A key player in the US-Saudi relationship is conspicuously missing from the talks held in Riyadh by the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to try to defuse the international crisis over the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi.
Jared Kushner helped build the alliance between the House of Saud and the House of Trump. The president’s son-in-law and senior adviser took the lead in promoting Mohammed bin Salman as a Saudi visionary, and persuaded the administration to hitch US Middle East policy to the prince’s rising star.
Together the two thirty-something princelings, MBS and Kushner, stayed up late into the night planning to remake the map of the Middle East with bold thinking and mountains of cash. For now, however, those plans are stalled. The Saudi crown prince stands accused of masterminding the cold-blooded murder of a dissident journalist, Kushner is silent and Donald Trump has been performing crisis public relations for the Saudi monarchy.
Peppered with questions on Monday, the president gamely suggesting that the suspected hit team that arrived in Istanbul on official jets and had free run of the Saudi consulate there, were “rogue killers” acting without the knowledge of the prince or his father, King Salman.
The scramble for alibis is a long way from the high hopes of May last year, when the Trump–Saud courtship was consummated. The new president made Riyadh the destination of his first trip abroad since taking office. In the months before, Kushner identified MBS as a potential partner. The state department and the CIA backed Mohammed bin Nayef, the incumbent crown prince at the time, but the first son-in-law insisted that he had “reliable intelligence” – most likely from the Israeli president, Benjamin Netanyahu, a Kushner family friend – that Mohammed Bin Salman was the man to bet on. The prophecy became self-fulfilling as wholehearted support from Washington aided Mhis rise, eventually eclipsing and replacing Nayef.
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