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. 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 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.
Author: Isaac Chotiner
Published at: 2025-11-18 21:43:55
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