He will also be the leader of one of America’s closest allies and the source of many of its headaches. His father’s eventual death will leave him as the absolute monarch of the birthplace of Islam and the owner of the world’s largest accessible oil reserves. “If there are people in Washington who think he will not be, then I cannot help them. “Ask any Saudi, anyone at all, whether MBS will be king,” a senior Saudi diplomat told me. Many in Washington and other Western capitals hope his rise to the throne might still be averted.īut within the kingdom, MBS’s succession is understood as inevitable. Among those who share a dark appraisal of MBS is President Joe Biden, who has so far refused to speak with him. The Khashoggi murder fixed a view of the crown prince as brutish, thin-skinned, and psychopathic. In 2017, he rounded up hundreds of members of his own family and other wealthy Saudis and imprisoned them in Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton hotel on informal charges of corruption. MBS had already developed a reputation for ruthlessness.

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