Iran’s Fatwa against Nuclear Weapons: the Evolution of a Myth

October 10, 2022

By Dr. David Wurmser

At the time of this writing, the Iranian people are rising up across all its communities to free itself from the Islamic Revolution. It is unclear that the regime will survive. This hope, combined with the horror of its amassed brutality over the last 43 years and the complete disregard for international convention, let alone international law, should remove the option of proceeding with any new nuclear agreement with Iran. Instead, the West should finally reach consensus that the current talks must be terminated. The reliability of any treaty – which is after all a contract under the very international law the regime has consistently not only violated but whose validity it has dismissed – is futile. The regime is not a legitimate interlocutor.

Indeed, the very act of negotiating with the regime itself validates and enriches the regime at precisely the time that the Iranian people have rejected its legitimacy and are desperately trying to fight the mechanisms of brutality. An agreement would not only signal that the West assumes the regime’s survival, but it would unlock hundreds of billions of dollars to fund the regime’s repression apparatus internally and its instruments of accelerating aggression externally. In essence it betrays the Iranian people who are trying to free themselves from the deadening hand of this regime.

Moreover, the regime has consistently used international negotiations to make a withering argument against its own people whenever its internal legitimacy was shaken. It has argued that the international community does not care about Iranians and Iranian freedom, but only conspires perpetually to weaken the “great Iranian nation.” The symbol of such greatness, they argue, is Iranian nuclear power. As such, the regime argues, the West is supporting Iranian popular attempts at liberation only as leverage to suppress the power of the Iranian nation and deny its historical greatness, and that the West will abandon the Iranian people the moment the leverage is spent or worthless. To this end, it points to the statement by the Obama administration in 2009 during the height of the “Green” revolution that it tempers its support for the demonstrators because it has “other priorities as well,” clearly implying the nuclear talks.

Beyond these valid and overarching considerations, the obsession with continuing talks with Iran over its nuclear program rests on a key assumption: that in the end, Iran does not want nuclear weapons – indeed, feels religiously opposed to such weapons — but only seeks them for a sense of security or a form of leverage on other matters. One of the most important documents to which western diplomats consistently refer that bears this assumption out is the Fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khamenei in 1997 which specifically prohibits nuclear weapons as un-Islamic. Between 1997 and 2012, this Fatwa became a backstop of confidence for diplomats who began conceding verifiable and solid restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for a sweatheart nuclear “cutout” deal with Iran that erases lingering past concerns and gives it rights and privileges within the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) far beyond any other P-5 nation (US, UK, Russia, France and China) within the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The fatwa stood at the center of US debate in the several years leading up to the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, a.k.a. the 2015 “Iran nuclear deal”). Despite the fact that there has never been a text issued of this Fatwa in public – and thus we do not know with any certainty what it purports to say, its has been the subject of academic and international policy journals analyses. The Iranian regime encouraged highlighting the solidity and importance of this fatwa, suggesting in its propaganda “academic” journals that it was an even more solid guarantee than the NPT itself. For example, a Kent University Ph.D., Farhad Sirjani, wrote with the veneer of scholarly garb in 2013:

The Fatwa elaborates and confirms Iran’s commitment regarding WMD ban, on the one hand, and Iran’s insistence on its NPT right to peaceful uses of nuclear technology, on the other. It is concluded that the commitment undertaken by Iran via the Fatwa, is, in some important respects, more comprehensive and more long-lasting than that Iran has undertaken under the NPT. ¹

This fatwa influenced not only the public debate, but policymaking not only at the level of diplomats, but at the presidential level itself under the Obama administration. For example, on September 24, 2013, at the UN General Assembly’s annual opening in New York, President Obama in his speech said:

“Meanwhile, the Supreme Leader has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons, and President Rouhani has just recently reiterated that the Islamic Republic will never develop a nuclear weapon. So these statements made by our respective governments should offer the basis for a meaningful agreement.”²

The appeal to this fatwa has once again appeared recently in US government briefings and statements as the United States continues to seek a new nuclear agreement with Iran. Indeed, so much is it understood by Iran that this fatwa remains a core pillar of the assumptions governing western policy that the Iranian regime employed the threat of rescinding it – strongly suggesting it believed such a threat forms effective pressure on the US government. As Iranian lawmaker, Sabbaghian Bafghi, said on August 2, 2022:

“We will ask Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to change his fatwa and strategy on the prohibition of producing nuclear weapons if the enemies of the Islamic Republic continue their threats.”³

The problem is that this Fatwa has never been published, nor likely has it ever existed. The core assumption and evidence to which western diplomats cling to allay their fears of Iran’s ultimate intentions for the acquisition and use of a nuclear weapon, in fact, does not exist. It never did.

