Crown prince keeps power amid stigma of killing
Trump administration stands by king’s son
LONDON — A month after the killing of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, the Trump administration has decided to stand by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, having concluded that he is almost certain to retain his grip on power despite a growing international consensus that he bears responsibility, officials familiar with the deliberations said.
The White House was aware of the crown prince’s hostility to Khashoggi, a Virginia resident and columnist for the Washington Post, as early as Oct 9. That was seven days after the dissident had disappeared in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and long before the crown prince acknowledged that Saudi agents had killed him.
In a phone call about the case with both Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and Middle East adviser, and John Bolton, the national security adviser, Prince Mohammed argued that Khashoggi was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to two people familiar with the call. The Islamist group has branches in countries around the Middle East and to the Saudis, membership made Khashoggi a terrorist.
Rather than weighing the crown prince’s chances of retaining power, officials in the White House and around the region have turned instead to the question of what effect the stigma of the killing may have on the grand plans laid out by the 33-year-old crown prince, who could rule Saudi Arabia for the next half-century. And they are all wondering how they can leverage his vulnerability for their own benefit.
“Everybody is milking this,” said Maha Yahya, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. With the crown prince now in visible need of external assistance to rehabilitate himself, she added, “everybody is trying to turn this to their advantage and try to get what they can out of it.”
Officials in the Trump administration have discussed proposals like urging King Salman, the 82-year-old father of the crown prince, to appoint a strong prime minister or other senior official to help oversee day-to-day governance or foreign policy, according to three officials familiar with the deliberations.
But such ideas were quickly discarded as unrealistic, in part because no one would be willing to risk taking such a job, or to appear to counter Crown Prince Mohammed while he retains full control of all the Saudi intelligence and security services as well as the aging king’s ear.
One person familiar with the White House’s deliberations said the administration expects to impose some sanctions on Saudi Arabia over the Khashoggi killing, in part because of bipartisan pressure from Congress. But the White House intends to keep the sanctions limited enough to avoid a rupture in its partnership with Mohammed.
Having resolved to endure the negative publicity of standing by the crown prince, however, the White House is now hoping to extract some concessions from him in exchange for its support, potentially including steps to resolve the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar or the Saudi-led bombing of Yemen.
Overall, however, the White House’s reliance on Crown Prince Mohammed is still largely intact, in that he remains central to several administration strategies for the region, including hopes to build an Arab-Israeli alliance against Iran and to pressure the Palestinians into a peace agreement with Israel.
The killing of Khashoggi has strengthened the crown prince’s capacity to threaten or intimidate others even in his own family, royals and other Saudis said.
Andrew Miller, deputy director for policy at the Project on Middle Eastern Democracy with experience in the region, argued that the lingering stain on the crown prince is most likely to hamper him as an advocate with Western governments, where he has mainly argued for a hard line against Iran.
“I think this makes it much for difficult for him to sustain his singular focus on Iran because the actions he is condemning there, he himself is perpetrating,” Miller argued.