DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — In the years since Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman catapulted to power, it has been hard to find a controversy in the Middle East that doesn’t somehow involve the 37-year-old heir to the throne. Now he’s pivoting to his next audacious plan: Giving peace a chance.
The moves toward reaching a détente with Iran, reestablishing ties to Syria and ending the kingdom’s yearslong war in Yemen could extricate Prince Mohammed from some of the thorniest regional issues he faces.
Whether it succeeds will have profound impacts on the wider Middle East and on his expansive plans to reshape the kingdom away from oil and further into his image. Failure threatens not only his impending rule over a nation crucial to global energy supplies, but a wider region shaken by years of tensions, inflamed in part by his decisions.
Prince Mohammed’s rise accelerated in 2015 after his father, King Salman, appointed him as deputy crown prince. That year saw Mohammed, also the country’s defense minister at the time, plunge Saudi Arabia into a military campaign in Yemen, a civil war that grew into a regional proxy battle still continuing today. Riyadh supports Yemen’s exiled government against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who hold Sanaa, the country’s capital.
The tensions with Iran, at the time still in a nuclear deal with world powers, escalated with Saudi Arabia’s execution of a prominent Shiite cleric in 2016. Protesters stormed Saudi diplomatic posts in Iran, and Riyadh broke off ties to Tehran.
In 2017, Saudi Arabia joined three other Arab nations in boycotting Qatar, which maintains ties to Iran. The same year, the prince made what appeared to be a heavy-handed attempt to break Iranian-backed Hezbollah’s domination of Lebanon’s government by inviting Lebanon’s prime minister to the kingdom and then allegedly forcing him to announce his resignation. The attempt failed and Saudi Arabia’s influence in Lebanon has been diminished ever since.
Prince Mohammed days later launched a purported anti-corruption campaign that saw the Saudi elite locked in the Ritz Carlton until they handed over billions in assets. The slaying of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, believed by the United States and others to be at the prince’s orders, followed in 2018.
But an attack that followed likely changed the prince’s calculations. In September 2019, a barrage of cruise missiles and drones struck at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, temporarily halving production.
While the Houthis initially claimed the assault, the West and Saudi Arabia later blamed the attacks on Tehran. Independent experts also linked the weapons to Iran. Though Tehran still denies carrying out the attack, even United Nations investigators said that “the Houthi forces are unlikely to be responsible for the attack.”