As such, it is important to go back to the evolution of this myth to its origins in the 2008-2012 period to ferret out that western belief in the critical assumption is, in fact, flawed.

KHAMENEI’S FATWA AGAINST NUCLEAR WEAPONS

As the negotiations between the P5+1 (the UN Security Council’s five permanent members plus Germany) talks with Iran in Istanbul began in mid-April 2012, the proceedings and public discourse were both seized with reporting of the issuance (or supposed issuance) of a fatwa, or a religious ruling, by Ali Khamenei, the supreme religious authority in Iran’s current revolutionary regime. The fatwa, Iran’s press reported, forbids the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons – what it called “the three “nos.”

Iranian officials noisily heralded the fatwa as proof that Iran was not trying to weaponize its nuclear program, and was thus operating within its nuclear rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty:

“The fatwa that the Supreme Leader has issued is the best guarantee that Iran will never seek to produce nuclear weapons, Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli Larijani said on Wednesday [11 April] … Khamenei has issued a fatwa declaring that production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons are all haram (prohibited in Islam).”⁴

Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi highlighted this as a turning point in the negotiations, saying that the West realized that Khamenei’s fatwa against making atomic bombs “had a religious basis and was announced on the basis of Shari’ah tenets and not for political purposes. Taking this into consideration, the West came to the conclusion at the Istanbul talks that a joint framework was needed as a basis for advancing the talks with Iran.”⁵

In recent weeks, the West has led an effort to tighten the screws on Iran through toughened sanctions with the hope of compelling Tehran to accept a restraint on its nuclear program, the first test of which were the Istanbul talks. While it may not be the official US negotiating stance yet, the United States has recently defined its red line in public signaling not around the state of progress of Iran’s program, but whether Iran would cross the threshold of weaponization. As such, Western diplomats were quick to note that such a fatwa could be an important benchmark that suggests the current effort of isolating and pressing the Iranian regime is beginning to show signs of success. As the London Telegraph reported, “[Secretary] Clinton revealed that she has been studying Khamenei’s fatwa, saying that she has discussed it with religious scholars, other experts and with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. ‘If it is indeed a statement of principle, of values, then it is a starting point for being operationalized,’ Clinton said.”⁶ Europeans were even more encouraged: “One of the diplomats, who demanded anonymity because he was sharing information from a closed session, said the Iranians appeared to be moving toward that goal [of discussing their program], engaging in discussion about the peaceful use of nuclear energy and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. He said the Iranian team had mentioned supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s ‘fatwa,’ or prohibition, of nuclear weapons for Iran, in the course of the plenary discussions” which European Union foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton described as “the beginnings of a sustained process.”⁷

RECURRING REPORTS OF THE FATWA

The saga of this heralded fatwa is neither new, nor is it tied to the current state of pressure under which the Iranian regime finds itself. It dates as far back as 1997, and has been reported before – indeed several times – in the Iranian press or referred to in statements by Iranian officials:

 In an interview in the German paper, Der Spiegel, in early December 2011, Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi added: “Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued a fatwa saying that nuclear weapons are not acceptable in Islam and that they are banned in Islam. This means that the mass destruction weapons play no role in our defense strategy.”⁸

 In an interview on November 19, 2011 with the Italian paper, Corriere Della Sera, Iranian ambassador to Rome, Seyed Mohammad Ali Hossaini, said: “Iran has always aimed for a peaceful, civilian use of nuclear energy, we stated that right at the start of our program. Our highest authorities have always said that they believe the production, storage, and use of nuclear arms is something execrable, or even “haram,” which in Islamic religion is a prohibited action, totally to be condemned and banned. This principle is also contained in a fatwa, a religious precept, issued by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is the highest religious and political authority in the Islamic Republic of Iran. And we immediately issued it worldwide. The importance of this fatwa is such that, even if the international community were to give the green light tomorrow to an Iranian nuclear bomb, our government could not build one.”⁹

