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| Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia arrives with his entourage at the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh in October 2017 © New York Times / Redux / eyevine |
Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, established two things soon after his father, Salman, became king in 2015 and began handing him the keys to the kingdom.
The aspiring wunderkind, now aged 35, quickly cleared a path to the throne and ended the House of Saud’s consensual model of an absolute monarchy with no absolute monarch, seizing all the reins of power. Second, he surged forward with social and economic reform in a state until now under theocratic tutelage, where change has traditionally been driven at speeds between slow and stop.
Prince Mohammed set a furious pace for a ruling family that would coalesce slowly around low common denominators, with caution and consensus as its watchwords, so change-averse it did not outlaw slavery until 1962.
MBS, the colloquial shorthand into which he soon abbreviated amid effusions of hyperbole, came seemingly out of nowhere. Almost no foreign ministry or security service had a file on him. After he launched an air war against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen in March 2015, Washington sent Tony Blinken, a top adviser to then vice-president Joe Biden, to Riyadh. The person he met was Mohammed bin Nayef, a long-trusted US ally MBS would depose as crown prince in 2017.
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