The Kingdom has experienced a constant stream of political setbacks and disappointments since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s (MBS) took office. The young man is reckless and unsteady; whenever he gets out of one crisis in the Kingdom, he gets into another one.
The Kingdom experienced disappointments, defeats, and political crises in 2023. The most significant of these was its shameful stance on the Palestinian crisis, which is the issue of Arabs and Muslims. The kingdom’s pre-MBS kings used to claim that it was their mother cause, which MBS sold to Israel for no other reason but to promote his foreign image.
A few months ago, in a meeting between MBS and the Iranian Foreign Minister, he said: We learn from history to build the future. For an instant, you believe that the person who made these remarks will raise the Islam flag and restore the splendour of his nation, but his past demonstrates that he lacks historical perspective, reality awareness, and forward vision. MBS has imprisoned Saudi scholars, displaced activists, antagonized businessmen, destroyed Yemen, tarnished Saudi Arabia’s reputation by killing a freelance journalist seeking good for his country, and besieged the State of Qatar, which is part of the Kingdom in terms of land and people, while continuing to seek normalization with the Israeli occupation.
MBS’s political disappointments did not end there. He went beyond Iran’s declaration that it intended to drill and explore in the Dorra field, which is shared by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, thereby renouncing his nation’s right without raising a protest. Instead, unlike Kuwait, he did not even make snide political remarks.
After 12 years of boycott, he welcomed Syrian murderer Bashar al-Assad back into the Arab League, causing yet another setback for the Kingdom.
Foreign newspapers claimed that Mohammed bin Zayed had stabbed the Kingdom in the back by manipulating the heedless Crown Prince, who had no understanding of life or politics. This was just another political letdown the Kingdom had to endure from the Emirates. He threw the nation into a severe political crisis, which damaged its image and inflamed anti-Muslim sentiment.
The refusal of MBS to include five demands in the outcomes of the Arab-Islamic Summit for Gaza in the Kingdom—namely, stopping the transfer of American weapons to Israel, halting political and economic ties with the occupation, threatening to use oil weapons as a means of ending the war, preventing occupation aircraft from flying in Arab airspace, and forming a joint delegation to put international pressure on the occupying Zionist entity—was the biggest disappointment the Kingdom faced this year.
MBS’s disappointments in conspiring against the resistance and betraying Gaza still linger. Senior Saudi officials informed the US administration of their intention to crush the Palestinian resistance and end the conflict so that the Palestinians would accept any life, even if it meant being humiliated and submitting to the occupation.
Because MBS believes that the Zionist occupation is losing support, he acted quickly to confront the boycott campaigns. Through Turki Al-Sheikh, who oversees the entertainment file, he was able to conclude strategic partnerships between Riyadh Season and McDonald’s, the largest supporter of the Zionist occupation, challenging the sentiments of Muslims worldwide and pledging to do everything in his power to make up for the losses they suffered as a result of the massive boycott campaigns.
To sum up, whoever chooses to walk in MBS’s footsteps will only end up with economic, political, and social disappointments.