During a visit to Slovenia on July 11, 2011, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, said that Khamenei issued a fatwa declaring that the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons are all haram.¹⁰

In September 2004, Iran’s broadcasting authority reported that Khamenei had issued a fatwa – apparently as early as 1997 – stating that the use of nuclear weapons was contrary to and forbidden by Islam, and that this fatwa had been mentioned by Iran’s nuclear negotiator and National Security Council head, Hassan Rouhani, during the talks with the West.¹¹

The Islamic republic issued an official statement at the emergency meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna on Aug. 9, 2005, which was reported through a website, saying: “The Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued the fatwa that the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who took office just recently, in his inaugural address reiterated that his government is against weapons of mass destruction and will only pursue nuclear activities in the peaceful domain.”¹²

But is taking weaponization off the table by Iran really the bottom line issued by the highest religious authority in the land?

TOLERANCE OF STATEMENTS CONTRADICTING THE FATWA

Fatwas are serious affairs within a community of believers, and even more so among Shiites who break themselves down into schools of followers headed by one of several religious scholars who have attained the highest form of learning and are worthy of emulation (Marjah al-Taqlids). In Iran’s Islamic Republic, this reaches even greater heights, with the reigning theological premise being that of the Valiyet e-Faqih (Rule of the Jurisprudent) – a concept rejected by most Shiites outside of Iran – in which a ruler is anointed to assume the voice and authority of the occulted 12th Imam in the absence of his return. He is superior to any of the other sources of emulation and assumes the role of supreme ruler with accompanying religious authority.

As such, it is all the more surprising that ever since 1997 when the original fatwa by Khamenei was ostensibly released, a good number of Iranian leaders have issued fatwas or made statements which seem to directly contradict the religious edict of the unassailable and infallible supreme leader. These fatwas either suggest Iran is contemplating a nuclear weapons strategy, or outright call for Iran to develop, or even use, nuclear weapons:

In 2005, Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi published a book titled, The Islamic Revolution – Surges in Political Changes in History. Apparently the publisher, the Center of Publications of the Imam Khomeini Research Institute, released only 3000 copies limited to the seminary in which he taught. On page 337 of his book, clearly referring to nuclear weapons, he wrote: “We have to produce the most advanced weapon inside the country, even if our enemies do not like it. There is no reason that they have the right to produce a certain special type of weapon, but that other nations do not.”¹³

Mesbah Yazdi is not only a member of the Council of Experts – the body which chooses the Supreme Leader – but also the founder of the Haqqani school in Qom which trains future cadres of the regime whose alumni form the backbone of the clerical management class that runs Iran’s key political and security institutions. Mesbah Yazdi is one of the most prominent religious figures in Iran and is considered the mentor of President Ahmadinejad and leader of the Mahdist school (those who believe they see the signs aligning that confirm the 12th Imam is on the verge of returning from occultation).

On February 16, 2006, the reformist internet daily, Rooz reported that the late Mohsen Gharavian – a lecturer at the Qom seminaries and a prominent disciple of Mesbah Yazdi, issued a fatwa which read: “One must say that when the entire world is armed with nuclear weapons, it is only natural that, as a counter-measure, it is necessary to be able to use these weapons. However, what is important is what goal they may be used for … According to Shari’ah, too, only the goal is important….”¹⁴

On April 24, 2011, the website of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Gerdab, published what it envisions the day after Iran’s first nuclear test: “The day after Iran’s first nuclear test will be an ordinary day for us Iranians, but many of us will have a new gleam in our eyes – a gleam of national pride and might.” The article then continued by citing the Koran’s chapter 8, verse 60: “And prepare against them what force you can, and horses tied at the frontier, to frighten thereby the enemy of Allah and your enemy.”¹⁵ In tying this Koranic phrase directly to the quest for nuclear weapons, the IRGC publication in essence defines nuclear weapons as a requirement of the Islamic Republic’s constitution, since Article 151 of Iran’s Constitution relies on the authority of that very passage of the Quran when it states: “Prepare against them whatever force you are able to muster, and horses ready for battle, striking fear into God’s enemy and your enemy.”

