Mohammed bin Salman doesn’t care what the West thinks of him

Saudi Arabia is a bit like us. It’s decent at football. It holds conferences to talk about things like ‘investing in humanity’. Bruno Mars is doing a concert there next week. But then again, 17 criminals have been executed in Saudi Arabia in the past two weeks. Many had their heads chopped off. Drains in the kingdom’s public squares wash away blood, not water.

Western governments play up reforms in Saudi Arabia. Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is a visionary! He shut down the religious police and let women drive! It justifies the controversial relationship. The Saudis are the world’s largest oil exporter, and they buy our expensive weapons, but it’s easier to say that Jamal Khashoggi’s death and the famine in Yemen were just missteps on the way to attaining a higher western liberalism. One former US diplomat told me that, by their count, the kingdom’s ruling Saud family has saved thousands of American lives through intelligence sharing, and only cost one.