Despot, radical … peacemaker? The millennial prince and the Middle East ‘moonshot’

Something strange was happening at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh. It was 2017, and the opulent hotel had just played host to Saudi Arabia’s inaugural “Davos in the Desert” economic forum, where royalty rubbed shoulders with the world’s finance leaders. Now, foreign guests were being unceremoniously kicked out of their rooms in the middle of the night. The doors of the Ritz were closed, they were told, as buses arrived to take them to other hotels. No one would say why.

But inside, secret preparations were taking place: locks, curtains and knives removed from rooms. When a new convoy of guests came that night – all members of the Saudi elite – it was under armed escort. They were princes, business leaders, ministers. But here they were prisoners, snatched from private jets or royal meetings and held on corruption charges by order of the ageing King Salman and his fast-rising son Mohammed bin Salman – now Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler. Over the next few weeks, hundreds were detained in this makeshift five-star prison, reportedly subjected to intimidation and, in some cases, torture until they handed over millions of dollars in assets. It was a shakedown.

In one fell swoop, Mohammed – the Millennial prince no one expected to be named heir – had stripped his sprawling royal family of much of their power. And he was just getting started.

The crown prince, known by his initials MBS, is in the middle of a radical reshaping of Saudi Arabia. To some, he’s a visionary, taking the conservative kingdom into the 21st century, allowing women to drive and partygoers to attend raves in the desert, striking up “bromances” with celebrities – and building a futuristic oasis city. To others, he’s the tyrant cracking down on dissent, the man found by Western intelligence to have ordered the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, via his “tiger squad” of assassins.

But, as Russia’s war in Ukraine pushes up global fuel prices, and Israel’s war in Gaza deepens into one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent times, MBS is no longer the pariah that President Joe Biden once vowed Khashoggi’s murder would make him. In fact, the young prince holds the key not just to oil prices but to pulling off something much more ambitious: Biden’s “grand bargain” to end the Israel-Palestine conflict.

So who is he? How does the House of Saud rule Saudi Arabia? And why is the country key to peace in the Middle East?

First, what is the House of Saud?

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as we know it today, is not even a century old. It was founded in 1932 by King Abdulaziz, also known as Ibn Saud, who led a small army on camelback to seize his family’s ancient home of Riyadh (the Saudi capital today) and unify the old Arabian territories. By the time of his death, the kingdom was the biggest in the Middle East, stretching from the Gulf to the Red Sea. And an ocean of oil had been discovered beneath its sands.

The House of Saud, or the Al Saud, is one of the world’s biggest royal families, with 15,000 members, including 7000 princes. Abdulaziz alone had some 45 sons with 10 wives. The throne passes from man to man (generally from brother to brother before father to son). That is, if coups and murder don’t get in the way first.

The Saudi Arabia of Abdulaziz’s sons – ruled today by Salman, his 25th son, with grandson MBS – is very different from the one he founded. Its territory has always been a place for holy pilgrimage, the birthplace of Islam, and home to its two most sacred cities, Mecca and Medina. But as oil wealth rushed in, it became an international hub of skyscrapers and shopping centres, too – and the royal family grew eye-wateringly rich.

The United States arrived in the kingdom for oil – energy behemoth Aramco was once a US-Saudi venture – but it now looks to its ally Saudi Arabia for stability in the Middle East, while Saudi Arabia seeks US support against its enemy Iran.

Now, as the other major power in the region, Israel, wages war on the Palestinian enclave of Gaza following the October 7 Hamas attacks, Saudi Arabia is more important than ever to the US, says former Australian ambassador to the kingdom Kevin Magee.

Biden wants a deal that will protect Israel but bring peace to the Palestinian territories, leaving the US free to focus on China and Russia. Saudi Arabia wants to position itself as leader of the Arab Muslim world by securing statehood for the Palestinians – and to forge a new pact with the US for defence guarantees and nuclear energy technology.

“The US will have to give MBS what he wants,” says Magee. “It’s hard to see them pulling this off without Saudi sign-off.”

