Mohammed bin Salman has dug a gaping hole the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will have an incredibly treacherous time digging itself out of.

The amount of damage the crown prince has done to his family and to his country is too grand to measure. The al-Saud family is highly attuned to public perception; they care a lot about what other countries, especially the United States, think about them. Riyadh isn’t used to intense bipartisan criticism in the halls of Congress. Bruce Riedel, a former career intelligence official and Saudi expert at the Brookings Institution, observed that “The Saudi alliance is now under more harsh scrutiny in the United States than at any time since the 1973 oil embargo.”