"Jordan first": Jordan's inter-Arab relations and foreign policy under King Abdullah II

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Summer, 2004 by Curtis R. Ryan

   The major issue that isn't noticed in our relations
   with other Arab countries was, well, King Hussein was an
   ambitious man. He inherited the philosophy of the Arab revolt,
   the ancestry of the Prophet Muhammad, and his grandfather's
   vision he shared of uniting the Arabs with Jordanian
   leadership and with the Hashemite family. King Abdullah
   does not claim to be king of all the Arabs. Just the king of
   Jordan. So these people--Syria, Palestinians, Lebanon, Saudi
   Arabia are not as edgy as they were with King Hussein.
   They are not threatened by Abdullah. There was always that
   anger that Abdullah I, and then King Hussein, was jumping
   ahead of himself. Especially with the Saudis. They feared
   what the ambitions might be. (5)

Almost immediately after becoming king, Abdullah made clear his interest and indeed aptitude for foreign policy, by embarking on a series of trips to key capitals to shore up international support for his regime and for Jordan. Underscoring his central concern with Jordan's economic development, Abdullah had within the first six months of his reign visited the leaders of each of the Group of Seven (G-7) states--the world's seven most industrialized and most wealthy countries. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, the young king also toured the Arab Gulf states and even made a point of visiting Libya and Syria--states that had often had tenuous relations with Jordan under King Hussein.

Despite Jordan's importance to war and peace in the region, from Palestine to the Persian Gulf, the literature on the kingdom's foreign policy remains sparse. A few works, however, have delved deeply into the economic underpinnings of Jordanian policy, into the social construction of Jordanian identity itself, and into the contested nature of that identity--and hence of policy--in the Jordanian public sphere. (6) Jordan's foreign policy is certainly also influenced strongly by its geographic position and its relative weakness vis-a-vis its neighbors. The Kingdom is clearly economically, politically, and militarily weaker than any of its neighbors and this has given rise to a politics of vulnerability, manifested in a cautious and conservative approach to foreign policy making. (7) As Bassel Salloukh has argued, Jordanian foreign policy under King Hussein was based in large part on concerns for regime legitimacy, consolidation, and survival. (8)

These overriding concerns with regime survival have not vanished with the succession in the monarchy to King Abdullah II. Indeed, paramount among all considerations, I argue, is the political economy of Hashemite regime security in understanding Jordan's changing foreign relations under King Abdullah. Jordan's economy is deeply indebted and entirely dependent on foreign aid from key external benefactors, especially the United States. (9) There is even a certain redundancy of pressures built into the global political economy since for Jordan and so many other countries the major sources of economic aid (the U.S., European Union, and Japan) happen also to have the majority of votes within powerful global economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The redundancy issue continues even to the world of private banking or corporate foreign investment, since most global banks and indeed most of the world's foreign investment capital is also concentrated in the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan. In short, small indebted countries like Jordan tend to be inherently constrained in their foreign policy decision-making. Jordan, to be blunt, cannot afford to alienate its creditors and its sources of foreign aid.