Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He has been a frequent visitor to Saudi Arabia since 2005.

(CNN) The mysterious disappearance of Saudi writer and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi after he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week has cast a spotlight on the Saudi regime, which is dominated by 33-year-old Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known commonly as MBS).

This, in turn, raises questions about the nature of the big bet that the Trump administration has placed on the Crown Prince.

For every positive move that MBS has made -- giving women the right to drive, allowing concerts in his kingdom, trying to open up the statist, oil-dependent Saudi economy and curtailing the powers of the feared religious police -- he has also accumulated a long list of errors.

The Saudi military intervention in neighboring Yemen that began in 2015, has, to put it mildly, not been a success. Houthi rebels there have grown closer to Iran, Yemen remains in the grips of a deadly humanitarian crisis and thousands of civilians have been killed in the conflict.

After more than a year, the blockade of Qatar by a number of Arab states, in which the Saudis are a key player, remains in a standoff with no end in sight. In international law, a blockade amounts to an act of war . Qatar is seeking arbitration of the matter at the United Nations, but adjudicating these kind of cases can take years.

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