Episode 7: Who Is Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — and What Does He Want?
Known as MBS, the 37-year old de facto Saudi ruler has ambitious plans to modernize society. But he has also been accused of brutal human rights violations, including ordering the operation that led to the medieval-style death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Should America still be his friend? And with the U.S. now much less dependent on Saudi oil, does it really need to?
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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You might remember all the excitement a few years ago when women in Saudi Arabia were finally given the right to drive.
ARCHIVAL Saudi Woman 1: It’s our moment, we will make history.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Saudi Arabia has just announced it will allow women to drive cars for the first time ever.
ARCHIVAL Saudi Woman 2: We've been waiting for this moment for such a long time, and finally, it's here.
ARCHIVAL Saudi Woman 3: I really enjoyed it, you know, having the freedom in my own country.
ARCHIVAL Saudi Woman 4: I can't believe that I'm just part of this great change. it's amazing. Woo.
Saudi women activists had been campaigning for decades to get the driving ban lifted. They’d protest by getting in their cars and filming themselves driving. Then they’d post the videos online, often risking arrest or prosecution.Some even lost their jobs.
Hala Aldosari grew up in Saudi Arabia under that driving ban. She remembers how difficult it was to go anywhere.
Hala Aldosari: You had to depend on someone from your family or you have to hire a live-in driver basically to take you to places along with all the other members of the family who were women.
She was working as a consultant for the Ministry of Health and had lots of meetings she needed to get to around the city.
Hala Aldosari: And I had to wait for a driver in the scorching heat of Riyadh in order to navigate the meeting schedule that was not in the ministry building itself. And that has been a story for every woman, any working women, or not working women, would be finding it so consuming to navigate her errands basically.
So when the ban was lifted, the change was hailed as historic in a country where a religious cleric once said that driving could harm a woman’s ovaries and her ability to have healthy babies Mohammed Bin Salman — known as MBS — the young Saudi leader largely responsible for getting the driving ban lifted, was praised and called a reformer.
Allowing women to drive was just one part of MBS’s bold plan to modernize the country. He's begun massive reforms of the Saudi economy which has relied heavily on oil. And he’s developed plans for a new futuristic $500 billion city called NEOM to be built in a remote desert region. But what you might not have heard as much about is something else MBS did in the weeks just before the end of the driving ban was announced. Instead of celebrating the women activists who’d campaigned for the change, he rounded up many of the leading activists and threw them in jail. Saudi newspapers printed their pictures with the words traitor. And many of these women say they've been tortured while in prison. So why did that happen?
Hala Aldosari: He wants the credit.
Aldosari is living in exile in the U.S. because of her own activism around women’s rights.
Hala Aldosari: So Mohammed bin Salman is a leader who likes to rule by fear. This is an absolute monarchy.
And that monarchy can be brutal. MBS has a track record of silencing anyone who disagrees with him or whom he perceives as a threat. If you criticize him you might end up dead, even chopped up into pieces. Like Saudi journalist Jamal Khashogg. Khashoggi published columns in the Washington Post that were critical of MBS. And in 2018 his body was dismembered by Saudi officials inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. The CIA says MBS approved the operation, something the Kingdom has officially denied. And the Saudis say those responsible have been punished. Still, when he was a presidential candidate, Joe Biden promised to make MBS a pariah.
ARCHIVAL President Joe Biden: Khashoggi was in fact murdered and dismembered, and I believe in the order of the Crown Prince and I would make it very clear we were gonna, in fact make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.
But last year Biden seemed to do a 180. He made an official visit to Saudi Arabia and greeted MBS with a casual fist bump. It’s true that Saudi Arabia has a lot of oil. It’s the world’s second largest producer. So MBS has the power to turn the oil spigot on or off, and that can lead to lower or higher gas prices in the U.S.
MBS is only 37, so he could control Saudi Arabia for the next half century. So who is MBS? And does the U.S. really need him?
I'm Peter Bergen and this In the Room.
[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]
Sarah and Omar Al Jabri vanished inside Saudi Arabia. Their brother Khalid Al Jabri hasn't seen or spoken to them since March 2020.
Khalid Al Jabri: Sarah - she's very smart. She loved math and architecture, and that's what she wanted to pursue as a career. Omar, you would never win an argument with him and that's actually a reason for concern because wherever he is right now, I'm sure he is having a lot of arguments - and we've always joked that he would be a great lawyer. He loved watching basketball. He loved the Celtics. And excuse me if I get emotional a little bit, because the last time I spoke to them was more than three years ago.
