Global News Podcast
The Global Story: Mohammed bin Salman from pariah to peacemaker
Sun, 16 Mar 2025
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was publicly identified as the man who ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. As a result, he was referred to as a pariah. So, how did MBS go from pariah to peacemaker?
Chapter 1: What is the podcast's main topic about Mohammed bin Salman?
Twice now in the last few weeks, the Saudi capital of Riyadh has played host to the biggest movers and shakers of the war in Ukraine. Russia, America and, of course, the Ukrainians themselves. Why Riyadh? because of one man's influence, Saudi Arabia's effective ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, known near universally by his initials MBS.
Just a few years ago, he was publicly identified as the man who ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, tortured, killed and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. As a result, MBS was called a pariah by no less than Joe Biden. But he's also the man who's driven the modernisation and diversification of the desert kingdom.
Now he has made Riyadh a place where the world comes to try and do deals. So how did Mohammed bin Salman go from pariah to peacemaker? With me today is Jonathan Rugman, journalist, author and the producer of the BBC TV series The Kingdom, about the life of the Saudi Crown Prince. It's a pleasure, Jonny. Can we start with the man?
I mean, how much do we know of what Mohammed bin Salman is like as a person?
Chapter 2: How did Mohammed bin Salman rise to power in Saudi Arabia?
It's a very good question. He's 39 years old. He's over six foot tall. He's bearded. He's charismatic in the way of a kind of old-fashioned tribal Saudi prince. He's a workaholic. He likes to stay up for much of the night. He will summon visitors at one o'clock in the morning if that suits him. He is a man on a mission to change his country as quickly as he can. And I think he feels that he's in a
a race against time to do that. And that may be one of the things which made him appeal to his own father, King Salman, in terms of who was going to be his heir. King Salman had plenty of other sons to choose from. MBS is the chosen one.
He's the heir to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which makes him in charge of the world's biggest exporter of oil and one of the world's biggest importers of weapons.
I just want to clear up this question of his role. He is the crown prince, and yet he is constantly described as the de facto ruler, the effective ruler. This is because, what, his father is now essentially so old that he is no longer running the show and that Mohammed bin Salman has taken on the mantle of ruler.
Yes. The king is now 89 years old. And the iller his father has become, and this isn't something that is talked about openly in Saudi Arabia, but is sort of widely acknowledged by those in the know, the more power MBS has accrued. So he's been crown prince since 2017. And then in 2022, he was made prime minister. Nobody's in any doubt in Saudi Arabia who rules the roost.
And he's not just in charge of an absolute monarchy where there are no political parties and no demonstrations about anything, but he also has an unprecedented degree of power even within that system. because he has sidelined potential rivals, curbed the power of Islamic clerics, and put the frighteners up, the business community, who have all had to step into line.
MBS, as he's known, Mohammed bin Salman, has compared himself with Alexander the Great. I mean, clearly, that impulsiveness is evident from a series of events. from 2015 when his father became king. And the question is, has he changed?
Let's talk about some of the things that took place. First of all, that conflict with Yemen, how he ended up putting together a coalition to go to war in Yemen against what were then known as the Houthi rebels. This is 2015. First of all, the process by which he got Saudi Arabia into that conflict was fairly curious, wasn't it?
Well, there were various things that were different about the way MBS went to war in Yemen. First of all, he dispatched with the usual slow, rather conservative way of making decisions in Saudi Arabia, where people sit around and talk about it for a long time. He didn't do that. He didn't consult the Americans to any significant extent.
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Chapter 3: What was the international reaction to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi?
And he never came out again alive.
And then I called the consulate. He said there is no one inside. And then I got really scared. Where is Jamal? What happened to Jamal?
The Turks were bugging the Saudi consulate and they successfully recorded conversations in the lead up to the killing and indeed the killing itself, which they released to the international press. Astonishing move against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
And to cut a long story short, Donald Trump, the president at the time, gave MBS a free pass in the sense that if you look at one of Bob Woodward's books on the first Trump presidency… He quotes Trump as saying, I saved his behind. Tell him he owes us one. In other words, Trump very much sort of took ownership of the fact that that MBS survived that scandal.
Although his successor, Joe Biden, published the intelligence into the killing scandal.
A U.S. intelligence report has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally approved the murder of the exiled journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
the operation to either capture or kill the journalist was most likely approved by the Saudi crown prince, simply down to his absolute control of the Saudi security services. And several of the men in the hit squad were bodyguards of the crown prince, and they were flying on diplomatic passports on a plane owned by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
Did you order the murder of Jamal Khashoggi? Absolutely not. This was a heinous crime. But I take full responsibility as a leader in Saudi Arabia.
So by 2019, 2020, Mohammed bin Salman has consolidated power domestically. But internationally, he's in trouble because of the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi.
