New Player in History

Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud is now, for all intents and purposes, King of Arabia. He is thus one of the richest people in the world, protector of the two holy cities of Islam and  de facto leader of the Sunnis. At only 32 years of age he is very young by the standards of our day to be in such a position (Kim Jong- Un of North Korean fame is 33). 

As you can see from his stone cold stare above, this guy isn't letting a little thing like his age getting in the way of being a monarch in the old mold. He has already unleashed war against their impoverished neighbors to the south in Yemen, which sends a clear message that he means to use some of the high tech weaponry the country has been buying up for decades. Of course, the humanitarian consequences of the two and half years of military intervention have been fairly horrific in terms of civilian casualties and hasn't really achieved much of anything substantial in military terms, but those are details to a true King. Recently, the embargo has led to large portions of Yemen being on the brink of starvation and to the largest outbreak of cholera (might be something else) in living memory. He also took the move of cutting off Qatar because it was seen as not following the Saudi/Sunni line in the region by doing things like being too friendly with Iran, sponsoring Al-Jazeera and in general having their own foreign policy.  

With so many of the worlds royals just being titular, its good to see someone looking to maintain the ancient tradition of hereditary authoritarianism. 

In my opinion the Saudi royal family is, taken as a whole, the most hypocritical bunch of reprobates that our era has produced. Working in tandem with a psychotically myopic US foreign policy they managed to do more damage to Islam than generations of Imperialism by Europeans and hundreds of years of rule by Turk managed to achieve. Places like Chechnya and Afghanistan have gone from being predominately Sufi, and thus fairly relaxed about religion, to centers of reactionary idiocy based on perhaps the shittiest religion on earth, Wahhabism. Having said all that, MBS has already let women drive and is allowing movie theatres to open up, so maybe he is going to jettison this wretched ideology.

"The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam." -Salman Rushdie