It all began the day that 31 year old MBS was appointed the crown prince of Saudi Arabia by his father King Salman. Crown prince is an important position, second only to the king in Saudi Arabia.
Khalid Al Jabri: On the morning of MBS being appointed as crown prince Sarah and Omar were at the airport. At the airport they were stopped and told, ‘You can't travel.’ That was June 2017.
While they couldn’t leave the country they were allowed to move about the city of Riyadh. Until one day, several months later, Khalid says they couldn’t.
Khalid Al Jabri: The morning of March 16th, they were detained at home in a dawn raid. The way we learned about it was very painful. Mom called Sarah. She didn't answer. It was, like, very unusual. Then she called Omar and he didn't answer. And then shortly afterwards we received a text message from a neighborhood witness basically, who told us that he saw 20 vehicles with almost 50 plain clothed officers that showed up, and he saw them escorting Omar and Sarah. And that was the last time they were seen. You know, it's a hostage situation in every means.
Khalid’s dad had been the top intelligence adviser to another member of the Saudi royal family — a much older cousin of MBS who many had expected would some day lead Saudi Arabia.
Former Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef.
Khalid Al Jabri: Maybe you wanna call it the brains, or the spines, or the right hand man behind Muhammad bin Nayef, was my father.
But bin Nayef was stripped of his title of Crown Prince to clear the way for MBS to become the Crown Prince. Khalid’s father was outside the country at the time and was warned if he returned he’d be targeted by MBS. So he didn’t return. After his kids were stopped at the airport Khalid’s dad messaged MBS on Whatsapp.
Khalid Al Jabri: MBS responds, and I'm quoting him right now. ‘I want to solve this issue of your son and daughter, but there is a file here that's related to Prince Muhammad (meaning Muhammad bin Nayef) that I want your opinion on, and I want you to answer some questions…’ So MBS was clearly saying, I'm holding your kids, you know, if you want me to solve it, come back.
Peter Bergen: Why would MBS want your father to come back to the kingdom?
Khalid Al Jabri: MBS is obsessed with control. And I can tell you dad dedicated his full life serving the country regardless of who was in charge. He was appointed to the cabinet by King Salman himself. He was a dedicated civil servant. The fact that he served Muhammad bin Nayef doesn't make him an enemy for MBS. My dad is not. He's just a perceived enemy. If MBS perceives you as a risk, even if you're not at risk, you're in trouble.
A Saudi court eventually convicted Sarah and Omar al Jabri on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to escape the Kingdom unlawfully. Charges they deny. We reached out to the Saudi Embassy to ask about the Al Jabri siblings. They did not respond.
[MUSIC TRANSITION]
Khalid grew up in the same circles as MBS in Saudi Arabia. MBS was at his college graduation. He actually delivered the commencement speech.
Khalid Al Jabri: That was summer 2007. He graduated law school. I graduated medical school. And at that point he was just a royal family member on the fringe, you know, just the son of a Riyadh governor, had no power.
And Khalid says back when he was growing up, because of how succession normally works in Saudi Arabia, no one expected MBS would become Crown Prince.
Khalid Al Jabri: Nobody expected that 10 years from that exact point, that he would become the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. And personally for me, he would become the person that would take my young siblings as hostages.
Peter Bergen: So you were an exact contemporary of his at university then?
Khalid Al Jabri: So we had some common friends. We went to different high schools.A lot of my friends were with him in his high school. So we have a lot of common friends.
Peter Bergen: What was his rep at that time?
Khalid Al Jabri: So when he was a kid, he was, he made a lot of trouble inside his household, uh, with the maids and, and, and, you know, the servants. He would mistreat people. He was a spoiled kid. He never heard no in his life. You know, in high school, he would do a lot of mischief. He would dress up as a police officer and go against traffic. He wasn't popular mainly because in these circles people looked at the royals that would had a chance of holding power in the future. So within the royal family, he was an outcast. And even within his educational and kind of social circles in Saudi Arabia he was an outcast.
Peter Bergen: Why?
