The Daily Populous Wednesday November 19th, 2025 morning edition
Authored by newyorker.com and submitted by newyorker

The former ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the Biden Administration, Michael Ratney, made the argument in the Wall Street Journal recently that the investments in sports weren’t really about improving M.B.S.’s image in the West, but instead about making Saudi Arabia more of a normal country. This struck me as a little far-fetched. But you seem to be saying that, regardless of what the motives were, paying comedians to come to Riyadh or spending on American sports leagues has failed as an image-improvement strategy, and is somewhat separate from Saudi Arabia’s improved relationship with Washington.

The sports spending can be more than one thing. I think that the crown prince is a sports nut and very interested in global sport, both e-sport and normal sport. And he thought that these were good investments. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. I think LIV Golf might not be a great investment, but it was more than just a P.R. effort. He thought of it as a way to both make money in the long term and to make Saudi Arabia a more normal place. Some of the sports investments have been better than others. The investments in Newcastle FC in the Premier League seem to be pretty good. The Formula One stuff that they’re doing locally, I assume, brings in some amount of tourism, although I haven’t seen figures on that. So the whole sports campaign can be more than one thing. But if it was primarily aimed at improving Saudi Arabia’s public-opinion profile in the United States, then it was wasted money. I don’t think it has made a dent in the generally negative opinion most Americans have about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

It seems like you’re describing the Biden relationship with Saudi Arabia as being more about these large economic factors. Dare I say that the Trump Administration’s embrace of M.B.S. might have to do with more personal economic matters, that Trump didn’t care about Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in the first place, and was annoyed by all the talk of punishing Saudi Arabia in his first term? And how do you understand the Trump relationship with M.B.S. now?

I don’t think it’s any different than President Trump’s policy in the first term. It’s the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks. It’s because that’s where the money is. I think President Trump, even more baldly in his second term, sees the difference between his own economic interest and the country’s economic interest as, in effect, inseparable. And that’s troublesome to me as an American citizen, but it’s certainly something that the Saudis understand because all those monarchies in the Persian Gulf region have been a combination of business interests and political interests forever, whether it’s oil or, in the pre-oil period, money from pearl diving. All of these ruling families have been part of the business environment in their countries. And so, in many ways, Saudi Arabia sees the Trump Administration as the first American government that it really understands because it’s not dissimilar to the way they view the intersection of politics and business. When Trump sent Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, to be his primary go-between with Saudi Arabia in the first term, I’m sure the Saudis understood.

It has been commonly assumed that M.B.S. wants to turn the country from a sort of strange religious dictatorship into a more banal, repressive dictatorship. Do you think that’s the way that we should understand what he’s been trying to do? I keep thinking that this is best evoked by the fact that he has been relaxing some laws that restricted women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, while at the same time throwing women’s-rights advocates in jail because he’s a dictator who wants to have political control.

The word that best describes what he wants is one that he’s used, which is that he wants Saudi Arabia to be a normal country. In the sense of the political system, he wants it to be a normal authoritarian country, i.e., a place where people can enjoy some amount of social freedom. And, on that score, he has really changed the country dramatically. I mean, not just the women driving and the women’s rights, but the availability of public entertainment, the mixing of the genders in public places, and the access women have to job opportunities in the public sphere. He thinks of that as a more normal country, and I think most Americans would probably think of that as a more normal country, but he has absolutely no desire to change the political system. In fact, he wants to recentralize power not just in the ruling family but in him personally within the family.

That’s been a big change. For decades, Saudi Arabia was basically run as a committee system, a committee of senior princes that had to sign on to anything important that was happening, and it had all the defects of committees. It was stodgy, it didn’t seize opportunities. But it had the virtue of committees, too, which is to say that they didn’t do anything spectacularly dumb. He has changed that committee system to an individual system, so sometimes they do dumb things, and he did a number of dumb things early on in the period in which he was the main decision-maker, including the war in Yemen, the blockade of Qatar, which was meant to end its support for Islamist groups, and the kidnapping of the Lebanese Prime Minister. This was a misbegotten effort to create a crisis in Lebanon, which M.B.S. thought would harm Hezbollah, but actually harmed Hezbollah’s opponents, such as the Lebanese Prime Minister himself, Saad Hariri. And the Jamal Khashoggi killing, as well. There’s been some learning from that. He’s been much more cautious on the foreign-policy scene, and I think that, with his consolidation of power, he’s not about to give that up for some kind of democratic reform.

It’s a nice time for him in that sense because he isn’t going to get many lectures about democratic reform.

From this Administration, no. He’s certainly not going to get any lectures. I think this trip is kind of a personal triumph for him. If he had come five years ago, nobody would have been talking to him.

You mentioned his foreign policy, and it seemed in the early years that he was meddling in Lebanon and Yemen and Qatar, and there was also a very aggressive posture toward the Iranians. How do you see the posture in the region now, and what have you made of the way he’s dealt with Gaza? My sense is that it seems like he’d probably love to have some sort of deal with Israel, but knows that he can’t get too far ahead of the Saudi population, which I imagine is not pleased about Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

Agitated-Airline6760 on November 19th, 2025 at 02:38 UTC »

> How M.B.S. Won Back Washington

How M.B.S. Won Back Trump.

Frankly, MBS never lost Trump to begin with so there was nothing to "win back" but money/oil to Trump and his children works.

juanitopastelito on November 19th, 2025 at 02:23 UTC »

Money. The answer is money

newyorker on November 19th, 2025 at 02:13 UTC »

After the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, Mohammed bin Salman became a pariah. He’s been slowly rehabilitated, and is now being celebrated in the Oval Office. Isaac Chotiner talks to an expert on the Middle East about how the Saudi leader won back Washington.