I was excited coming into this book, because I knew very little about MBS. Apparently for good reason! What I got out of this book is that nobody knows anything. That was disappointing. On the other hand, Hubbard does provide a good summary of recent history in Saudi Arabia. There's nothing new here, but it was nice to read it all in one place, versus scattered across newspaper articles. I did feel that the presentation was very biased, from an American perspective of Saudi Arabia. This was especially so in the choice of topics. The topics were exactly those that have made headlines in the NY Times, primarily: Kashoggi's murder, the Yemen war, the Ritz crackdown, the kidnapping of Lebanese PM Hariri, and Saudi women driving. Of course there is a good reason for that, but MBS must have done many other things, that are interesting enough for a book but not for an American newspaper. My interest in Saudi Arabia is not infinite, but I wouldn't have minded going a little bit deeper.

> What is clear is everything MBS did not do before he burst onto the scene in 2015. He never ran a company that made a mark. He never acquired military experience. He never studied at a foreign university. He never mastered, or even become functional in, a foreign language. He never spent significant time in the United States, Europe, or elsewhere in the West

> They had grown angry with him in 2011 for saying that President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt should leave power amid mass protests against his rule. Their frustrations grew when Obama did not provide more support to the rebels in Syria and declined to bomb President al-Assad after he used chemical weapons on his people in 2013, a tactic that Obama had previously declared a "red line." They then learned that the Obama administration had engaged in intensive negotiations with Iran about its nuclear program. The talks had been kept secret from the Saudis, solidifying the feeling that they had been betrayed by their most important ally.

> The kingdom had championed foreign jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s (in cooperation with the CIA), but that idea had gone out of style by the time I arrived, and government clerics focused their teaching on another tenet of Wahhabism: obedience to the ruler. I heard little disparaging talk about Christians and Jews, but the clerics persistently attacked Shiites, for ideological reasons and as part of the rivalry with Iran. The only Saudis who ever called me an infidel were children.

> The hardest part of discussing Wahhabism with Saudis was their tendency to deny its existence, for a range of reasons. Even the most devout Saudis did not identify themselves as Wahhabis and argued that Muhammed ibn Abdul-Wahhab had not established a new creed, but merely restored Islam to its roots.

> For most of his career, [Jamal Kashoggi] was not a reporter in the Western sense, as in a journalist who dug up facts to hold reluctant powers accountable. More accurately, he was an i'laami, Arabic for a "media figure," who wrote, ran newspapers, and appeared on television as much to transmit the government’s views as to promote his own. Sometimes, that meant writing for cash, as when a contact wired him $100,000 in 2009 to do a sympathetic interview with Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia

> Of the many ironies of the Trump era, one of the greatest was that Trump, after demeaning Saudi Arabia and its faith throughout the campaign, would, in the course of a few months, anoint Saudi Arabia a preferred American partner and the lynchpin of his Middle East policy

> MBS rewrote the rules for public discussion in Saudi Arabia, scaling back the types of comments and criticisms that were permitted while greatly upping the price Saudis would pay for crossing the new red lines.

> In his push for change, MBS had an advantage embedded in Wahhabism itself. Along with its quest for religious purity was an injunction to obey the ruler, even if he was unjust, as long as he did not hinder the practice of Islam. MBS was well aware of that tenet and leveraged it against the clerics, who mostly kept their grumbling to themselves.

> The kingdom no longer invested in foreign missionary activity as it had in the past, and it no longer held the same prominence in global Islam. Salafism, the hyper-conservative trend to which Wahhabism belongs, was alive and well in many Islamic countries with little connection to Saudi Arabia. And the continued ferocity of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, which had borrowed from Wahhabism before going their own way, showed they could thrive without it.

> "We have been influenced by you in the U.S. a lot," he had said the year before. "Not because anybody exerted pressure on us—if anyone puts pressure on us, we go the other way. But if you put a movie in the cinema and I watch it, I will be influenced." Without that American influence, he said, "we would have ended up like North Korea." The warm welcome MBS received also showed that the disturbing events he had authored on the other side of the planet—the Yemen intervention, the arrest campaigns, the kidnapping of Saad Hariri, the Ritz crackdown—had not affected how powerful Americans viewed him. At least not yet.

> "the Supreme Leader is trying to conquer the world. He believes he owns the world. They are both evil guys. He is the Hitler of the Middle East." In other interviews, MBS accused Iran of seeking to take over Mecca. "We are an essential target of the Iranian regime," he said. "We will not wait until the battle is in Saudi Arabia. Instead, we'll work so that the battle is for them in Iran." So when MBS looked for other regional powers who shared his view, he found Israel, setting in motion a major regional shift. … the fact that the likely next ruler of Saudi Arabia sees Israel not as a foe, but as a legitimate neighbor with shared political and economic interests could lead to a lasting realignment of the Middle East. ( )

this was a "can't stop until finished" type of read. I know who MBS is, but I knew nothing about him really. The authortouches on his cultural upbringing, education, and events that forged him into the leader of one of the most powerful countries in the Middle East. I now have a better understanding of Saudi Arabia as a whole, as well as a little more insight into how MBS was able to rise to power so quickly. ( )