Khalid Al Jabri: Let's start with his household. His mom was from a Bedouin tribe, a very famous Bedouin tribe. But within the tiers inside the royal family, you're a top tier if your mom is royal and your dad is royal. Obviously if your mom is not royal, then you're a second class kind of royal. And and, and that's just for the tiers within his family.
And it wasn't just people inside Saudi Arabia who didn't expect MBS to become crown prince. It was a surprise to those outside the kingdom as well.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Another big story making news. A shake up at the top of Saudi Arabia's royal hierarchy. King Salman has promoted his son, 31 year old Mohammed bin Salman to be the next in line to the throne.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: I see you running the video here of Mohammed bin Salman, shaking the hands of his cousin, Muhammad bin Nayef, who was the crown prince. You notice him kneeling there and kissing the leg of his cousin, uh, uh, leading… This is highly orchestrated in terms of a transition of power.
Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy where in theory the king makes all the decisions. But MBS's father, King Salman, is 87 years old and there are have long been rumors that he’s in poor health. So while MBS isn’t the king yet, he is widely regarded to be the country's ruler. As an absolute monarch, the Saudi king can appoint anyone he wants as crown prince. And King Salman chose one of his young sons: MBS.
Ben Hubbard: MBS got the only vote that counted, which is his father's. Like, his father chose him and that was it.
That's New York Times journalist Ben Hubbard.
Ben Hubbard: I spent many years covering Saudi Arabia for the New York Times. And I'm also the author of the book, MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman.
And he says nobody saw this coming
Ben Hubbard: If you'd hired like a head hunting firm, right, and said, go out and find me, you know, the perfect person to take over this, you know, incredibly important wealthy country in the Middle East that, you know, has challenges it needs to deal with, the chances that they would've come up with Mohammed bin Salman are incredibly small. Even inside of his own family, he was not very prominent, and didn't have sort of a lot of the prerequisites that I think people would look for.
There were a lot of other members of the royal family who seemed, at least on paper, to be more qualified for the role of Crown Prince.
Ben Hubbard: He has a number of older half-brothers who are much better educated than he is, at least in sort of an international sense. He has an older half brother who has a PhD from Oxford. Uh, another one of his older half-brothers was the first Arab astronaut. And then in, in the wider royal family, There were plenty of other people who speak foreign languages, who had studied at foreign universities, who had spent significant time abroad and sort of understood the United States, understood the United Kingdom, and Saudi's other sort of international allies.
Unlike some of these other royals, MBS never spent any significant amount of time outside of Saudi Arabia.
Ben Hubbard: He had never studied at a foreign university. You know, that would've kind of given him a better sense of how these countries operate or how they think about things. He had a quite difficult time expressing himself in English, and tended to work through a translator. He was very, very Saudi which in the end when I look back now, I think ended up being a tremendous asset for him.
So you might be wondering: why did MBS get picked?
Ali Shihabi: His father saw in him something different as he was growing up.
Ali al Shihabi is a Saudi businessman who serves on the board of MBS’s planned megacity in the desert. He’s an enthusiastic supporter of many of the changes that MBS is bringing to Saudi Arabia.
Ali Shihabi: That's something that his father saw in him in terms of personality, in terms of character, I guess, in terms of intelligence, and made his father keep him closer to him. His older brothers, many members of the royal family have gone abroad to school. And he was kept to do his schooling at home. And I have a theory where I think that it makes, actually, much more sense for a ruler to be schooled at home because he becomes of the soil, so to speak.
So he understands his society in a way that leaders who — and many leaders in the Arab world have gone to boarding school abroad and then to, to, to top universities — but they come back alienated from the masses of their people.They look down in a way on the masses of their people. In the case of Prince Mohammed, he's grown up among them. And I think that showed in his capacity to read society. Because, he broke the rule book in all the reforms that he undertook in the last five, six years.
Peter Bergen: Can you paint a picture of what he's like personally? What is it like to be in the room with him?
Ali Shihabi: He walks fast. He moves fast. I mean, his whole body language is, is fast. He takes decisions quickly. His elders, everything would be, you know, at a very slow sort of scale but with him, he's a man in a hurry and you can feel it. Now, that doesn't mean that he didn't make mistakes. Of course he made mistakes. But I think he has done more for his country and for his people than any modern leader in the last 50 years that I can think of. Now, if you were going to criticize the prince, you'd say that he's doing too much.
