IN THEIR WORDS

He’s a young guy and if you let him get away with killing journalists in his 30s, it’s only going to get worse, and so this has got to be nipped in the bud. — Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, aged 33. I don’t want to waste my time. I am young. — The crown prince to Time Magazine this year. They’re spending US$110 billion purchasing military equipment and other things. If we don’t sell it to them, they’ll say, ‘Well, thank you very much, we’ll buy it from Russia,’ or ‘Thank you very much, we’ll buy it from China.’ — President Donald Trump saying he’s reluctant to give up the revenue to punish Saudi Arabia. His credibility in the West and in the U.S. is at stake. The credibility gap is going to be huge, and the Saudi boosters in D.C. are going to find it extremely difficult to portray the image that they were generally quite successful in trying to push. — Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, on the crown prince. The Saudis have had a lot of leverage with the Trump administration from the very beginning, and they have known how to get (Trump’s) attention and how he might react. They’ve known how to manage the relationship, and they treated him very much in line with royalty in his first visit and they flattered him consistently. — Karen Young, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on the Middle East. We have been extremely active both in private and in public over many years now around our concern for human rights in Saudi Arabia, and we will continue to be clear and strong in speaking up for human rights around the world regardless of with whom. — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau