Mohammed’s view
There’s a recurring trap in how we analyze Saudi Arabia’s monarchs: focusing on too narrow a timeframe. Nowhere is that clearer than in the debate over Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi will likely follow him forever in the Western press, as was evident during his Washington visit last week. But that’s not the metric by which his subjects will judge a reign that could stretch across half a century.
Journalists tend to like tidy narratives, and early impressions often stick. When his father became king in 2015, Prince Mohammed was portrayed as impulsive — launching a war in Yemen, dragging the country into tiffs with Canada and Germany, and famously cracking down on fellow princes and billionaires. For most Saudis, however, that turbulent stretch also included a reshaping of daily life: new jobs, expanded social freedoms, and an economy increasingly wired into global capital and poised to become the world’s biggest construction market.
By the time the first biographies of the prince rolled out, he was already on a new path. Today, he has pursued rapprochement with Iran, mediated between Russia and Ukraine, and is acting as a stabilizing influence in Sudan and Syria. Now at 40, he’s presenting himself — as The New York Times noted after his joint appearance with US President Donald Trump — as an experienced, measured statesman.
So how should we judge monarchs who will outlast most other leaders (and lowly journalists such as myself)? We will have to weigh decisions made over a few days, or even months, against the context of an 18,000-day reign. Not because we like to, but because it’s the way it is.
Notable
- Mohammed bin Salman’s arc from a pariah in the West to, in Trump’s words, “a very good friend” is explored in an interview between The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner and F. Gregory Gause, an author of multiple books on Saudi Arabia and a visiting scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC.
- The US and Saudi Arabia struck agreements on defense, semiconductors, nuclear power, and more during the crown prince’s November visit to the White House. Experts at the Atlantic Council unpack the deals and predict what to expect next.