THE AUTOCRAT’S ASCENT
There may not even be a name for what the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has been doing in the U.S. for three weeks, but he has been doing a lot of it. By the time 32-year-old Mohammed bin Salman departs, he will have visited five states plus the District of Columbia, four Presidents, five newspapers, uncounted moguls and Oprah. America has not seen the like since Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev arrived in September 1959 in a Tupolev 114 with cracks in the fuselage to knock around the country for 13 days, putting a relatable human face on America’s most dangerous enemy.
Bin Salman’s ride is a Boeing 747 with God Bless You emblazoned under the cockpit in Arabic and English. And the kingdom he essentially rules—as iron-fisted regent of his ailing 82-year-old father, King Salman—defines frenemy. His U.S. itinerary (a week longer than Khrushchev’s) is as wide-ranging as the American distrust of his homeland: 55% of Americans disapprove of Saudi Arabia, according to the latest Gallup survey. In the 1970s, the Saudis engineered the oil embargo that had Americans waiting in gas lines; in the ’90s, U.S. troops scrambled into the desert to save the Saudis in the First Gulf War; and when American families drew up emergency safety plans in the fall of 2001, it was after the terrorist attacks orchestrated by one Saudi, Osama bin Laden, whose countrymen accounted for 15 of the 19 people who carried out the attacks. A great deal has turned on the actions of men in red checkered headscarves and flowing robes.
So there could hardly be a more dis-arming question than the one bin Salman poses in the hotel suite where he has just sat for a formal portrait, once the cameras are finally gone:
“Can I take this stuff off?”
The instant transformation that follows—kerchief off, ceremonial robe handed to an aide—captures the entire point of his sojourn: to sell skeptical Americans on his audacious, risky plan to modernize Saudi Arabia and reassert its primacy in the Middle East. Over the course of three years since his father became king, bin Salman has ruthlessly consolidated control over the kingdom’s economic and security power centers. He has introduced modest liberalization and sharply escalated a proxy war with Iran across the region, creating a humanitarian crisis in neighboring Yemen. And he
