The Growing Tyranny of Mohammed bin Salman

Tying the U.S. closely to Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia will blow up in our face one way or another.

Nicolas Pelham has written a very good and thorough article on Mohammed bin Salman’s rise to power and the many excesses, abuses, and crimes he has committed in just a few years. Here he reports on the arbitrary and unexplained detentions of thousands of people:

As we chatted over the whir of his office air conditioning, my friend reeled off a list of people he knew who had been detained in the past month: a retired air-force chief who died in prison, a hospital administrator hauled away from his desk, a mother taken in front of her seven children, a lawyer who died seven days after his release from prison. “These people aren’t rabble rousers,” my friend said. “No one understands why.”

Officially, the government says it has no political prisoners. Rights groups reckon that thousands have been swept up in MBS’s dragnet. I’ve covered the Middle East since the 1990s and can’t think of anywhere where so many of my own contacts are behind bars [bold mine-DL].

Few ordinary Saudis predicted that when MBS was done trampling on the elites and the clerics, he would come for them next. Bringing Saudis into the modern, networked, online world has made it easier for the state to monitor what they are saying.

Mohammed bin Salman is in many ways a typical Saudi royal, but from everything I have read about him over the years he seems to be unusually prone to using threats and violence to get his way. Pelham refers to accounts of the crown prince’s “terrible tempers” and his wild mood swings, and he adds, “Two former palace insiders say that, during an argument with his mother, he once sprayed her ceiling with bullets.” Because of the crown prince’s violent temper and his intolerance for dissent, he has created such an atmosphere of fear that no one will advise him away from reckless and destructive decisions. As is often the case in authoritarian systems, there is no one that can tell him he is wrong and survive. Pelham writes:

All remain vulnerable to MBS’s tantrums. Saudi sources say he once locked a minister in a toilet for ten hours. (The minister later appeared on tv blabbering platitudes about the prince’s wisdom.) A senior official I’ve spoken to says he wants out. “Everyone in his circle is terrified of him,” says an insider. And that could make it hard for him to govern a country of 35m people effectively. Former courtiers say no one close to MBS is prepared to offer a truthful assessment of whether his increasingly grandiose schemes are viable. “Saying no”, says one, “is not something they will ever do.”

While there are still some Western pundits who will wrongly try to dress up this thuggish despot as someone that the U.S. needs to work with, it seems clear that maintaining a close relationship with a Saudi Arabia ruled by Mohammed bin Salman is setting the U.S. up for some ugly combination of our government’s past backing of Saddam Hussein and the Shah. The U.S. enabled their aggression and repression respectively, and it got the U.S. nothing but worse problems down the line. In Mohammed bin Salman’s case, the U.S. has effectively enabled both aggression and repression, and he has only been crown prince for five years. Tying the U.S. closely to Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia will blow up in our face one way or another, and it probably won’t be long before some of the same people that championed the crown prince as a “new Ataturk” will be agitating to have him overthrown in another ten or fifteen years.

The war on Yemen is Mohammed bin Salman’s signature policy. His real legacy has been to escalate a conflict that has claimed nearly 400,000 lives as of the end of last year and to drive tens of millions of people to the brink of famine and, for many tens of thousands, over that brink into mass starvation. He is one of the major war criminals of our time in addition to being a brutal despot at home. His “reforms” mostly amount to bread and circuses to distract people from his growing tyranny, and his building projects are comically unrealistic wastes of money. His flagship endeavor, the “futuristic” city of Neom, is representative of Mohammed bin Salman’s vision: lots of hype and nothing to back it up. Pelham went out to see Neom for himself, and there wasn’t much to see:

Finding Neom was the first problem. There were no road signs to it. After three hours’ drive we came to the spot indicated by the map. It was bare, but for the odd fig tree. Camels strolled across the empty highway. Piles of rubble lined the road, remnants of the town bulldozed to make way for the mighty metropolis.

The designated area is nearly the size of Belgium. As far as I could tell, only two projects had been completed, MBS’s palace, and something Google Earth calls “The Neom Experience Centre” (when I drove to see it, it was obscured by a prefabricated hut). The only other solid building I could see was a hotel constructed before Neom was conceived: the Royal Tulip. A poster in the lobby urged me to “Discover Neom”. But when I asked for a guide the hotel manager cursed my sister with Arabic vulgarities and tried to shoo me away. There was no sign of the media hub with “frictionless facilitation”, “advanced infrastructure” and “collaborative ecosystems” promised by the Neom website. Neom’s head of communications and media, Wayne Borg, said he was “out of Kingdom at present”.

The problem here isn’t just the warped personality of Mohammed bin Salman. Even if he weren’t an overly ambitious, power-hungry villain, the kind of repressive system that he runs will fail sooner or later, and when that happens the U.S. does not want to be invested deeply in backing that system. The crown prince may hasten the collapse with his recklessness, but regardless it is still a mistake to identify the U.S. so closely with a despotic dynasty that may come crashing down earlier than anyone expects. Even if the dynasty survives for another half century, there is no good reason why the U.S. should continue the abnormally close relationship with Riyadh that it has had. The rise of Mohammed bin Salman is exactly the time for the U.S. to begin putting a lot of distance between the U.S. and that despotism.

Unfortunately, as we know, the Biden administration has made the choice to let Mohammed bin Salman off the hook for his many crimes and even to reward him for his destructive behavior. If we have learned anything about the crown prince over the last few years, it is that he doesn’t learn from his mistakes because he has never had to face any consequences for them. Since no one else around him is willing to tell him that he has made a mistake, he will continue blundering ahead with his ludicrous, wasteful building projects, power grabs, and war crimes for as long as he can get away with it.