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4. The Case Studies and Jordanian Policy in Context
- University Press of Florida
- Chapter
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4 The Case Studies and Jordanian Policy in Context The first three chapters of this book examined the issues of security, political economy, and ideology in inter-Arab politics, while also presenting a regime security approach to understanding inter-Arab alliance dynamics. In this chapter, I provide a brief overview of Jordanian politics and policy in their regional context, as well as an introduction to the empirical case studies themselves. The Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan has long played a regional foreign policy role that seems to belie its small size and its limited economic and military means.1 That role in no way diminished even after the succession in the Jordanian monarchy from King Hussein to his son Abdullah in 1999. King Hussein had ruled from 1953 to 1999, and had long been regarded as one of the great survivors of Middle East politics and as a particularly skillful leader, guiding his state through tumultuous waters and countless domestic and regional threats to the regime’s survival. But with the death of Hussein and the accession to the throne of King Abdullah II, leadership in Jordanian foreign policy shifted for the first time in forty-six years. The succession came at a particularly challenging time in regional politics, which would soon see the collapse of the Arab-Israeli peace process, a renewed Palestinian Intifadah, and U.S. wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, throughout these turbulent events, Jordan has continued to play a key role in the prospects for both war and peace in the region. Indeed, starting in 2003, the influential World Economic Forum began holding annual meetings at Jordan’s Dead Sea resort, underscoring the Jordanian regime’s determination to court the world’s most wealthy and powerful economic actors , while also demonstrating the central role that these economic “powers that be” seem to attach to Jordan within Middle East politics. Similarly, the “Quartet” of officials from the United States, the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia met frequently in Amman, the Jordanian capital, in repeated attempts to revive the moribund peace process. For better or worse, the major powers of the early 21st Century seemed to regard Jordan 62 / Chapter 4 as geo-politically far more important than its size or resources might otherwise suggest. Yet Jordan is also a small country with limited resources and a weak economy, and it has historically been dependent on financial aid from various external patrons. The kingdom is also geographically situated in the very center of the Middle East, among neighboring states which are each more powerful in just about every sense of the term. As Jordan’s former foreign minister, Marwan al-Qasim, has put it, “our borders make us more vulnerable even than Kuwait. And we are surrounded by more powerful neighbors: Israel, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and even Egypt. As a small country, we have to be careful.”2 The modern state of Jordan first emerged from the imperial machinations that divided the Middle East following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War One. After the war Britain, under the League of Nations Mandate System, carved out Jordan’s borders and set up the Hashimite regime under the Emir Abdullah. The Hashimite family had previously ruled Mecca in Western Arabia, before being defeated and expelled by the rising power of the Saudi family and their allies. Britain shortly thereafter established Hashimite monarchies in the newly emerging states of Jordan and Iraq. From that point onward, Britain maintained close strategic ties to the kingdom.3 After World War Two, and with the onset of the Cold War, the United States also established stronger and stronger links to the Jordanian state, as the Western powers came to view Jordan as a conservative bulwark against communism and radical forms of Pan-Arabism, and as potentially a moderating element in the Arab-Israeli conflict. From the beginning, then, Jordan has held close ties to powerful Western states and has in fact depended heavily on foreign aid from these countries to keep the kingdom afloat.4 Jordan was therefore regarded as a client state— in terms of both military and economic aid—by successive governments in both London and Washington, D.C.5 The U.S.-Jordan relationship might best be seen as a structural factor running beneath all of the inter-Arab alliance decisions addressed in this book. It has also been a mixed blessing for the Hashimite regime. On the one hand, the Jordanian monarchy has...