One might be tempted to discount these statements, since they are from officials who could be seen as part of the competing faction to the Supreme Leader. But other officials, who owe their allegiance and careers to Khamenei’s sufferance (and thus cannot be considered to be from a “deviant” or competing faction), also have expressed a quest for weaponization:

On December 14, 2001, during the al-Quds (Jerusalem) day sermon, Iran’s former president, Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani declared at the University of Tehran not only that Israel can be destroyed with a single bomb, but suggested that Israel’s likely nuclear retaliation is digestible because the Muslim world would only be damaged by it: “If one day … the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [nuclear weapons] – on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This … is because the use of one nuclear bomb in Israel would leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.”¹⁶ He added that “It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.”¹⁷

On August 22, 2006, at the ceremony in Arak in which Iran inaugurated its heavy water plant, the Deputy Speaker of the Majlis (parliament), Mohammed Reza Bahonar, declared: “The Iranian people is faced by unreasonable forces that possess nuclear weapons, and there is no [force] that can deter them. If they put pressure [on Iran], the [Iranian] people may ask the government to produce nuclear weapons for the sake of deterrence … You [the West] need to fear the day the Iranian people will amass in the streets, demonstrate and ask of its government to produce nuclear weapons in order to counter the threats…”¹⁸ Far from paying a price for this statement, Bahonar, who is also the Leader of the Islamic Society of Engineers, was reelected and served in the post until 2011.

An Iranian paper, Asr-e Iran, published an editorial on February 28, 2010, saying: “The truth is that for Israel … the mere sense of insecurity is deadly poison…The truth is that Israel knows very well that even if Iran obtains nuclear weapons, it will never use them except in self-defense… Rather, Iran’s possession of such weapons will sow in Israel a sense of insecurity – and this sense alone will be enough to shatter the glass palace of this illegitimate regime in the Middle East. An Iran with nuclear weapons means an end to the dream of ‘secure Israel’ – and this means the exodus of most of the residents of this occupied land… This exodus will include human, financial, and other capital, and, therefore, will be a death sentence for this regime.”¹⁹

These articles by both allies and competitors to Khamenei have never elicited a price or even a reprimand for having so blatantly crossed the Supreme Leader and his fatwa.

THE FATWA CONTRADICTS OTHER FATWAS

The effort to gauge the meaning and validity of this supposed fatwa is also problematic since no reasoning or context is provided in the reports or statements discussing why such a weapon is, from a religious point of view, materially different from any other weapon, and why it should be thus forbidden (haram) rather than encouraged to fulfill – as the IRGC’s publication, Gerdab suggests – the stipulation outlined in Koranic verse 8:60 and mentioned in Article 151 of the Constitution.

In the West, we accord not only nuclear weapons, but an entire category of weaponry, a special status defined by the term “weapons of mass destruction,” namely their ability to inflict mass death and realistically contemplate swift, genocidal annihilation. In Iran, however, mass destruction has been sanctioned as part of a sanctioned cult of annihilation and martyrdom. The Iranian regime has issued numerous fatwas which provide the religious justification for not only the permissibility, but the imperative of inflicting mass killing of the enemy, and the acceptance of severe retaliation as a religiously justified risk and cost.²⁰ This is true not only of the competing clerical leaderships surrounding Khamenei and Ahmadinejad – but even the “moderate” camp defined by the likes of Rafsanjani.

Given the context of other fatwas’ legitimizing a cult of annihilation and martyrdom, it is impossible that this fatwa grounds its special treatment and prohibition of the nuclear weapon in the ghastly nature of the weapon, as we do in the West. And in every mention of the fatwa, only the one sentence appears and there is no discussion, nor any stated reason – as there often are in fatwas in Shi’ism, which generally list both the verdict and the arguments that led to it – why nuclear weapons alone are singled out for prohibition and inapplicable to the Koran’s chapter 8, verse 60 and Iran’s Constitution’s article 151, both of which command Muslims to “muster whatever force you are able” to fight the enemy.

Other aspects of Iranian rhetoric are also inconsistent with the heralded fatwa. Specifically, Iran suggests rather bluntly how analogous its current situation is to North Korea’s as Pyongyang moved toward weaponization, implying Tehran reserves the right to pursue the path the fatwa forbids.

