Steven A. Cook
Over the last few weeks, colleagues, bosses, mentors, and friends from high school have asked me some version of the question “What’s up with Mohammed bin Salman?” On Nov. 11 at a summit of Islamic nations in Riyadh, the Saudi crown prince called on the international community (translation: the United States) to compel Israel to “respect the sovereignty of the sisterly Islamic Republic of Iran and not to violate its lands.” At the same gathering, he described what the Israel Defense Forces had wrought in the Gaza Strip as a “collective genocide.”
This rhetoric runs against everything that most folks in Washington have come to believe about Mohammed bin Salman, thus prompting the “What’s up with him?” questions. And this time at least, the Washington foreign-policy community is not imagining things.
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