Ben Hubbard on MBS
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2020
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
Saudi Arabia continues to be a mainstay of newspaper headlines, whether it be for its oil price war with Russia or for news about Turkish indictments in connection with the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But making sense of Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Mohammed Bin Salman, known widely as MBS, can be a difficult proposition. He has made social reforms—lifting the ban on women driving and taking power away from Saudi Arabia’s infamous religious police—but he has no interest in political reform and has a propensity to take impulsive and remarkably violent action, both in the foreign policy space and toward perceived enemies within Saudi Arabia and beyond. Ben Hubbard, Beirut bureau chief for the New York Times, provides an account of the young prince’s rise and his early years in power in Saudi Arabia. Jacob Schulz talked with Hubbard about MBS's rise to power, his influence on domestic life in Saudi Arabia, his relationship to Jared Kushner and the Trump administration, and about the White House response to Khashoggi’s murder.
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| 1:17.6 | Political reform is just something that he's not interested in. |
| 1:21.2 | He's never talked about democracy. |
| 1:22.7 | He's never talked about trying to find ways for citizens to play a greater role in choosing |
| 1:27.4 | who represents them or choosing how they're governed. |
| 1:30.3 | This is not what he's interested in. |
| 1:31.5 | He's very much an autocrat. |
| 1:33.3 | He wants to have the power. |
| 1:34.9 | He doesn't want there to be a lot of checks and balances on what he does. |
| 1:37.9 | He doesn't want people to criticize him. |
| 1:39.3 | He wants to get credit for the things that happen. |
| 1:41.3 | So, while we have this kind of dramatic social opening going on, you also have a quite strict |
| 1:47.4 | authoritarian crackdown. |
| 1:49.6 | I'm Jacob Schultz and this is the Lafayette Podcast March 31st, 2020. |
| 1:57.5 | Saudi Arabia continues to be a mainstay of newspaper headlines, whether it be for |
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