From ‘pariah’ to partner, Saudi leader defies threats to isolate him
ISTANBUL – US President Joe Biden vowed during his quest for the White House to make the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, a “pariah” over the killing and dismemberment of a dissident. He threatened the Prince again last autumn with “consequences” for defying the United States’ wishes on oil policy.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham called Crown Prince Mohammed, the oil-rich kingdom’s de facto ruler, a “wrecking ball” who could “never be a leader on the world stage”. And Mr Jay Monahan, the head of golf’s prestigious PGA Tour, suggested that players who joined a rival Saudi-backed league betrayed the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks – carried out by hijackers who were mostly Saudi citizens.
Now their words ring hollow.
Mr Biden, visiting Saudi Arabia in 2022, fist-bumped Crown Prince Mohammed when they met and regularly dispatches officials to see him – including his Secretary of State, Mr Antony Blinken, this past week. Mr Graham grinned next to the Prince – known by his initials MBS – during a visit to Saudi Arabia in April. Also this week, Mr Monahan jolted the world of professional golf by announcing a planned partnership between the PGA and the upstart Saudi-backed LIV Golf league, suddenly giving the kingdom tremendous global influence over the sport.
“It just tells you how money talks, because this guy sits on top of this oil well and all this money, so he can basically buy his way out of everything,” said Mr Abdullah Alaoudh, the Saudi director for the Freedom Initiative, a rights group in Washington and a vocal opponent of the monarchy.
Over and over throughout his eight-year rise to power, Crown Prince Mohammed, 37, has defied expectations that his rule was in jeopardy while leveraging the kingdom’s wealth, its sway over oil markets, and its importance in the Arab and Islamic worlds to evade repeated threats to punish him with international isolation.
Along the way, he has not only sharpened his vision for the future of Saudi Arabia as an assertive regional power with a growing economy and increased political clout, but has also taken lessons from his setbacks to refine his methods for achieving his goals, said analysts and officials.
For now, at least, he appears to be riding high.
Strong oil demand in recent years has filled the kingdom’s coffers. It bought an English football club, paid an eye-popping figure to bring Portuguese superstar Cristiano Ronaldo to play in its national league, and is trying to recruit other international stars, too.
If the golf deal goes through, a close aide to Crown Prince Mohammed would become one of the sport’s most powerful figures, giving Saudi Arabia another major platform to reshape its international image.
In recent years, heads of state from Turkey to the US who once spurned the Prince have accepted him as the future of Saudi Arabia. And he has deepened the kingdom’s relationships with China, which helped broker a diplomatic breakthrough between Saudi Arabia and Iran, long-time regional rivals.
That all marks significant progress for a young prince who was widely seen as a dangerous upstart after his father became king in 2015.
That same year, the Prince launched a military intervention in Yemen that caused vast civilian deaths and sank into a quagmire. He later shocked the diplomatic community with the kidnapping of the Prime Minister of Lebanon and stunned the business community by locking hundreds of rich Saudis for weeks on end in a luxury hotel as part of a purported anti-corruption drive.
His international standing took a sharp dive in 2018 after a Saudi hit squad killed and dismembered dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul. Crown Prince Mohammed denied any foreknowledge of the plot, but the US Central Intelligence Agency concluded that he had likely ordered the operation.
That was perhaps his lowest point.
But in the years since, the Crown Prince has recovered much of his clout, helped by his country’s considerable wealth and power.
Early on, he sidelined rivals to consolidate his control at home. Social changes he has pushed through, like allowing women to drive and expanding entertainment options in a country that used to ban movie theatres, have won him fans among the kingdom’s youth.
He also knows that, as the king-in-waiting in a monarchy, he can play the long game. He will never have to stand for re-election, and he is already dealing with his third American president, with many more likely to come and go while he remains.
His eventual recovery from the Khashoggi affair showed that the kingdom’s money could go a long way and that no matter how much Western governments talked about human rights, other interests ultimately took precedence.
“The Gulf Arab states, they think it’s a joke,” Ms Dina Esfandiary, senior adviser for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group, said of the human rights criticisms. “They really do grasp their worth to the Western world, as partners, as energy producers, as countries with economic might, so they say, ‘We can handle this empty threat’” because it is just part of the relationship.
President Donald Trump was in office when Mr Khashoggi was killed and staunchly defended the Prince, saying among other things that Saudi arms purchases benefited the US.
Mr Graham, the senator from South Carolina who said after the Khashoggi killing that Crown Prince Mohammed was not fit to lead, turned around and praised him during a visit to Saudi Arabia in April, when he thanked Saudi Arabia for buying US jets.
“You bought US$37 billion (S$49.7 billion) of aircraft made in my state and my country. I think more is coming,” Mr Graham told Saudi Arabia’s Al-Arabiya television. “So as a United States senator, I reserve the right to change course.”
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, whose government leaked details of Mr Khashoggi’s murder to damage the Prince, also eventually set its objections aside. In 2022, a Turkish court transferred the case against Mr Khashoggi’s killers to Saudi Arabia, ending the last case that sought to ensure accountability for the crime. Not long after, the kingdom set aside US$5 billion in deposits for Turkey’s central bank to help shore up its finances.
The PGA Tour did a similar about-face.
For months, Mr Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, berated Saudi Arabia, even asking players who considered joining the rival circuit, “Have you ever had to apologise for being a member of the PGA Tour?”
As a result, many were shocked when he announced the new partnership.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy wrote on Twitter that PGA Tour officials had recently argued to him that “the Saudis’ human rights record should disqualify them from having a stake in a major American sport”.
Mr Murphy added: “I guess maybe their concerns weren’t really about human rights?”
Affecting many of Crown Prince Mohammed’s decisions in recent years is a growing sense within the kingdom that the US has become an unreliable partner.
The Prince has dealt with three US presidents from both parties who all want to scale back US involvement in the Middle East. The risks of such a retreat for Saudi Arabia became clear in 2019, when drone and missile attacks that the US accused Iran of orchestrating hit Saudi oil facilities, temporarily halting about half of the kingdom’s output.
Trump declined to respond directly, leading Crown Prince Mohammed and his counterparts in the United Arab Emirates to conclude that the US no longer had their backs and that they had to look out for their own security.
Ms Esfandiary said: “Now it is very engraved in their minds that, ‘We can’t count on Washington to defend us, so we have to do it ourselves’. This has led to a rejigging of certain things in their foreign policy.”
It has also made it less likely that Saudi Arabia will automatically accede to the US’ requests.
Crown Prince Mohammed refused to join Western sanctions aimed at isolating President Vladimir Putin after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and instead, Saudi Arabia has since stepped up imports of discounted Russian oil products.
After Mr Biden met the Prince in Saudi Arabia in July 2022, the administration pushed the kingdom to keep oil production up to help bring down gas prices in the US before midterm elections in November. But in October, the kingdom agreed with the other members of the oil cartel known as Opec+ to cut production instead, aiming to keep prices up.
That angered Mr Biden, and White House officials accused Saudi Arabia of having reneged on an agreement. Months later, when oil demand did flag, the Saudis insisted they had been right to resist political pressure and cut production.
The “consequences” promised by Mr Biden never materialised, making it clear that even the US considered its economic ties with Saudi Arabia too vital to disrupt.
The perception that the US is pulling back from the Middle East has driven Crown Prince Mohammed to broaden Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic relationships, particularly with China, the kingdom’s most important trade partner and the largest consumer of Saudi oil.
In recent years, the Prince has cultivated Chinese President Xi Jinping, hosting him at a Chinese-Arab summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in December 2022. During that meeting, the two leaders discussed China’s serving as a mediator to diminish conflict with the Iranians.
A few months later, the relationship yielded a surprising diplomatic breakthrough, when Saudi Arabia and Iran announced they would restore normal diplomatic relations.
It was a double win for Crown Prince Mohammed, who in one agreement diminished the likelihood of conflict with his main regional foe while giving a world power other than the US a stake in the outcome.
Saudi officials have said they would prefer to keep the US as their primary ally, but that the lack of commitment from America means they need to diversify. And the US was in no position to broker an agreement between the Saudis and the Iranians because of its own tense relationship with Iran.
Even some former critics of the kingdom see positive signs in the Prince’s efforts to quiet the region.
“You’ve got this building back of bridges and trying to rein in some of the more quixotic activities, reaching out and trying to be a more constructive force in the region,” said Mr Dennis Horak, a former Canadian ambassador who was expelled from his post in Riyadh in 2018 over Twitter posts criticising the arrests of Saudi activists.
The question, he said, was whether this would last.
“The problem always with MBS, of course, is that he can change on a dime,” he said. “But maybe that is changing. Maybe he is maturing a bit.” NYTIMES