If you take away only one thing from the stateside tour of Mohammad Bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, which ends this week in Houston, he would prefer you to think that he is strong — confident, secure, forward-thinking. That’s what his friends at the National Enquirer wrote in a glossy propaganda magazine, The New Kingdom, to accompany his trip. MBS, as he’s called, is depicted on its cover as “the most influential Arab leader,” our “closest Middle East ally destroying terrorism,” who is “improving (the) lives of his people & hopes for peace.” Much is made of the fact that he has invested in Uber, and that he has driven a Tesla. He is not, the story goes, your father’s Saud.

But a strong man does not do the kinds of things that the crown prince does — torturing political rivals at a Riyadh Ritz-Carlton, or kidnapping a foreign head of state, as he did recently to the prime minister of Lebanon, Saad al-Hariri. A secure government does not keep novelists and human rights activists in solitary confinement or threaten prominent members of religious minorities with beheading, and a strong man does not bring his nation’s impoverished neighbors to the brink of famine and epidemic for no conceivable reason, as the Saudi army has done to Yemen. Those are things that a strongman does.

These are peculiar times for the kingdom. While still incomparably rich, the Saudis no longer have a chokehold on the global economy, thanks to the expansion of hydraulic fracturing and fossil fuel production in the United States. Iran’s leaders have skillfully expanded their country’s influence while Saudi Arabia’s has shrunk. Salman’s Saudi Vision 2030 plan aims to secure the country’s future by transforming it into a high-technology powerhouse, while doubling down on oppression and absolutism at home and taking a more aggressive line with the kingdom’s regional enemies.

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To be sure, the government has pledged to take small, symbolic steps toward openness, like lifting the ban on women driving. But Salman has made it clear on his U.S. tour that he is uninterested in any true kind of political freedom, which would necessarily mean weakening his family’s power over the country. Instead, he has expended extraordinary time and effort attempting to improve his own image abroad and winning over the people of the United States. President Donald Trump, by all evidence, loves Salman, which will be of some help to him over the next few years, and he has attracted many defenders in the American media and foreign policy establishment. Even the schedule of his tour, which brought Salman to Silicon Valley before he arrived in Houston, is intended to signal the prince’s great new dynamism and his break with tradition.

But, as many deposed leaders in the Middle East could tell you, the esteem of the American people only means so much. There is in Saudi Arabia no sign of the kind of dramatic political upheaval that has undone so many of the region’s strongmen, and Salman could conceivably rule for many decades. But Salman’s Iranian enemy, the ayatollah, is in power only because his predecessor, the shah, put too much emphasis on his country’s relationship with the American military and political establishment in D.C., the banks in New York, the technologists in California and oilmen in Houston, and too little emphasis on the well-being and freedom of his own people.

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We can’t expect the crown prince to develop a sense of republican tradition from nowhere. But to the extent that we must all hope for a stable and prosperous Middle East, we must hope for MBS to unlearn some of the most disconcerting habits he seems to have learned in recent years — to end the war in Yemen, to practice diplomacy in the region, and to inculcate a sense of fairness, if not freedom, at home. Quite a lot depends on it.