Khamenei’s mouthpiece Keyhan drew the most direct analogy on October 13, 2006 in an editorial entitled: “Lessons from North Korea:”

“What led Korea to this point was nothing but persistence in the face of the U.S., which would not agree to … assure it that it would not act to topple the North Korean government .… The Koreans said many times before that if America would stop its operations to topple their government … then North Korea would have no problem whatsoever with the inspection of their efforts to produce nuclear weapons. But the Americans, with their usual defective mindset … persisted and now it’s over… North Korea has built a nuclear bomb before America’s eyes, despite the great pressure it was under, and despite years of harsh international sanctions – and no one has managed to do anything against it … What this means is that if any country, such as North Korea, concludes for political or security reasons that it must have nuclear weapons, it will ultimately succeed in implementing its wish – even if the whole world does not want it to.”²¹

Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator of last decade, Ali Larijani – who is now the Speaker of Iran’s parliament – made the connection directly:

“You have pressured North Korea for two years and consequently it withdrew from the NPT and IAEA…I recommend that you once again pay attention to the conduct of North Korea. After two years … you have accepted North Korea’s nuclear technology… So accept ours now… [A]lthough Iran proposes these peaceful conditions, if you want to use aggressive language, Iran will have no choice but to protect its technological accomplishments by withdrawing from the NPT.”²²

In short, in the view of the Iranian leadership surrounding Khamenei, the United States’ refusal to meet the DPRK’s demands fully not only justified, but left Pyongyang no other choice but to realize its nuclear quest and seek a weapon. Iran’s leaders argue that Iran now finds itself along the same path, implying that if their demands are not met, they too would not only be justified, but impelled, to seek the very nuclear weapons the reported fatwa ruled are forbidden.

THE HIDDEN FATWA

Taken together, it is nearly impossible to reconcile Khamenei’s reported fatwa prohibiting nuclear weapons with the gist of Iranian public statements since the first references to it were made in 1997 – all of which flow in the opposite direction.

Moreover, the problem is compounded by the fact that that Khamenei’s fatwa has never been seen or published – not in 1997, 2005, 2011, or today. The Iranian press referred to it, and Iran’s negotiators at various P5+1 talks have regularly raised the existence of this fatwa as proof of Iran’s good intentions, but Khamenei has never said or released it in public. It is impossible to properly analyze, or understand the context in which it needs to be understood and followed, or if it even exists.

Either the fatwa outright is a fabrication for the purposes of willful deception of the West or that the operative phrase is embedded in the context of a larger fatwa which makes the prohibition on these weapons – and perhaps others as well – conditional on theoretical circumstances such as, for example, the age in which Islam has universally triumphed and, the Mahdi has returned. Indeed, were the operational phrase in the fatwa so conditioned, then it would have been perfectly consistent and reinforcing for Mohsen Gharavian to have issued his fatwa on Iran’s right to nuclear first use in 2006. And this would explain why there never was any criticism, let alone sanction taken, by any journalist, institution or official connected with Khamenei or the government against Gharavian or any of the others who suggested Iran has a nuclear armaments concept or should have or use a nuclear weapon.

CONCLUSION: CONTRADICTING FATWAS REVEAL TACTICAL FISSURES IN THE REGIME

As if the drama surrounding its sudden appearance on the scene without accompanying evidence, not least of which is the absence of any publication to date of any official text of this fatwa, makes this entire episode deeply suspicious. The only evidence that we have that such a fatwa exists is that official statements from Iran say it is so, but they too fail to provide any text. Mohsen Rafighdoost, a minister in the IRGC responsible for a significant part of the nuclear program, said in 2014 he sought to pursue a nuclear weapons option, but was restrained by the ostensible edit – which led quickly to established Western journals, such as Foreign Policy, to seize on the statement as definitive evidence of the edict.²³ Of course, it is unclear why the IRGC even had a role in the nuclear program if it was not for military purposes.

In short, there is no evidence that this fatwa exists beyond dubious statements from officials saying it does. Moreover, assuming the phantom edict does exist, nobody knows what it actually says since its content has never been published. Whole articles have been written by Iranian propagandists about it and analyzing its importance without ever citing even a single phrase or line from the edict.

In contrast, there is evidence from other, published and clearly existing fatwas that the Iranian regime does consider nuclear weapons as legitimate. And in the last years, there have been several Iranian officials, such as Abolfazl Razavi Ardakani, who have said it was either temporary and in effect – surprise, surprise — only until the most recent period in which Iran actually reached the technical ability to approach a nuclear device.

