How have Saudi Arabia’s geopolitical dynamics changed under Mohammed bin Salman?

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This is the script for my video posted on June 17, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

Since 2015, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS for short, has consolidated power almost completely in the country. He’s launched an overhaul of the country’s economy, initiated unprecedented and controversial megaprojects, and dramatically liberalized Saudi society in general, while also intensifying authoritarian repression. But all of that is domestic. So how has MBS changed Saudi Arabia’s geopolitical dynamics?

Mohammed bin Salman was born in 1985 to Salman, who now serves as king and is a son of Saudi Arabia’s founder, Ibn Saud. In his early adulthood, MBS studied law and worked for several years in the private sector before becoming a special advisor to his father, who was governor of Riyadh Province at the time and his brother Abdullah was ruling as king while his next oldest brother Sultan was Crown Prince, which in Saudi Arabia is the heir to the throne. In 2011, Sultan died, making Nayef the Crown Prince, but he died the following year and Salman became Crown Prince. In 2015 Abdullah died too and Salman became king. Within months he made his nephew Muhammad, Nayef’s son, Crown Prince. But in 2017 King Salman detained Muhammad bin Nayef and forced him out, replacing him with MBS.

MBS promptly began a purge within his own family purportedly against corruption, detaining many of his relatives at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh. A lot of analysts consider this a straightforward consolidation of power and assets because the family had grown sprawling and wasteful and rival factions within the Saudi royal family threatened MBS’s authority. Very quickly, King Salman began delegating huge amounts of power to MBS, making him Prime Minister when traditionally the king himself holds that role. As head of government, this gave MBS sovereign immunity against foreign criminal charges, which will come up later. But suffice it to say that King Salman has largely withdrawn from public life for MBS to occupy the role as Saudi Arabia’s leader.

In 2016, MBS launched Vision 2030, a plan to diversify the country’s economy away from oil like many Gulf countries have been doing. Even while fighting a war against the Houthis in Yemen, he pushed for the previously state-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco, to make an initial public offering in 2019, and until the SpaceX IPO in 2026 this was the biggest IPO in history, raising over 29b dollars on only 1.5% of the company and creating a valuation of 1.7 trillion dollars. In this period, he also kicked off numerous megaprojects like The Line, NEOM, and Diriyah that were incredibly ambitious but also deeply impractical and expensive. In 2025, the country’s budget projected a deficit of 27b dollars, but as oil prices fell the actual gap ballooned to roughly 65b dollars, and growing market volatility and war in the Gulf region has only made this situation more unstable in 2026.

MBS’s general strategy revolves around the belief that Saudi Arabia needs to modernize and integrate with the West. In 2018 he lifted the ban on women driving in the country and relaxed guardianship rules for women as well, allowing them to obtain passports, travel independently, and head households. The religious police were stripped of their powers of arrest and pursuit, basically nullifying their existence. MBS has deemphasized the role of Wahhabism as well, the strict and puritanical form of Sunni Islam that had been the primary sect in Saudi Arabia for centuries. Many believe though that the religious shifts aim to consolidate religious authority under the state, not to achieve actual liberalization.

MBS’s ideology has serious internal inconsistencies. At the same time that he’s trying to make Saudi Arabia more attractive to foreign business and consumers, he was found by US intelligence to have approved the operation that killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018. Executions are at a record high, mostly for non-violent drug offenses, and largely against foreign nationals. His regime has detained and heavily persecuted activists, highlighting the paradox at play. He has pursued dramatic social and economic change but also has zero tolerance for political dissent, and those things do not align with Western expectations in particular.

So how has all of this influenced Saudi Arabia’s geopolitics? Well, suffice it to say that MBS did not get along well with the US under its more liberal administrations. The Biden administration for example campaigned on the promise of making the kingdom an international pariah. But under the current US administration and its previous iteration that ended in 2020, Saudi Arabia and the US have grown closer than ever. In May 2025, Saudi Arabia pledged a 600b dollar investment into the US economy that is now closer to a trillion dollars, alongside a 142b dollar defense package, a strategic defense agreement, and approval for a landmark sale of F-35s. There have been other developments too, like a memorandum on AI and advanced chip sales and a declaration expanding civil nuclear collaboration.

Despite all of this, Saudi Arabia has staunchly opposed normalizing relations with Israel, but they did restore relations with Iran in 2023 with Chinese brokering. Embassies reopened and high-level exchanges resumed, and this has managed to survive every conflict since, although relations remain tense, particularly in the context of Saudi Arabia’s 2025 mutual defense pact with Pakistan, which directly borders Iran and wields nuclear weapons. Under MBS, China has become Saudi Arabia’s largest trade partner, and the two countries have grown much closer economically, even with the Saudi riyal’s peg to the US dollar preventing some deals from being made. In general though, Saudi Arabia under MBS has taken on a more reasonable international role, for example serving as a mediator in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Perhaps the biggest shift in Saudi Arabia’s geopolitical dynamics is its relationship with the UAE. A decade ago, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were close allies, fighting in Yemen and opposing Qatar and Iran together. But today they compete across nearly every possible area, from aviation to tourism to oil and gas to infrastructural development. They back opposing sides in Sudan’s civil war and different factions in Yemen, and in 2026 the UAE exited OPEC in part because it’s so dominated by Saudi interests.

MBS has converted Saudi Arabia from a passive US client state into an assertive and transactional regional power that is hedging between multiple global powers. Unfortunately, like many authoritarian states, it seems that MBS’s personal control over the country may be steering it in an unsustainable direction. His most ambitious megaprojects have been drastically scaled back after spending many billions of dollars. He’s trying to diversify the country’s economic interests, but the fact of the matter is that Saudi Arabia will continue to rely on its oil and gas output for stability for the foreseeable future, and any attempt to integrate with the West faces some degree of inherent incompatibility, because liberalization is always a threat to authoritarian rulers.

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