King Hussein of Jordan: A Political Life (review)

Following the political intrigues and challenges of King Husayn of Jordan provides a compelling vantage point to survey the shifting tides of regional Middle East geopolitics during the Monarch’s often tremulous reign from 1953 to 1999. In his well researched and highly readable political biography, British historian Nigel Ash-ton offers a survey of the complex and often daring diplomatic maneuverings of Husayn who ruled a weak, fragile kingdom that many Arabs viewed as an artificial, Western invention. Husayn constantly dealt with numerous internal and external challenges — from chronic budget insecurity and protests led by nationalists and Islamists, to Nasser’s regional popularity, attacks from Israel, Syrian bullying, and the severe political threats posed by the Palestinian nationalist movement. In response, Husayn’s statecraft was both cunning and opportunist. While heavily dependent on British and later American support, at times he stepped away from their paternal guidance. Playing a weak hand, he constantly shifted and juggled alliances with regional Arab powers such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, which were at various times foes, rivals, or allies.

Ashton catalogues the King’s intricate diplomatic moves, including his covert dealings, and addresses the controversies and conspiracy theories that swirled around him. With a fair-minded scholarly approach, Ashton presents rival arguments and judiciously assesses the validity of plausible interpretations of events. King Hussein of Jordan is noteworthy as the first biography to draw on Husayn’s “Royal Archives,” though the cited material consists mostly of diplomatic correspondences. While these provide another means for the reader to experience Jordan’s diplomacy from atop the King’s desk, they offer no startling revelations that better explain the King’s motivations and calculations. While Husayn occasionally displays some playfulness, these correspondences generally reflect his constant need for adroit performances targeted to different audiences, each defined by the demands of constantly shifting contexts and geopolitical alignments.

Overall, Ashton provides a respectful and highly credible political biography. It carefully intersperses brief mentions of the major events of Husayn’s private life, but avoids probing his psyche, recounting well known antics, or dwelling on his reputation as a youthful playboy. As Ashton notes, King Hussein of Jordan is by no means an “official biography,” but it is understandably a highly sympathetic depiction of Husayn’s rule, shaped in part by Ashton’s access and professional friendship with select members of the royal family. Only at a few moments does Ashton offer a critical assessment of Husayn’s rule, as when he recognizes that his commitment to the increasingly unpopular normalization of relations with Israel in the late 1990s led to a harsh reversal of the democratic opening launched in the late 1980s.

If anything, the text largely reflects Ashton’s sensibilities as a historian of Anglo-American diplomatic relations. The narrative is primarily defined by the diplomatic correspondences, consular reports, briefing papers, and memoirs of British, American, and Israeli officials. These are supplemented with the extracts from official letters from royal archives and surprisingly few oral interviews. The resulting narrative offers a palace view of events. Reaching beyond the popular focus on Arab-Israeli and great power relations, Ashton admirably covers Husayn’s relations with Arab leaders and guides readers through the complexities of inter-Arab politics, but only at the state level.

To the degree that Ashton offers a guiding theme, he argues that Husayn was motivated not only by realism and a survival instinct, but by an idealism defined by his ideology of Hashemite Arab nationalism. While the notion that Husayn had dynastic aspirations for greater regional power, as Malik Mufti has argued, helps explain the assertiveness of many policy moves, referring to this notion as an “ideology” begs the question of whether this ideology had followers and how it compares to the rival nationalisms with which Husayn’s subjects identified. Thus missing from Ashton’s account is a survey of the domestic policies and...