Long-serving minister dedicated to promoting Saudi Arabia’s foreign interests in an increasingly complex world
In the course of four decades under four kings of Saudi Arabia, Prince Saud al-Faisal, who has died aged 75, became the world’s longest-serving foreign minister. Until his retirement in April this year, he was the soft diplomatic face of the monarchy rather than the power behind it. He distinguished himself from the other princes by both his education and his standing as someone who had never had to deal with complex and messy domestic challenges, but concentrated his energies on even more challenging foreign relations, albeit without great success. Towards the end of his career, when King Salman replaced him with Adel al-Jubeir, Saudi Arabia appeared to have abandoned its careful diplomacy in favour of a more hawkish military interventionist foreign policy in the Arab world.
The son of Prince Faisal, then foreign minister and later king, and his wife, Iffat al-Thunayan, Saud was born in Ta’if, near Mecca. In addition to his traditional education, he went to the Hun school of Princeton, New Jersey, took an economics degree at Princeton University, and was fluent in French as well as English. He worked in the government oil organisation, and in 1971 was appointed deputy minister. After his father was assassinated in March 1975, the new king, Khalid, appointed him foreign minister.
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