And anyone who's ever spent any time in Saudi Arabia will tell you that since MBS rose to power the country looks and feels like a very different place than it used to be. Until MBS was in charge, Saudi Arabia had followed a strict version of Islam where religious clerics enforced a rigid set of rules about how men and women could behave in public.
Ali Shihabi: First of all, it was an environment where women were hardly seen. I remember in a bank where I was involved in running that bank, we had a women’s section because we also had women's banking. And if we wanted to go see the women who worked there, somebody would phone down and they would all cover up, and we would go through a digital lock to go into the room where they worked.
There was something called the religious police, which patrolled the streets to ensure that men and women did not mix, that women were appropriately covered up, did not wear makeup, did not flirt, that they did not sit next to strange men in restaurants, even that they didn't have parties at home.
And you had nightmarish stories of the religious police storming people's homes when they had parties or harassing their daughters or sisters or wives.
Ben Hubbard: They tended to be these sort of stern looking men with long beards and, you know, they would sort of patrol malls and public parks and, and areas like that to make sure that, you know, there were no men and women who were unrelated, who were socializing with each other unsupervised.
And, I remember on my first trip I was staying at some hotel downtown, and you know, I just sort of want to go for a walk in the evening. And Riyadh is not a walkable city where you could just kind of go stroll around and enjoy yourself. And so I tried to go to the mall, which was next to the hotel and just figured, okay, I'll go walk around the mall for a bit and stretch my legs.
And they wouldn't let me in because they said, ‘Oh, it's family hours,’ which basically means that only men were allowed in if they were with their wives or if they were with other female members of their family. And I sort of looked around and there were all these other young men who were kind of hanging around outside the mall, sort of wishing that they could get in because kind of that's where the action was.
It was kind of enforced to such an extent that, I mean, billboards were blacked out. I remember seeing billboards for a breakfast cereal or something like that. And it was sort of a normal billboard, of like a family, a happy family gathered around the breakfast table and all of the women were blurry. So you had sort of the father and the kids sitting there enjoying their breakfast area and then you had sort of blurry faces for the women.
There was also a system of specific rules for women. These laws were known as the guardianship rules.
Hala Aldosari: Every woman needed a permission of a male guardian in order to access any kinds of governmental services, obtain ID documents, passports, travel, being admitted in a hospital, getting into education or university.
Women’s rights activist Hala Aldosari remembers the stress she felt trying to do just simple daily tasks. Even though her father was very supportive and would give her permission to do the things she wanted to do, that didn't matter. She was still subjected to all the rules. And all the hassle.
Hala Aldosari: Having to go through the administrative paperwork in order to get my father to sign his approval for every single thing is labor intensive. So all these issues, for instance, I would go to the airport and they would say, well, why didn't you have a copy of your father's permission for you to travel? I told him, well he has the official permission. He said, well, I can't have the official, you have to get me a copy, so I have to go out of the airport and get him a copy. So you get to see all those issues, which are very small details that would wreck your day basically and make you anxious all the time. Did you miss something?
After becoming Crown Prince, MBS made some dramatic changes in Saudi Arabia. The feared religious police, who had once roamed the streets of the kingdom looking to enforce their ultra fundamentalist interpretation of Islam were no longer able to make arrests. And while the guardianship system remained in place, the government got rid of some of the rules.
Ali Shihabi: The most important overt aspect of this is the full integration of women into society. From the moment you land at the airport now, you can have a female police officer check your passport, check you through customs. You go to the hotel, you'll find a female receptionist or guest relations officer. And the list goes on. This is unheard of in Saudi Arabia before.
And then of course he got rid of the driving ban. But Khalid Al Jabri says that move was calculated and it wasn’t about gender equality.
Khalid Al Jabri: One of the lowest hanging fruits was to improve economic metrics and GDP and he did that by tapping into a large pool of unemployed Saudi females. They were unemployed because of social restrictions and the simple fact that they couldn't drive to work. Hence women were allowed to drive.
For me, that was primarily an economic decision where women empowerment was an after effect, an advertisable after effect. Otherwise, why would MBS allow women to drive and detain the leading female activists, and allegedly like, you know, torture them and sexually harass them?
If you're an economic unit that can serve my ambition, and conquest towards money and power, then you can live in Saudi Arabia. Anything beyond that, it's not acceptable.
Peter Bergen: And the way I interpreted it was, you can't actually ask for your rights. You can only be given them by MBS. So he'll arrest you if you're asking for your rights, even if he agrees with a policy.
