi died inside the consulate in Istanbul as a result of a “brawl and quarrel,” a sharp reversal from previous assertions by the regime that the dissident journalist had left the diplomatic facility unharmed more than two weeks ago. Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor said 18 Saudi nationals have been arrested in connection with the case. None were identified.
Some Middle East experts say that Khashoggi’s violent death could prove to be the undoing of the crown prince.
“Presumably the Saudi royal family has a decision to make: to save itself or to see Saudi Arabia become a pariah state,” said Sigurd Neubauer, a Washington-based Middle East analyst.
His father, Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz, 82, is reportedly trying to reassert his own power as the kingdom grapples with the global firestorm sparked by Khashoggi’s slaying, according to Reuters.
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It all could mark an ignominious turn for the crown prince, known by his initials MBS. He has been hailed as a bold young visionary seeking to transform Saudi Arabia and cement his country’s power and influence across the Middle East.
A 'ruthless' rock star
When he landed in the United States in March, the crown prince was given a rock star’s welcome from Washington to Silicon Valley. He met President Trump and other presidents, along with Wall Street executives, celebrities and tech tycoons. Among them: Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post newspaper, publisher of Khashoggi’s columns criticizing the kingdom.
Salman had many of America's elite swooning.
"(The crown prince) has done a lot of things we’ve wanted Saudi Arabia to do for a really long time. ... He’s lifted the driving restrictions on women. He’s really shackled the religious police. He’s taken the religious establishment out. They’re not exporting Islamism," said Danielle Pletka, senior vice president for foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank in Washington.
“Those things are all in the plus column,” she said. “Everybody fell head over heels for this guy.”
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But MBS’s rule also came with a dark side, experts and royal family insiders say.
Since becoming the oil-rich kingdom’s de facto leader and central policymaker in 2017, MBS has detained hundreds of Saudi nationals under the guise of an alleged anti-corruption crackdown, including more than 200 perceived opponents who were confined in one fell swoop at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh last year after being called in for questioning. Many, such as Prince Turki bin Abdullah, Prince Abdul Aziz bin Fahd, Prince Kahled bin Talal and prominent businessman Mohammed Al-Amoudi, are still missing and thought to be held in secret locations without access to their families or legal advice.
“We know he’s ruthless,” Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN referring to the Ritz-Carlton episode orchestrated by MBS. His opponents are “locked up, we believe tortured,” he added.
Mohammed bin Nayef, next in line to be the Saudi king before MBS allegedly plotted his ouster, "was a very effective partner for the U.S.," said Barbara Slavin, a specialist in Middle East policy at the Atlantic Council think tank. "This man has now been under house arrest for over a year and is reportedly being drugged. None of his friends have been able to contact him. This is how MBS treats people he sees as a threat," she said.
Neubauer, the Middle East analyst, said MBS’s rise to power is directly linked to a personal relationship he forged with Trump.
"MBS was about making Saudi Arabia great again," Neubauer said. "It was about a strong leader countering history. It was the belief that he would be the second founder of Saudi Arabia — that he was larger than history, that he would bend history to his will."
'He wants to be a disruptive leader'
Trump made Saudi Arabia the first foreign country he visited as president and his administration has been slow to criticize Saudi Arabia in the wake of Khashoggi's disappearance. Trump has denied that he’s “giving cover” the royal family, even as he has emphasized the crown prince’s promise to buy billions of dollars in American weapons and other goods.
MBS is also largely to blame for the horrific humanitarian disaster in Yemen, foreign affairs experts say. He dragged the Saudis into that country’s civil war as a way for the kingdom to fight a proxy battle with Iran, its archenemy in the region. At least 10,000 Yemenis have been killed. Millions are on the verge of starvation.
"There are a number of people who look to MSB as a potential reformer. That may be true, but he clearly seems to think that he can get away with doing whatever he wants," said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Shaheen said Khashoggi’s slaying has helped to spotlight MBS’s other cold-blooded policies.
"It’s not just their actions in Yemen. It’s their picking a fight with Qatar. It’s kidnapping the Lebanese prime minister," she said. "It's rounding up the royals and other prominent members of Saudi society and holding them."
Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said there's a clear link between MBS's reform instincts and his ruthlessness.
“The connective tissue between those two issues is his sense of urgency," he said, which was seen as “extraordinarily refreshing" inside the kingdom.
“He’s frank that he wants to be a disruptive leader,” said Alterman, who met MBS when he was in Washington in March. “He doesn’t want to shape a consensus. He wants to lead in a new direction, and that’s a stark departure from decades of Saudi leadership.”
Khashoggi was an irritant to the crown prince, not because he disagreed with the direction MBS was taking his country but because of the repressive tactics he was using to get there. Khashoggi argued that change in Saudi Arabia should come with discussion and debate, Alterman said, while MBS’s attitude seemed to think that would take too much time and would give Saudi Arabia’s enemies time to undermine his agenda.
More: Who is Jamal Khashoggi? Prominent Saudi journalist turned reluctant dissident
"The irony in all of this is that Jamal Khashoggi agreed with about 90 percent of the things that the crown prince wanted to do in Saudi Arabia. And he agreed with about 1 percent of the methods," Alterman said.
Khashoggi may have been a victim of those methods, and the crown prince could now be sidelined as a result.
Asked if he believed the Saudi regime was considering ousting MBS, Alterman said: “I can’t imagine nobody’s thought it, and I can’t imagine anyone is saying it very loudly.”
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