Yet Western alliances jar with the kingdom’s strict branch of Sunni Islam, Salafism, sometimes called Wahhabism (though not by Saudis) for its 18th-century founder, cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. His alliance with the Saud dynasty helped the family unify Arabia, and their rule is still partially built on the Wahhabi clergy. So, although two-thirds of Saudis are under 30 and more citizens are on social media than in almost any other country, much of the kingdom can feel stuck in time.

Prisoners are still beheaded in town squares and, until recently, morality police would stalk the streets looking for those breaching Islamic law or sharia – women uncovered or music playing, for example. (Saudi King Faisal was murdered in 1975 over a dispute that began with the introduction of television to the kingdom.)

Jonathan Panikoff, a former top US intelligence officer who helped brief the president on Saudi Arabia during its turbulent recent years, says the kingdom is walking a tightrope between the old order and the urgent need to diversify its economy. Saudi Arabia is the world’s biggest oil exporter and it still runs off the back of those profits – citizens as well as princes often live subsidised lifestyles. Corruption is common. And women have been largely restricted from working at all.

The country only has so much time left to reform its economy before the oil money starts drying up as the world shifts from fossil fuels, says Panikoff, now at the Atlantic Council. It needs more foreign investment (but more local employment). It needs tourism and recreation. He sees virtually all of Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy through the lens of this mammoth task at home, whether it’s building the futuristic city Neom in the desert or wooing the then-Trump administration while courting Chinese investment.

“MBS knows he has to move quick,” Panikoff says.

How did MBS rise to power?

A few months before the 2017 Ritz-Carlton “purge”, another palace coup of sorts shocked the kingdom. Mohammed bin Nayef, the king’s nephew, was next in line to the throne. MBN, as he’s known, was well-regarded by the West, the intelligence chief credited with helping stamp out al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia after 9/11. (The terror cell’s founder, Osama bin Laden, was the son of a Saudi construction magnate.) “MBN was the key man then,” says Magee, and seen as a safe pick to succeed Salman (who is now 88).

This time, the line of Saudi kings was veering into a third generation. Though a king chose his successor, it was generally decided by consensus among Abdulaziz’s surviving sons, too, as most important decisions still were then in the kingdom.

King Salman, known as the fearsome disciplinarian of the Saud family, had raised eyebrows in 2015 when he appointed his seventh son, Mohammed, then 29, to the roles of defence minister and deputy crown prince.

Few people outside the kingdom had heard of MBS. The boy had grown up in the shadow of successful older half-brothers and cousins – a princely pool of astronauts, billionaire investors, ministers and Oxford fellows. He hadn’t been educated abroad as they had. He’d stayed in Riyadh, where his father had long served as governor. Even the international intelligence community had barely noticed him. “I don’t think anyone would’ve said, ‘Oh, that’s the guy [to watch]’,” Panikoff says.

But MBS was considered intelligent and hard-working (a “bright technocrat”, recalls Magee, who met him at functions). “Salman saw something,” says Magee. “It’s just like any family, not every son has the same qualities.” And it soon became clear that MBS was every bit as fierce as his father.

MBS, the little cousin who princes once teased as the son of a Bedouin tribeswoman, was now ruler in all but name – crown prince – and in charge of the key ministries.

One of his first acts as defence minister was to launch a bombing campaign against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen as it descended into civil war, a conflict that has spiralled into a humanitarian disaster. Later, MBS led a regional blockade against another neighbour, Qatar. Many in the royal family began to worry what this bold, young prince would do next. Still, MBS was not heir yet.

Then in June 2017, MBN was summoned to see the king. According to multiple insider accounts, he was stripped of his phone (and security guards) and held in a room all night. He was told the royal council had dismissed him as crown prince, but later, a court cameraman captured the strange scene of MBS kissing MBN and accepting his “abdication”.

MBS, the little cousin who princes once teased as the son of a Bedouin tribeswoman, was now ruler in all but name – crown prince – and in charge of the key ministries: energy, defence, economy, and religion.

After the Ritz-Carlton purge a few months later, he took $US100 billion from his royal relatives (corruptly acquired assets, MBS said, rightly returned to the Treasury). Even family members once thought untouchable were forced to hand over millions, including the head of the National Guard. Some swept up in the arrests were hospitalised. At least one man died.

