The section on the summit concludes triumphantly: “The next month Saudi king Salman at age 81 appointed MBS, age 31, the new crown prince and next in line to lead the Kingdom perhaps for decades to come.”Įven at the time, it was already clear that Harvey’s assessment was delusional.

The Obama approach of straddling was over.Īs for the big gamble on MbS, that, too-in Woodward’s account of Harvey’s thoughts-had culminated in a tremendous win. The Saudis, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia) and Israel were united. Harvey believed the summit had reset the relationships in a dramatic way, a home run-sending a strategic message to Iran, the principal adversary. Harvey now works on the staff of Devin Nunes, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee.) No person in Woodward’s book is more lavishly praised than Harvey: (Harvey, a Michael Flynn appointee, would be fired by H. Woodward doesn’t publicly identify his sources, but much of his account of the inner workings of the National Security Council in the first six months of the Trump administration is relayed from Harvey’s perspective.

MBS saw that transformative change in Saudi Arabia was the only path to survival for the Kingdom.” This is but one of the encomia to MbS in Woodward’s pages-all of them traceable much less to Woodward’s feelings about MbS than to Woodward’s apparent indebtedness to Harvey. Woodward observed that a National Security Council staffer, Derek Harvey, believed that “MBS was the future. T he alleged killing of a Washington Post columnist on the orders of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has triggered many rethinks-and not least a rethinking of the lavishly flattering journalism that hailed the crown prince’s rise to supreme power.Īmong the biggest media boosters of the Saudi crown prince was Bob Woodward in his new book, Fear.

Fear by Bob Woodward