Khalid Al Jabri: Absolutely. It's a monarchy where people can have privileges, but they can’t have rights. I will give you the privilege to drive, but you can't ask for it.
But MBS clearly understands many things about Saudi society and the kinds of changes people want. Before he was in charge, Saudi royals were known to borrow money from Saudi banks and never repay the loan. Commissions and kickbacks were common business practices among the country's elite. One of the first things MBS did after becoming Crown Prince was to head up a new anti-corruption committee. It had the power to issue arrest warrants, freeze bank accounts and issue travel bans in order to quote “take on corruption at all levels.” “All levels” meant even the most elite, who’d previously been able to operate with impunity.
In November 2017 about 400 businessmen–including many princes and many cousins of MBS–were summoned to the Royal Court in Riyadh.
Ben Hubbard: And instead of going for their audience with the king or whatever it was, they thought they had been invited for. They are taken to the Ritz-Carlton, which is a big, beautiful hotel, not far from the Royal Court. And they're basically locked in.
They are locked in rooms that where the curtain cables have been removed, where all glass has been removed, basically to prevent any kind of suicide attempt. They are not allowed to close their doors. There are guards posted in the hallways. And then this whole sort of inquisition begins where you have lawyers and other people from the Royal Court start sort of calling them in to ask them about their finances and accusing them of various things.
In the end, many of them lost substantial assets. Basically they're accused of corruption saying, you know, you stole this money, or you did this business deal in some corrupt way. You robbed the government in some way and we're gonna take it back. The whole process was incredibly opaque. As a reporter, it was incredibly difficult for us to get really good detail on how it all went down.
I think domestically it was quite popular because I think there were a lot of Saudis who were ticked off about the corruption and there was a sense that these people had been able to get away with this kind of corruption for too long. I mean we know for sure that violence was employed. We know for sure that at least one person basically died in custody during the Ritz-Carlton affair and we have good reason to believe that there were painful, coercive measures used in the Ritz-Carlton.
The Saudis have denied that anyone was tortured and they say this was part of an effort to root out corruption.
Ali Shihabi: The country had become so corrupt. It was part of the system of entitlements that the royal family, each one felt that it had a right to certain elements of the economy where it could dispense patronage through its control of certain ministries and certain elements of the economy and the prince had a choice, really. He said how do I change this culture?
I think he came up with a very novel way, which was, you know, they took a couple of hundred prominent royals and businessmen who arguably had been the most egregious in their misuse of power and patronage to make extreme amounts of money, threw them into the Ritz-Carlton, and gave them a chance to negotiate a settlement.
Now, people thought that was atrocious. It was extremely popular in the country. it brought, you know, in excess of a hundred billion dollars back into the Treasury. He needed something quick, shocking to the system that sent a message that affected change and that was not too coercive and not too brutal. And I think it worked out very well.
Peter Bergen: The name of the royal family is embedded in the name of the country. So a bit like if England was renamed Windsor. And so this raises sort of an interesting question about corruption as an issue because Mohammed bin Salman certainly is reported to have some pretty serious toys. A $300 million chateau in France, a very expensive yacht. How do you square this like extreme wealth that the ruler has? And yet at the same time, this crackdown on corruption?
Ali Shihabi: The crown prince in the early days of his power, he made some of these purchases that he has not done since. But, he certainly deserves a yacht. He's a man who doesn't go on vacations abroad. He doesn't spend this time skiing in St. Moritz or partying in Saint-Tropez. He takes his vacations at home. So he deserves a, you know, a benefits package commensurate with an Arabian monarch, but the country can't afford to have 20 of them or 30 of them, which is really effectively what it had before and that was a massive drain on the treasury. What is happening in Saudi Arabia is the circle of entitlement is being made much smaller.
And locking people up — as a way to stem criticism or to consolidate his power — is something he’s become known for. It's even been said that MBS has locked up his own mother.
Ben Hubbard: We don't know much except we know that it is true. And we know that because of sort of American intelligence assessments; we know that because other members of the royal family have talked about it very quietly. We don't know exactly what the deal is, but we know that she was on the social scene in Riyadh and that she used to show up to weddings and to other sort of social events, and then all of a sudden she kind of disappeared.
We reached out to the Saudi Embassy for comment. They did not respond. And then of course there are Khalid Al Jabri's siblings.