Lina al-Hathloul, whose activist sister Loujain was imprisoned the following year, is one of many Saudis who call it a coup: “The royal family didn’t want [MBS]. The people didn’t ... Now we have a one-man rule.”

Others say the prince had to take control of the kingdom to push through the radical reforms needed to fix its economy and clean up a lazy bureaucracy run on kickbacks. MBS has a vision, his proponents say, and it’s already dramatically changed life in Saudi Arabia.

It could also change the Middle East.

Why is Saudia Arabia important to Israel-Palestine?

By some measures, things were looking more stable in the region at the start of 2023. Enemies Saudi Arabia and Iran had agreed to restore diplomatic relations in a breakthrough deal – albeit one brokered by the US’s own rival China – and Saudi was in peace talks with the Houthis. MBS was even talking about normalising relations with Israel.

“He’d decided he needed to fix these conflicts so he could focus on fixing his economy,” says Magee. “MBS is not as distracted by religion and [regional] politics as other kings have been. He’s different.”

Then, the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel flipped the chessboard.

‘The White House has been briefing about a “grand bargain” for Palestine it is trying to broker between Israel and Saudi Arabia.’

Magee, who has been speaking with Saudi diplomats of late, says one likely motivation for those atrocities was to sour the Saudi-Israel deal – a theory also suggested by the White House early on. “That would’ve been the heart of Islam making peace with Israel without any wins for Palestine,” Magee says. “Saudis say they’d have stood up for Palestine anyway. But you only have to look at the [previous] deals, talk of Palestinian self-determination and [limits] on Israeli settlements, that never actually happened, while Israel’s still benefited from peace with its Arab neighbours like Jordan and Egypt.”

Now that Israel has gone so far in response, killing tens of thousands of Palestinians trapped in Gaza as it hunts Hamas, Magee says, “ordinary Saudis, and the other Arab states, won’t stand for it”.

MBS has since stressed there can be no deal with Israel without a ceasefire and Palestinian statehood – that means, he says, the return of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, including East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel since 1967. Behind closed doors, MBS is reportedly open to a weaker, non-binding commitment from Israel on this long-sought “two-state solution” for Palestine, if it means guaranteed US military support in the event of an attack on Saudi Arabia. And he wants help developing a civilian nuclear energy program (which some diplomats suspect may be cover for building nuclear weapons to counter Iran).

Ahead of the US election, the White House has been briefing journalists about a “grand bargain” for Palestine it is trying to broker between Israel and Saudi Arabia. “The US gives Saudi something it wants, Saudi gives Israel what it wants – the centre of Islam endorsing a peace deal – and Israel accepts a two-state solution,” says Magee. At least, that’s the idea.

While Israel has said ties with Saudi Arabia are key to ending the war, it’s unclear if it would accept a Palestinian state, given the current hard-right cabinet that’s helping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hold on to power.

Also unlikely, experts say, is US Congress signing off on Saudi Arabia’s military and nuclear demands. Congress is largely controlled by Republicans, who are largely controlled by Donald Trump, and he won’t want Biden closing an historic Middle East peace pact.

Still, if any Saudi leader were to agree to this “moonshot deal”, experts say, MBS could be the one – bold and increasingly eager to prove himself on the world stage as a peacemaker. But would he settle for helping forge “the deal of the century” without a US guarantee in return?

For all their sympathy for Palestine, Magee thinks Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab states will take care of their own interests first. “And MBS takes care of MBS first.”

How is MBS changing the kingdom?

The crown prince has a lot to do back home. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. The will of the king is law. But MBS runs his father’s court and state. He’s like the chief executive of the kingdom. And he’s been given free rein to unchain the economy from oil by opening it to the world. His plan is called Vision 2030, an ambitious suite of social reforms and high-tech infrastructure projects designed to draw more women and young Saudis into the workforce – and to secure serious international investment.

