Mohammed bin Salman: The Icarus of Saudi Arabia?
Mohammed bin Salman. A monarch-to-be without scruples? Or a visionary seeking a path to global power? A social reformer determined to bring his country into the twenty-first century? Or just another brutal dictator? A leader on the road to greatness, or one destined to follow in the footsteps of Icarus? Veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent David Ottaway draws on more than a half-century of observation and reporting to shed light on these conundrums at the heart of any attempt to understand Saudi Arabia―and the man who is poised to rule the country for decades to come.
The SETA Foundation at Washington DC is pleased to host a book event to discuss David Ottaway’s new book, Mohammed bin Salman: The Icarus of Saudi Arabia?.
Speaker
David Ottaway, Middle East Fellow, Wilson Center
Moderator
Kadir Ustun, Executive Director, The SETA Foundation at Washington, DC
David B. Ottaway received a BA from Harvard, magna cum laude, in 1962 and a PhD from Columbia University in 1972. He worked 35 years for The Washington Post as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and Southern Europe and later as a national security and investigative reporter in Washington before retiring in 2006. He has won numerous awards for his reporting at home and abroad and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ottaway was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 1979-80 and again in 2005-06 and is currently a Middle East Fellow. He just released a book about contemporary Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman: The Icarus of Saudi Arabia? His book before that, co-authored with his wife, Marina, is A Tale of four Worlds: the Arab Region After the Uprising, published by Oxford University Press in 2019.
Kadir Ustun is Executive Director at the SETA Foundation at Washington, D.C. He holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University and a master’s degree in History from Bilkent University. Dr. Ustun taught courses on history, politics, culture, and art in the Islamic World as well as Western political thought at Columbia University and George Mason University. His research interests include civil-military relations, social and military modernization in the Middle East, US-Turkey relations, and Turkish foreign policy. His writings have appeared in Insight Turkey, Al Jazeera English, Sabah Daily, Hurriyet Daily News, Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Al-Monitor, Politico, Daily Sabah, Mediterranean Quarterly, and Middle East Policy. He is co-editor of edited volumes History, Politics and Foreign Policy in Turkey (2011), Change and Adaptation in Turkish Foreign Policy (2014), and Trump’s Jerusalem Move: Making Sense of US Policy on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2020).
