Is a major war about to break out in the Persian Gulf for the fourth time in less than forty years?

For better than two weeks, the world has watched transfixed as Muhammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s all-powerful crown prince, has struck out at a growing list of enemies. The action began on Saturday evening, Nov. 4, when Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced his resignation — not in Beirut as one would expect, but in Riyadh to which he had been summoned just a day earlier. Speculating that Hariri had been forced to step down against his will, one journalist noted that he spoke “with the conviction of a kidnap victim.”

A short time later, Saudi defense forces reportedly intercepted a missile that Shi‘ite Houthi militias had fired from Yemen some eight hundred miles away. A few hours after that, mass roundups began as eleven princes — including billionaire Alwaleed bin Talal, the world’s forty-fifth wealthiest individual — found themselves under arrest along with four government ministers and numerous others, many of them forced to camp out on mattresses in Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton under an armed guard.