JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — Crowned with cranes, the Jeddah Tower emerges in the distance as an under-construction 826-foot-tall spaceship presiding over Saudi Arabia's second-largest city. Through the desert haze you can almost see the more than 3,000-foot height it was supposed to reach, the lively business district its innovative design was meant to inspire and the tens of thousands of people filling the palm-tree-lined boulevards at its feet.
Planners envisioned the tower as the piece de resistance of a full-on economic revitalization with the declared aim of nothing less than "changing the mind-set of Jeddah."
Instead, six years after it was to open, it remains a construction site with no construction — at the moment, anyway — and looms like a question mark over Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's gamble to overhaul his country of 36 million people.
