Mohammed bin Salman doesn’t care what the West thinks of him

Saudi Arabia is a bit like us. It’s decent at football. It holds conferences to talk about things like ‘investing in humanity’. Bruno Mars is doing a concert there next week. But then again, 17 criminals have been executed in Saudi Arabia in the past two weeks. Many had their heads chopped off. Drains in the kingdom’s public squares wash away blood, not water.

Western governments play up reforms in Saudi Arabia. Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is a visionary! He shut down the religious police and let women drive! It justifies the controversial relationship. The Saudis are the world’s largest oil exporter, and they buy our expensive weapons, but it’s easier to say that Jamal Khashoggi’s death and the famine in Yemen were just missteps on the way to attaining a higher western liberalism. One former US diplomat told me that, by their count, the kingdom’s ruling Saud family has saved thousands of American lives through intelligence sharing, and only cost one. He couldn’t say that publicly.

Really, though, lots of Saudi Arabia hasn’t changed. The UN called the 17 recent executions ‘a deeply regrettable step’. They followed a mass killing of 81 criminals back in March. More people have been put to death this year than in the past two put together. 

We were told that the executions would stop. A couple of years ago, Saudi Arabia stopped killing people for lots of non-violent crimes, including ones related to drugs. It was another reform to keep us quiet after Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. But now that’s been reversed. Drug smuggling is punishable by death again. The 17 recent executions were due to drug crimes. Seven Saudis, four Syrians, three Pakistanis and three Jordanians. 

MBS doesn’t care how he looks to us anymore. He probably never did. China, not the United States, is by far the kingdom’s most important trading partner, and the CCP isn’t fussed about western liberalism. Trade between China and Saudi Arabia has risen by a third in recent years, and the Chinese buy more Saudi oil than anyone else. Meanwhile, trade with the US has fallen. ‘Where is the potential in the world today?’ MBS said in an interview with the Atlantic in March. ‘It’s in Saudi Arabia. And if you want to miss it, I believe other people in the East are going to be super happy.’

We’re not helping with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s one serious worry abroad, either. American talks with Iran about their nuclear programme are going nowhere, and the regime’s missiles are still a threat to Saudi Arabia. Iranian drone attacks on oil fields in Abqaiq and Khurais a few years ago took out almost 60 per cent of the kingdom’s oil production. Earlier this month, the Saudis said another attack from Iran was imminent. What use are our security guarantees?

MBS knows that his position is safe. No one in London or Washington wants the Saud family out of power, and he is clearly going to succeed his father as king. ‘Do you honestly think that Ed Davey and the Lib Dems are waiting in the wings there’, asks one former British official close to the royal court. The Crown Prince can do what he wants.

Saudi Arabia is only going to change so much, so quickly. We deluded ourselves with the thought that the kingdom was going to become like us any time soon. We have less power there than we used to, and MBS will reform the kingdom when it serves him best. This shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s our fault if it is.