Khashoggi and the Saudi Kingdom
from Pressure Points
from Pressure Points

Khashoggi and the Saudi Kingdom

October 22, 2018 7:48 pm (EST)

Post
Blog posts represent the views of CFR fellows and staff and not those of CFR, which takes no institutional positions.

On October 4th, I wrote a blog item here entitled "Where is Jamal Khashoggi?" Now we know: he was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

In The Weekly Standard, I've followed that blog post with a longer article entitled "The Kingdom and the Power." There I analyze what the killing of Khashoggi tells us about the Saudi government, and suggest that the centralization of power has gone too far: "MbS is today crown prince, deputy prime minister (the king always has the additional title of prime minister), defense minister, head of the Council for Economic and Development Affairs, head of the Council on Security and Political Affairs, and more. That arrangement is unprecedented for Saudi Arabia and is alien to every other Arab monarchy."

More on:

Saudi Arabia

U.S. Foreign Policy

I urge that our reaction should not be "to abandon Saudi Arabia, but to insist that Saudi Arabia move further away from gruesome violence, and start to create a system of governance and law that can truly modernize the country and sustain the alliance with it that we have had since 1945."

More on:

Saudi Arabia

U.S. Foreign Policy

Creative Commons
Creative Commons: Some rights reserved.
Close
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License.
View License Detail
Close