Khashoggi and the Saudi Kingdom

On October 4th, I wrote a blog item here entitled "Where is Jamal Khashoggi?" Now we know: he was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

In The Weekly Standard, I've followed that blog post with a longer article entitled "The Kingdom and the Power." There I analyze what the killing of Khashoggi tells us about the Saudi government, and suggest that the centralization of power has gone too far: "MbS is today crown prince, deputy prime minister (the king always has the additional title of prime minister), defense minister, head of the Council for Economic and Development Affairs, head of the Council on Security and Political Affairs, and more. That arrangement is unprecedented for Saudi Arabia and is alien to every other Arab monarchy."

I urge that our reaction should not be "to abandon Saudi Arabia, but to insist that Saudi Arabia move further away from gruesome violence, and start to create a system of governance and law that can truly modernize the country and sustain the alliance with it that we have had since 1945."