Khalid Al Jabri: We only went public after they were kidnapped. Not even right away. We waited two months because prior to that, we exhausted every avenue in trying to salvage the situation and reach a kind of silent diplomacy route. But that didn’t work.
Peter Bergen: In the old Saudi Arabia, keeping silent might have actually worked. In the new Saudi Arabia, keeping silent doesn't.
Khalid Al Jabri: Absolutely. I hear a lot of people saying as well, you're leading a public fight. You know, like, that doesn't work. I was like, we are actually the evidence staying silent in the new Saudi Arabia doesn't work because we stayed silent for three years. You effectively have a ruler of a country that had the highest G20 growth this year singularly obsessed with an exiled family and using every power in his hand to crush it. And we've realized with MBS, given his kind of conduct over the past few years, that he has a very low threshold to exercise maximum power to achieve an immediate objective regardless of the knock on consequences, because he figured out, there is not going to be consequences or accountability.
Peter Bergen: And what motivates MBS do you think?
Khalid Al Jabri: Two things: money and power. Ultimate control. And it is very clear from day one. It is very clear from, you know, a private briefing he had with my dad. It was supposed to be a 30 minute meeting, but it turned out to be three hours. At the end, dad asked him a question. It was like, ‘Your highness, what are you after? Just high level.’ And MBS was like, he smiled, sat back was like, yes, that's a question I-, it's almost like the question that he wanted to hear. And then he responded, “Do you know Alexander the Great?”
Peter Bergen: And of course, Alexander the Great had conquered much of the world, the known world by the time he was 33. So that was the kind of level of ambition.
Khalid Al Jabri: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, one of his traits is he has a tendency to oversimplify things and thinks that he has the means to achieve them.
MBS has really ambitious plans for Saudi Arabia. He’s declared it his mission to shift the kingdom’s economy away from oil. And that's included bringing major international sporting events to Saudi Arabia, like golf tournaments and Formula One car racing. Opening up movie theaters and concert venues. He’s developed a massive plan for the future known as Vision 2030, that includes turning Saudi Arabia into a major tourist destination.
ARCHIVAL Saudi Tourism Ad: Welcome to a journey you've never imagined. Welcome to Arabia, Saudi.
And building NEOM, the city in the desert that’s supposed to include a 100-mile-long vertical skyscraper, ski slopes, an artificial moon and flying taxis.
ARCHIVAL NEOM Ad: What is NEOM? It’s a home for people who dream big. It will be a hub for innovation, an entirely new model for sustainable living, a vision for a new future….
Hubbard says while the plans for the city of NEOM are pretty out there, there are some things about his economic plan which are hard to disagree with, like diversifying the economy away from oil.
Ben Hubbard: At least he's thinking about the future of his country in a positive way which is something that you can't say for many other leaders in the Arab world, frankly. I mean, I don't think Bashar al-Assad spends much time thinking about what Syria's gonna look like in 2030. It's quite remarkable that he decided to say, ‘I wanna decide what my country's gonna look like in a decade, and I'm gonna start putting in place, you know, mechanisms to push it in that direction.’
MBS hasn't just made major changes at home. He has implemented a much more aggressive Saudi foreign policy in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has waged a disastrous war in neighboring Yemen that triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes. And in 2017 the impetuous crown prince effectively kidnapped the Lebanese prime minister for weeks when he was visiting the Saudi kingdom — an incident MBS later joked about. And for four years MBS led several Arab states to impose an embargo on Saudi Arabia’s gas-rich neighbor Qatar, which is home to the largest U.S. military base in the region. And he's strengthened the Saudi relationship with China, which is undercutting the role of the United States as the major player in the Middle East.
Ben Hubbard: I think he's very much of the view that the world is becoming increasingly multi-polar. It's not just sort of the great powers anymore but you know China is rising, and China is the largest customer of Saudi oil. So, you know, there's a very good reason for Saudi Arabia to have good relations with China. And I think that when they look to the future, they see China as being an incredibly big player in the world. They have maintained their relationship with Russia despite the invasion of Ukraine.
And you know, I think that MBS just also feels that Saudi Arabia, because of its wealth and because of its position and because of its standing in the Islamic world, it should really be able to kind of stand up on its own two feet as a world power and call its own shots.
