Mohammed bin Salman

Mohammad bin Salman

Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud (born 31 August 1985), also known as MBS, is the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, First Deputy Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia and the youngest minister of defense in the world.

Quotes

• You’re from Britain, and I am a fan of Churchill. And Churchill said that opportunities come during crises. And I recall Churchill’s statement whenever I see the obstacles or the crises in the region. So this is how I view the challenges or the crises in the region.
  • 2016-01-06, Interview with Muhammad bin Salman, The Economist [1]

• And the court did not, at all, make any distinction between whether or not a person is Shi’ite or Sunni. They are reviewing a crime, and a procedure, and a trial, and a sentence, and carrying out the sentence."
  • 2016-01-06, on the execution of Nimr Baqir al-Nimr. Interview with Muhammad bin Salman, The Economist

• First of all I’m not the architect of the Yemen operation. We are a country of institutions. The decision to proceed with the operation in Yemen, this is a decision to do with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defence, with the intelligence, the council of ministers, and the council of security and political affairs, and then all recommendations are submitted to His Majesty, and the decision to go forward is with His Majesty.
  • 2016-01-06, on being called the 'architect' of the Saudi intervention in Yemen. Interview with Muhammad bin Salman, The Economist

• My dream as a young man in Saudi Arabia, and the dreams of men in Saudi Arabia are so many, and I try to compete with them and their dreams, and they compete with mine, to create a better Saudi Arabia.
  • 2016-01-06, Interview with Muhammad bin Salman, The Economist

• We have our values: it is important to us, the participation in decision making; it is important to us to have our freedom of expression; it is important to us to have human rights. We have our own factors, values and principles as the Saudi society and we try to make progress according to our own needs.
  • 2016-01-06, Interview with Muhammad bin Salman, The Economist

• We know that we are a main goal for the Iranian regime. We will not wait until the battle becomes in Saudi Arabia but we will work to have the battle in Iran rather than in Saudi Arabia
  • 2017-05-07 [2]

• We are simply reverting to what we followed – a moderate Islam open to the world and all religions. 70% of the Saudis are younger than 30, honestly we won’t waste 30 years of our life combating extremist thoughts, we will destroy them now and immediately.
  • 2017-10-14 [3]

• Adopting unrealistic policies to reduce emissions by excluding main sources of energy will lead in coming years to unprecedented inflation and an increase in energy prices, and rising unemployment and a worsening of serious social and security problems.
  • 2022-07-16 [4]

Quotes about Mohammed bin Salman

• As we tried to make sense of Donald Trump's positions or when one of us tried to argue against them, we first had to ask: Why is the president so attracted to autocrats? After a contentious meeting about the president's engagement with a foreign dictator, a top national security aide offered me his take. "The president sees in these guys what he wishes he had: total power, no term limits, enforced popularity, and the ability to silence critics for good." He was spot on. It was the simplest explanation. For instance, Donald Trump sympathized with Saudi crown prince bin Salman's violent internal purge in 2017, saying the country's leaders "know exactly what they are doing" and adding that "some of those they are harshly treating have been 'milking' their country for years!" This included long-time US interlocutors who were allegedly held against their will, beaten, imprisoned, or put under house arrest.
  • Anonymous, A Warning (2019), p. 171

• The paradox wouldn’t last. Iran and Saudi Arabia both feared ISIS, but they hated each other more. Secretly, many Arabs cheered ISIS on, hoping it would bring Tehran to its knees and put an end to Iranian dreams of hegemony in the region. And as Iran took the lead in fighting ISIS on the ground, it looked like Shias were out to kill any Sunnis, the latest brutal, sectarian mutation of the Saudi-Iran rivalry. Which came first: Iran’s imperial sectarianism or the Sunni sense of exceptionalism? By now the dynamic was hard to unpack, but it was about to intensify with the rise of King Salman and his favorite son, prince Mohammad bin Salman. While Obama dismissed Iran’s “destabilizing activity” as a “low-tech, low-cost activity,” Saudi Arabia watched with alarm as Iran poured thousands of men and an estimated $35 billion into Syria to prop up Assad. Suleimani was turning into the king of Iraq. As the US-Iran nuclear negotiations inched closer to a deal in the spring of 2015, the Saudis grew unnerved by the prospect of cash flowing into Iran’s coffers after the lifting of sanctions. They seethed as US secretary of state John Kerry and the Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif exchanged pleasantries and smiled for the cameras during the negotiations.
  • Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East (2020)

• In neighboring Yemen, the Houthi rebel group had seized the capital Sana’a in September 2014 and brought down the internationally recognized government. The Saudis accused the Iranians and Hezbollah of supporting and arming the Houthi rebel group whose fighters belonged to a Shia subsect known as Zaidi. When Sana’a fell, Prince Salman was defense minister and his son Mohammad was his aide. The young prince was incensed by what he perceived as the weakness of King Abdallah in dealing with the Houthis and Iran. Some Iranian politicians declared smugly that Iran now controlled four Arab capitals: San’aa, Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut. Worse, Iran’s sphere of influence had extended to Saudi Arabia’s southern border. Soon, the Houthi rebels would start lobbing rockets into the kingdom. On January 23, 2015, King Abdallah died and Salman became king. He appointed his son as defense minister. The duo and the coterie around them wanted to push back against Iran and step into the vacuum that America was creating. The Saudis wanted to beat their chests, restore Sunni pride, and bolster their leadership of the Muslim world. And so, for the first time in its recent history, on March 25, 2015, the kingdom went to war.
  • Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East (2020)
• The Saudi military operation, launched with barely a warning to the Obama administration, was called Decisive Storm. Within hours, bombastic Saudi analysts went on television claiming the campaign would be so successful it would be studied in history books. Airplanes from Saudi allies joined in, at least initially. The Sunni world watched the Saudi air strikes against the Houthi rebels and felt their pride restored. And Prince Mohammad bin Salman, two months into his job as defense minister, was certain this would make him king of the Middle East chessboard, a mastermind who could rival Suleimani. The days of King Abdallah’s consensus politics were over, his penchant for compromise not part of Bin Salman’s repertoire. The military campaign would be anything but decisive. The Saudis had never fought a war in such a way; they had never deployed troops. They couldn’t do precision strikes with their fancy fighter jets. They were now facing a guerrilla force in rugged, hilly terrain. The conflict would drag on for years; tens of thousands of civilians would die by 2019, in air raids by the Saudi-led coalition and ground fighting, but the worst impact would be the starvation and diseases. Ten million people were on the brink of famine because of the blockade the Saudis and the United Nations had imposed, and the country was battling a dangerous outbreak of cholera. Almost ninety thousand children died. It was the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, almost on par with Syria.
  • Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East (2020)

• I believe MbS is a nationalist who loves his country and wants it to be the strongest but his problem is that he wants to rule alone.
  • Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabian journalist 2017-11-10 [5]

• He is a very active statesman, we have really warm relations. This is a person who knows what he wants and can achieve his goals. At the same time I consider him to be a reliable partner with whom one can negotiate and be sure that agreements with him will be implemented.
  • Vladimir Putin, President of Russia

• MBS is attempting to undertake LBJ-like social reforms and Thatcher-like economic reforms.
  • Salman Al-Ansari, 2017-04-27, Washington Institute