In 2019, he started taking public the country’s huge oil company Aramco. And he’s turbocharged Saudi Arabia’s languishing sovereign wealth fund, driving it to make bigger investments, including in world sport.

Vision 2030’s centrepiece is Neom, a proposed $500-billion-dollar metropolis in the desert on the Red Sea coast 33 times the size of New York City that promises to use solar power, robots and even flying cars to forge a kind of sustainable utopia (but is yet to see much real construction). It will be open to the world’s top innovators, MBS says, the Silicon Valley of the Middle East. There will be luxury resorts studded among islands, the first skiing complex in the Gulf, a floating industrial city to service shipping routes and, running straight through it, a mirrored vertical city called The Line.

The hope is that it’ll keep Saudis from spending their money abroad in cosmopolitan playgrounds such as Dubai and Europe and draw in tourists and investors by the millions within the next 10 years. Neom will be a place foreigners will want to live, not just visit, MBS says, with softer laws than for regular Saudis. There will even be alcohol. Saudi Arabia is already spending big on Neom’s PR push, even if officials are reportedly terrified they won’t meet its ambitious timelines, and foreigners are wary of the city’s planned surveillance. Meanwhile, some tribespeople who call the site home have already been killed or executed for resisting their forced displacement.

These plans would be radical anywhere but this is Saudi Arabia, a kingdom that had actually become stricter in the decade since MBS was born. In 1979, a group of religious extremists took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca (via guns hidden in coffins). They were railing against what they called Western decadence among the Saudi royals. And the royals, fearing Islamic rebellion of the kind that had then recently engulfed Iran, responded to the bloody siege by giving the clerics and the morality police even more power.

In 2016, MBS de-fanged the religious police and began reining in the male guardianship system.

Growing up in the kingdom after the crackdown, Lina al-Hathloul recalls how hard it was for the women in her family to get around. They always needed a male driver or escort and were usually segregated in public. “My father was involved in everything my mother wanted to do. I’d see her struggling.”

Then, in 2016, MBS de-fanged the religious police, stripping them of their street arrest powers, and began reining in the male guardianship system, including stopping forced marriage. Today, men and women can mingle freely in cafes, restaurants and offices, see international music acts in concert, even go to dance parties. Women can not only travel solo and drive, they can be Uber drivers. Foreigners can get tourist visas. The kingdom is open for business, MBS says.

The reforms have helped make him a star among Saudi Arabia’s youthful population. He’s clearly a leader of a new generation, Panikoff says. Suddenly, there were diplomatic channels into the kingdom via the prince’s WhatsApp account. Yet, while more of life has opened for Saudis, Hathloul says they are less free, too. And they are afraid.

What about all the arrests and spying?

Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was a reluctant dissident. Once a court insider championing MBS’s reforms, he was shocked by the 2017 purges, which rounded up hundreds of moderate activists and academics as well as the elite. (Popular reformist cleric Salam al-Ouda is still facing the death penalty for posting a Tweet advocating a peaceful end to the Qatar blockade.)

In 2018, Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to pick up marriage paperwork and never walked out. Leaked recordings by Turkish intelligence revealed that, as his fiancee waited outside the building, a Saudi hit squad pounced. The CIA linked the crown prince’s close associates to Khashoggi’s murder and concluded that MBS himself had approved a plot to capture or kill him. MBS has denied knowing of the plan but has taken responsibility as de facto ruler.

That same year, Hathloul’s sister Loujain was snatched in more raids back home. She’d been jailed before for defying the old ban on women driving. But this time, her sister says Loujain spent the first month of her arrest being tortured – “electrocuted, waterboarded, deprived of sleep, beaten”. She was imprisoned for three years on terrorism charges. While she’s since been released under a travel ban, “she’s not safe,” Hathloul says. “She’s surveilled … We found Pegasus [spyware] on her phone. She just went from a small prison to a bigger one.”

The Saudi state is known to hunt dissidents with spyware and social media bots (called the “army of flies” online). MBS’s top aides have even infiltrated X to access information on his critics. And the spyware found on the phone of Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post where Khashoggi penned columns critical of the regime, seemed to come from MBS’s own WhatsApp account. (Saudi Arabia denied having anything to do with the hacking.)