Peter Bergen: If we think about the 1970s and the oil embargo on the United States, I mean, Saudi Arabia literally through its position in OPEC, had the United States over a barrel. The situation's very different today. I mean, the U.S. is now the largest oil and gas producer in the world, bigger than Saudi Arabia. So why is it that the U.S. remains beholden to the Saudis and, you know, whether it's the Trump administration or the Biden administration, you know, it doesn't matter who's in charge politically in the United States, the United States maintains the same relationship with the Saudis.
Ben Hubbard: I wouldn't quite agree with that characterization. I think that we’re in the process of kind of a gradual drifting apart that has significantly accelerated in recent years. The traditional sort of formula was that the United States counted on Saudi Arabia for oil and for stabilization of global oil markets because of its role in OPEC and in return, the United States basically helped out with security. The United States sort of guaranteed that if it would help protect Saudi Arabia from foreign threats, whether it was from Iran or from anybody else who wanted to come in and attack the kingdom or try to seize the oil fields that the United States would step in and protect them. And I just think that the fundamentals are not the same. As you noted, the U.S. produces a huge amount of its own oil now. It just doesn't need to rely on Saudi oil the way that it used to. I think on the U.S. side, there's just been a fatigue with the Saudis in general. I just think that the constant sort of drumbeat of human rights violations, I think that that's kind of worn down people in both parties that would-, that I think in the past had been more sympathetic to Saudi Arabia.
And on the Saudi side, I think that MBS has a very different vision for how this should work. They question how much they can actually count on the United States to come help them out if they end up with some sort of security issue. People saying that there's a rupture or there's a divorce or anything like that, I think that's overstating it. But there's definitely a sort of a drifting apart that has, that has accelerated. This seems to be something that MBS is quite comfortable with.
And a sign of that is a recent agreement that China helped negotiate, which will restore diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran. For years Iran and Saudi Arabia have supported opposing forces in conflicts across the Middle East. In the past, the U.S. might've been the country brokering such a deal, such as the Trump administration's role in getting several Arab states to recognize Israel, or the Carter administration's role in making peace between Israel and Egypt.
Ali Shihabi: Saudi Arabia has built up a very strong strategic relationship with China. China has a big vested interest in the security of the Gulf and is Iran’s major global interlocutor. And, by putting its signature to an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, it gave the Saudi government the comfort to feel that it can give the Iranians the benefit of the doubt.
So this was an example of Saudi Arabia creating a portfolio of relationships to complement its American relationship, and try to bring security benefits and other economic and political benefits to the table where America is unable or unwilling to meet those requirements.
Peter Bergen: So when the historians of the future look back on the history of the Middle East, obviously after the first World War, the French and the British dominated the Middle East. After World War II, it was the United States. This deal, that China brokered between Iran and Saudi Arabia to restore diplomatic relations, will they look back on that as saying this is the beginning of the Chinese not just inserting themselves economically in a big way in the Middle East, but also politically and the beginning of the end of American dominance of the region?
Ali Shihabi: I don't think it's the beginning of the end of American dominance of the region but I think it's the beginning of the end of American exclusivity in terms of its relations with, particularly, the Gulf states.
And yet despite all these changes, many say MBS has created a climate of fear that is unprecedented in Saudi Arabia.
Khalid Al Jabri: I think there was initial excitement, that excitement's turned into skepticism and fear. And right now what I feel, it's almost saying, well, We don't like him, we fear him, but we're stuck. And it's almost like there's an acceptance of reality and a lot of rationalization because like one of my friends is like, ‘What do you want me to do? Like, I know he's a murderer, but I still need to work and make a living. And I'm, you know, for me, immigration is not an option.’ So it's almost like he is the ugly reality for a lot of people. A lot of people who are not, you know, touched or hurt by MBS who are making money or enjoying some of the selective liberalization reforms, they're fine.
And Hala Aldosari agrees. She says ultimately Saudi women — while they might be able to drive — they're not necessarily better off because they can no longer express themselves. At all.
Hala Aldosari: What's happening is the majority of women live within conservative families where the rule of the guardian is enforced in a different way. It's not legally enforced, but it's traditionally enforced, and we don't have any idea if the men in the family would coerce the women. We used to have women speak out against any kinds of problems that they're facing, even when there is a reform of law.
But she says now, under MBS, that’s impossible.
