Daniel Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack
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and isn’t put o by the human cost o doing so. Whether he succeeds
or fails, MBS has deÄed the risk-averse logic o Saudi politics and is
betting everything on his far-reaching reforms.
On foreign policy, MBS has also broken with decades o tradi-
tion. From 1953 to 2015, under Kings Saud, Faisal, Khalid, Fahd,
and Abdullah, Saudi Arabia had a modest international role. It
mostly relied on others, primarily the United States, to secure its
interests, tossing in a little checkbook diplomacy from time to time.
It rarely fought wars, and when it did, it was only as a bit player fol-
lowing someone else’s lead. It kept its squabbles with its Arab allies
under wraps and hewed closely to the American line. MBS has
charted a radically dierent course. Holding Lebanon’s prime min-
ister hostage to force him to resign, intervening in the Yemeni civil
war, isolating Qatar, killing the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in
Turkey, cozying up to China and Russia, threatening to acquire nu-
clear weapons, forging a tacit alliance with the Israelis at the ex-
pense o the Palestinians—all represent breathtaking departures
from past policy. Although the kingdom’s changing international
circumstances make some o this understandable, MBS has consis-
tently chosen the most radical option, at the far extreme o what
international incentives alone would have predicted.
It is useful to consider what might have happened i the system
had worked as it traditionally had. In 2017, King Salman, who had
ascended to the throne two years earlier, sidelined the incumbent
crown prince, his nephew Mohammed bin Nayef, and replaced him
with MBS, one o his younger sons. Naye was a close U.S. counter-
terrorism partner and an establishment man who favored stability
above all. Indeed, his initial appointment as crown prince was in part
meant to calm any fears that King Salman would take the country in
a dramatically dierent direction. It is hard to imagine that Naye
would have risked alienating the clerical establishment while em-
barking on high-risk gambits across the Arab world. But owing to
some combination o ambition, vision, ego, youth, risk tolerance,
insight, and ruthlessness, MBS has done exactly that.
Such top-down revolutionaries are few and far between. Yet when
they appear, they are transformative. Stalin turned the Soviet Union
into an industrial power, slaughtering tens o millions o people in
the process. Mao tried to do something similar in China, successfully
uniting the country and destroying the power o traditional elites,