Indeed, if there is any lesson to be learned from this terrible affair, it’s how blind so much of official Washington and the American press were to M.B.S.’s true nature. When the crown prince visited the United States earlier this year, he was fêted in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and, of course, by the Trump White House, as a messiah—in the mold of Gorbachev or Gandhi. “Historic night it was,’’ Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson, the actor, wrote, on Instagram, of a dinner with M.B.S. hosted by Rupert Murdoch at his vineyard in Bel Air.
It was the Trump White House that went the furthest, basing its entire Middle East strategy on the vision and maturity of the thirty-three-year-old monarch. As I detailed in my profile of M.B.S., earlier this year, Jared Kushner, sitting down with aides in the White House, unfurled a map of the Middle East shortly after Inauguration Day and wrung his hands at the dire state of the region. He dubbed M.B.S., still the deputy crown prince at the time, “the change agent,” the man who would save Saudi Arabia from otherwise certain doom. Kushner threw the Administration’s support behind him. Not long after, and not least because of the White House’s boost, M.B.S.’s chief rivals, including his cousin, the crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef, were dispatched. It was ugly, but no one seemed to mind. President Trump’s visit to the Saudi kingdom—his first trip abroad—was an orgy of mutual admiration and monarchical excess. [...]
M.B.S. told his countrymen that, in cracking down on corruption, he was doing the dirty work on their behalf. But there was no luxury that he denied himself. In 2015, while vacationing in the South of France, he bought a yacht, the Serene, from a Russian vodka tycoon, for five hundred and fifty million dollars. He bought a château west of Paris, with a cinema and a moat with a submerged glass chamber for viewing carp. And, in 2017, he reportedly spent four hundred and fifty million dollars on “Salvator Mundi,’’ the Leonardo da Vinci portrait of Jesus Christ, which he donated to the new branch of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, the fiefdom of his fellow-prince M.B.Z. [...]
The question now confronting Saudi leaders—and American ones—is whether M.B.S. can and should become king. At a glance, it seems unlikely that King Salman would part with M.B.S., long his favorite son. The humiliation for the House of Saud might be too much to endure. Even if Salman were inclined to remove M.B.S. from the line of succession, who could replace him? Nearly all of M.B.S.’s rivals have been imprisoned or humiliated.
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