Hala Aldosari: Issues of gender equality, issues of violence against women, issues of political and civil reforms, those budding movements have been squashed under Mohammed bin Salman.
Perhaps the most well known example of this is the case of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist brutally murdered by Saudi officials.
Hala Aldosari: I knew Jamal. I was really touched by his views and by his concern for Saudi Arabia and for the Saudi people. A lot of families reached out to him to speak about their loved ones who were imprisoned or harmed, uh, under Mohammed bin Salman, and he felt like he couldn't do anything. There is no one to talk to. And then of course the news that really shocked us was when he disappeared in the Saudi consulate. I reached out to some of my friends in Turkey and I asked them, ‘What do you think happened?’ You know, our wildest thoughts was that he was forcibly returned to Saudi ‘cause Saudis have actually abducted other people, uh, other Saudis from-, including women who ran away from their family, have been abducted by Saudi forces and returned to Saudi Arabia. I think all the Saudis, including myself, were shocked at this level of brutality. Saudi monarchy has been always intolerant of any kinds of critics, but it hasn't reached this point of killing someone in an embassy and dismembering him.
Khalid Al Jabri: What did Jamal do? Jamal wrote mildly critical op-eds at the Washington Post. Is writing mildly critical op-eds worth being dismembered in that brutal way?
Peter Bergen: And your family believes that he was planning to do something similar to your dad?
Khalid Al Jabri: Yes. Just a few days after, you know, what happened to Jamal Khashoggi we learned that, uh, there was a, uh, a squad of similar consistency that was apprehended, at a airport in Ontario.
Peter Bergen: Your dad's living in Canada at the time?
Khalid Al Jabri: Yes, yes. Uh, and he's still based out of Toronto. That was also, you know, another moment where, you know, we knew that, you know, we have a bullseye on our back. And I just wanna also, I think, I've talked about some of the text messages between MBS and my dad. There was one message: he told my dad, you have one hour. He gave my dad an ultimatum, ‘Tell us where you are. We'll send a private plane to, to fetch you, or I will use all means, including means that would be harmful to you, to get you back.’ He literally said things like, ‘Oh, we have, we have the Interpol, uh, notice, ready to file. We have the public prosecutor warrant ready to file. We have legal claims ready.’ These are his own words. I'm not kidding you. Like it's there. And, you know, he did pursue a lot of these things. You know, he filed an Interpol red notice warrant. And he was successful in getting that against my father, which was ultimately dismissed as politically motivated. And by the way that was even before Jamal was murdered. We were, and we still are the target number one on his hypothetical hit list. And he does have a hypothetical hit list apparently.
Peter Bergen: You made the decision to go public because silence didn't yield anything. Are there some risks in doing that?
Khalid Al Jabri: There are risks. You're dealing with somebody who has ordered the murder of a perceived detractor. But I have accepted that risk. I decided to be fully detached emotionally, and it's very hard to do because we're in the fight of our lifetime. You have a fragmented, exiled family, uh, who is, you know, who's being crushed by one of the most powerful autocrats probably in history, given the resources that he has.
It is a modern day, David versus Goliath. So for me to be able to fight, I have to be fully detached emotionally. And I know that can be tough for people around me, especially my wife and my kids. This is not the life I envisioned. I invested a lot in the country. Saudi Arabia invested in me with scholarships and so on. I went to a public medical school. My whole life ambition was to be a subspecialized cardiologist in the field of arrhythmia where it's highly needed in Saudi. And my goal was to go back and, and serve my country and, and pay my debt. It is a never ending nightmare. Nightmares usually end when you wake up from sleep, but this one doesn't go away. It's, it's something that I live with every day.
Peter Bergen: You know, um, Gabriel Márquez, you know, the great Latin American novelist, he wrote News of a Kidnapping, and he describes having a loved one being taken like a, a form of living death.
Khalid Al Jabri: Absolutely, I feel deficient, unfulfilled. And that's how my mom and dad feel. And that's how we feel every day. And what's really painful is I don't know if I'll ever see my siblings again. And as much as that thing is scary and bad, everything can go away, if that one person changes his mind, and I don't know if he'll ever do that.
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If you want to know more about some of the stories and issues we discussed in this episode we recommend: Ben Hubbard’s MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman, and The Saudi Kingdom by Ali al Shihabi.
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In the Room with Peter Bergen is an Audible Original.
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