‘A couple of years ago, I might have thought [he’d face trouble]. But now he’s taken such firm control.’

While MBS has spoken of wanting to return to the “moderate open-minded Islam we used to be” before the Wahhabi clerics were empowered to police people’s lives, Hathloul says he has turned the country into a police state of his own. At home, many Saudis routinely put their phones in the fridge before speaking for fear of being caught criticising the regime. Her parents are also banned from leaving the kingdom, but Hathloul has moved overseas to advocate for her sister. Our conversation would see her thrown in jail or worse if she set foot back home to see her family, she sighs.

MBS’s crackdown on dissent does extend to the Wahhabi clergy, too, helping him drive through his social changes, such as legalising cinemas, at a breakneck pace, Panikoff says. “A couple of years ago, I might have thought [he’d face trouble]. But now he’s taken such firm control.”

Still, the reforms aren’t complete. Parts of the male guardianship system remain in place, and many women continue to flee the country – including reportedly the two Saudi sisters found dead in a Sydney apartment in 2022.

“For him to get legitimacy, he had to do what the West wants to hear,” Hathloul says. “People did believe he was a reformer. But the real reformers are behind bars.”

What’s the future for MBS and the West?

In 2018, Khashoggi’s murder made MBS a near pariah overnight. While his friendships with president Trump (and his son-in-law Jared Kushner) seemed to hold, foreign investment crucial to Vision 2030 slumped, and other world leaders gave the prince the cold shoulder.

MBS himself was reportedly caught off guard by the backlash. There was an awkward photo op with Khashoggi’s son, then a secret Saudi trial, which the UN called a sham, sentenced five men to death over the murder. (Inside the kingdom, it’s rumoured MBS saw off a bid to oust him by angry royals.)

But in 2022, when another autocrat, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine and sparked a global energy crisis, British PM Boris Johnson was on a plane to Riyadh within days. As oil prices skyrocketed over the next few months, Biden followed – bumping fists with MBS. Later, when the prince became prime minister, the US granted MBS immunity from the crime as head of a foreign nation.

An intense campaign of Saudi investment in world sport, from tennis and golf to the Olympics, even women’s soccer, has since been called “sportwashing” by critics – attempts to clean up the kingdom’s brand. (An unfazed MBS says he “will continue doing sportwashing” if it means lifting his country’s GDP: “I’m aiming for another 1.5 per cent”.)

The spin seems to be working, sighs Magee: “I think he’s largely gotten away with it.”

“We should have red lines” and call out human rights abuses, Panikoff says, especially in diplomatic efforts behind the scenes. But he argues the West’s influence on MBS is overestimated and unlikely to make him “relinquish his more authoritarian tendencies”. He’s a different leader to the Western-educated princes the US is used to dealing with – with a much smaller circle of advisers. “He stayed in Saudi Arabia. He’s Saudi through and through.”

‘You can’t isolate a country as important as Saudi Arabia for long.’

What would get his attention? A Western boycott of Saudi oil certainly, or no more US weapons sales to the kingdom (Australia too still sells it weapons). Still, Panikoff and Magee suspect MBS would only drift closer to the Chinese and the Russians, who have both been making greater commercial inroads into the kingdom of late, even if neither power is likely to replace the US as a major military ally. MBS himself has said of Washington’s cold shoulder: “I believe other people in the East are going to be super happy.”

Panikoff thinks the West and Saudi Arabia still need each other “whether we like it or not”. ”You can’t isolate a country as important as Saudi Arabia for long,” adds Magee.

Panikoff calls MBS impulsive, astute and unpredictable. “He’s made mistakes and my sense is he’s gonna make more. The question is whether he makes the same mistakes again.”

But, even in the wild world of Saudi politics, it seems certain he’ll become the next king. “He could reign for 40, 50 years. That gives him time: time to ride things out, to shape the country to his vision. I think he sees himself as a historical, transformative figure.”

“Of course, it’s really just him at the top now. When things go well, he’ll get the credit. But when things go bad, there’s nobody left to blame.”

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