Mohammed bin Salman’s Style Shift Sets Up a New World Order Strategy
The Saudi leader has morphed from a cocksure young prince to a more patient and strategic international power broker.
Illustration: Mathieu Larone for Bloomberg
In 2020, Justin Scheck and I published Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman’s Brutal Quest for Global Power (Hachette). This Next Chapter looks at why the last four years of the crown prince’s rule have been a marked departure from his first five, and what that means for his and Saudi Arabia’s future.
The image was striking: US President Joe Biden greeting Mohammed bin Salman with a fist bump at the entrance of Jeddah’s Al Salam Royal Palace. It was July 2022 and just two years earlier, Biden had vowed to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But with oil prices surging, he could no longer afford having MBS as an enemy.