Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman still wants peace even after October 7
ON Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast, a massive construction project is underway. Satellite images show hundreds of excavators literally moving mountains to carve a massive furrow into the landscape. The manmade canyon is some 70 to 150 meters wide, extending dozens of miles to the east into Saudi Arabia’s interior.
Information on the megaproject is patchy; analysts have noticed unusual gaps in the images taken by commercial satellite firms, suggesting that a deep-pocketed customer has been buying them up to keep details of construction progress secret.
All this attention is focused on “The Line,” a stupendous moonshot of a civil engineering project in the form of a blade-like, glass-walled city meant to stretch for 105 miles across the Saudi desert. (That distance would span the width of the state of Connecticut, from Stamford through New Haven and Norwich, all the way to the border with Rhode Island.) The Line is only the most eye-catching district of a new city, called NEOM, Saudi Arabia’s answer to the Gulf states glitz and Chinese megaprojects.
For sheer Pharaonic megalomania, it’s hard to beat, and it’s all the brainchild of one man: Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the desert kingdom.
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