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

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

Yet with the political economy of regime survival appearing to drive so many Jordanian foreign policy shifts, it must also be noted that these have carried domestic costs. The Abdullah regime, like that of Hussein before it, has placed paramount importance on economic links and security concerns, often at the expense of the program of domestic political liberalization. All controversial foreign policy moves in recent years have been accompanied by further retreats from Jordan's domestic political liberalization process. (13) In the current climate of regional crises, for example, from renewed Intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, to renewed U.S. war against Iraq, Jordan's parliamentary elections were repeatedly postponed. National parliamentary elections had been held in 1989, 1993, and 1997 with a fourth round due in November 2001. (14) Those elections were rescheduled to the summer, then the fall of 2002, and were soon more than a year overdue. The elections finally did take place, however, in June 2003 in the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq war and in the context of attempts to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

As Schwedler has noted, it seems clear that these electoral postponements would have occurred even without the additional security concerns that followed the 11 September 2001, attacks on the United States. The deliberalization process seemed to be well underway in the immediate aftermath of the 1994 peace treaty with Israel. The renewed Palestinian uprising, coupled with fears of renewed war in the Persian Gulf, only added to that process. In Schwedler's view, "the events of September 11 did not so much change the course of domestic politics in Jordan as accelerate them by providing a Washington-friendly justification for increased political repression." (15) Jordanian foreign policy, therefore, must be seen as walking the tightrope between domestic, regional, and even global constraints. But by the same token, the regime's interest in the economics of its own security tends to take precedence in both domestic and foreign policy over all other considerations. I will now turn to an analysis of Jordan's changing relations with Syria and Iraq, before returning to the domestic implications of the regime's own slogan: "Jordan first".

JORDAN'S CHANGING RELATIONS WITH SYRIA

Within regional and inter-Arab relations, the Jordanian-Syrian relationship has been among the most volatile. Jordan and Syria fought as (at least nominal) allies in the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars, but more often acted as rivals in regional politics. (16) In 1970, with the outbreak of the Jordanian civil war or the "Black September" conflict between the Hashemite armies and PLO guerrilla forces, Syria had launched an unsuccessful invasion of northern Jordan. That invasion failed for three main reasons: Jordanian military resistance, Syrian intra-regime rifts that prevented air cover from supporting Syrian ground troops, and finally, Israeli threats to intervene on the side of the Hashemite monarchy against Syria. Yet only a few years later, in 1975, Jordan and Syria had allied together this time in a very real sense--and had achieved fairly extensive levels of political and economic cooperation. By 1980, however, they had de-aligned once again with intense recriminations and saber-rattling on their mutual border. Jordan had by this time shifted to an alliance with Iraq and throughout the 1980's Jordan supported Iraq while Syria supported Iran in the eight-year long Iran-Iraq war. The two states differed again during the 1991 Gulf war, when Syrian troops deployed in Saudi Arabia as part of the U.S.-led coalition, while Jordan opposed foreign intervention (and was thus viewed by some in the U.S. government as collaborating with Iraq). (17)