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Chapter 4: How did Mohammed bin Salman manage the aftermath of Khashoggi's murder?
Pop stars and tech titans, founders and filmmakers, inventors and investors, we cover them all. And for the first time, we're talking about a video game designer.
Yeah, we're talking about Marcus Persson, the Swedish coding king who programmed the world's most successful game, Minecraft, all by himself.
He made a billion, but is he good, bad, or just another billionaire? Find out on Good Bad Billionaire, listen on the BBC app, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You're listening to The Global Story from the BBC World Service. There's a fresh episode available as a podcast each weekday. Just search for The Global Story wherever you get your podcasts. With me is Jonathan Rugman.
We've mentioned Donald Trump a little bit as we've talked, but perhaps what we haven't made clear is how early on Mohammed bin Salman and Donald Trump built a face-to-face relationship because... It was, to re-add, rather bizarrely in many people's eyes, that Donald Trump went first. It was his first international trip, wasn't it, in his first term?
And he built a relationship that has been very strong ever since.
Yes, that's right.
I have always heard about the splendor of your country and the kindness of your citizens. But words do not do justice to the grandeur of this remarkable place.
I think it goes way back, actually, because when Trump announced that he was running for president in 2016, he made a speech in Trump Tower. In that speech, he said, I love the Saudis. They buy apartments from me. Very early on, he had this sense that these people had unimaginable amounts of money. And that impressed him.
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Chapter 5: Why is Mohammed bin Salman considered a key global figure despite controversies?
Some of the things that have been approved and are currently under construction and will be delivered... for Saudi Arabia very soon, and that's for their protection.
And the Saudis were relieved that he wasn't Barack Obama, that he wasn't lecturing them on human rights, and they felt that this was a president that they could do business with.
$3 billion, $533 million, $525 million. That's peanuts for you.
rather than doing Washington's bidding, which was certainly, I think, how MBS saw that his predecessors had done things.
How important in the relationship between Donald Trump and Mohammed bin Salman is Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner? He seems to have been behind the scenes linking the two men, and he seems to be particularly close as well to Mohammed bin Salman.
Yes, well, Trump put Jared Kushner in charge of attempts to broker a Middle East peace process in the Trump first term.
The economic impact could be felt throughout the entire region by the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Lebanese.
And Jared Kushner was the prince slaying of one dynastic family going to meet the prince of another. And they would stay up late at night playing video games. They would WhatsApp each other. And I think the strength of that relationship actually emboldened MBS to do some of the rather outlandish things that he's done.
So, for example, when he had hundreds of princes locked up in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Trump tweeted in favor of this. The stronger the relationship with Kushner became, I think the more MBS felt emboldened to do the things that he did. I think there was a degree of permissiveness there and impulsivity in the young Saudi crown prince. What happens at the end of the first Trump presidency?
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Chapter 6: How has Mohammed bin Salman repositioned himself as a peacemaker?
But then Zelensky, after he met MBS, talked of his wise perspective, which is a very different MBS to the one, the impulsive and rather dangerous young man we saw when he first became current prince.
Given what you understand about MBS, both his personality, his vision, let's be honest, also his ego, Do you think the positioning of him and his country at a sort of diplomatic center or the attempt to is about ego and position and Saudi Arabia sort of coming of age globally? Or is it about what he can then leverage from that, whether it's business or personal or consolidation of his own power?
I don't think it's about MBS leveraging things from others. I think it's much more about MBS projecting his nation's power. And what we're witnessing is a coming of age of a rather slumbering kingdom of that we always knew was important, but we didn't know much about it. It was the custodian of the two holy mosques. It had lots of oil. It had a strict Wahhabist Islamic faith.
And that's about as much as anybody really knew. And I think MBS sees himself, rather in his grandfather's shoes, as a man who's putting his kingdom on the map. And doing so... for generations to come. So he's only 39 now. He could be in charge of Saudi Arabia for the next 50 years if he's not assassinated. And he has enormous power to wield, enormous wealth.
It's so easy to get the oil out and to market. Why didn't this happen before, I think, is how a lot of people might look at this when you look at how powerful and rich Saudi Arabia is. And it's taken a young man with vision and ambition and ruthlessness to do what his predecessors hadn't managed.
Do you admire him?
I think he's a thug, but he's not the only thug on the world stage. I admire what he's trying to do to his kingdom, that he's trying to drag it into the 21st century. I admire the fact that he's stood up to religious extremism. I admire the fact that radical Islam is not being exported from Saudi Arabia to places like Pakistan in the way that it was.
I admire the fact that men and women can now mix freely and feel that they're living in a far less restrictive world. But I think there's a price to pay when you have an absolute ruler like MBS, which is a really ruthless grip on power. Some people would say, well, that's what you've got to do in order to stay alive. You've got to be one step ahead of your enemies.
Jonathan, pleasure to talk to you.
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