Our Leader’s fatwa that Iran would not pursue an atomic weapon was meant for its time. It is possible that the Leader will change his mind. This is based on the Islamic ruling about whether it is allowed to put stones in the enemy’s river in order to poison him. The answer is that this is allowed if it’s the only way to prevail…. It is possible that the Leader will give the order to enrich uranium to 90%. The Leader knows perfectly well when to give which fatwa. The fatwas of the religious scholars, especially secondary ones, are not permanent. There is a difference between primary fatwas and secondary fatwas. A jurisprudent can issue a ruling and then cancel it 10 years later.”²⁴

And finally, there are even official statements that suggest that the fatwa never existed. Former Iranian member of the Majlis (parliament), Ali Motahari, said on April 24, 2022 that:

“From the very beginning, when we entered the nuclear activity, our goal was to build a bomb and strengthen the deterrent forces, but we could not maintain the secrecy of this issue, and the secret reports were revealed by a group of hypocrites.”²⁵

On balance then, the evidence is substantial the entire tale of Khamenei’s phantom nuclear fatwa is little more than an attempt at strategic deception. Either the fatwa does not exist or exists within a hidden context, the obvious failure of enforced discipline of message, and the absence of any reprimand is likely a result of fissures within Iran’s regime.

However, since even allies of Khamenei were on record before 2006 suggesting a nuclear weapons quest, the fissures cannot be understood through categories such as “hardliners” or “moderates” over nuclear policy, but a schism between two schools of thought, reflected most starkly by Khamenei on the one hand, and Mesbah Yazdi on the other. Most of the post-2006 statements overtly suggesting a nuclear weapons quest appear to come from the clerics surrounding Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, while those reinforcing the ostensible fatwa came from the traditional clerical elite aligned with Khamenei and his close associate, Ali Larijani.

While the disagreement plays itself out over the fatwa issue, it is not about the legitimacy of nuclear weapons at all, but about a disagreement over whether Iran should pursue Taqqiyah (deception) and caution against the West because open confrontation could be dangerous, or whether Iran should flaunt its ambitions since the West is toothless and overt confrontation would only expose that weakness.

Khamenei represents the clerical establishment, who views the preservation of the revolutionary regime and its mundane moorings as the prime directive. While not moderating or compromising, Khamenei and those close to him have consistently chosen to maneuver and be indirect rather than have a confrontation with the West.

In contrast, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi rejects maneuvering and indirect confrontation as too cautious, and even heretical against the will of Allah. Instead, he and his followers believe the hidden 12th Imam is near his return, and that divine intervention – secured by rigid adherence to principle – is the true source of victory for the Islamic Republic. For example, in his book which discussed the need to pursue the “special” (read nuclear) weapon, Yazdi wrote:

“In seeking to acquire the technology, Iran must be patient and not be deterred by economic shortages. Divine, messianic support has been the determining factor of the Iranian regime during the various trying periods which have plagued it since its foundation.”²⁶

In late 2007, Khamenei’s ally, Ali Larijani, who hails from one of the grand, traditional clerical families (the Amelis) of Qom, was forced by Ahmadinejad to resign as the head of the Supreme Council for National Security. His replacement, Saeed Jalili is guided by Mesbah Yazdi. In his first major speech published four days after assuming his new position on October 21, 2007, Jalili attacked previous governments for having “strayed from the principles derived from Islamic revolutionary teachings.” In contrast, Jalili argued that under Ahmadinejad, Iran’s foreign policy has returned to its ideological base and is “avoiding the past experience of sacrificing principles when faced with a challenge…Principles should not be sacrificed … in the name of pragmatism.”²⁷ Jalili even went on to suggest previous policies demonstrated “cartoon-like behavior [which causes] 180-degree turns in foreign policy without any basis.” Jalili then echoes Mesbah Yazdi’s eschatological spin: foreign policy should be coupled “with reliance on divine assistance” and should be based on a theological model which will bring “a good ending in this and the next world as was the intention of the Islamic revolution.” Referring to the previous governments’ suspensions of Iran’s nuclear program to avoid international reactions, Jalili “steadfastly stressed” the need to “return to an ideological and principled approach” in order to shape the nature of Iranian foreign policy in accordance with Islamic “authenticity based on the Prophet’s diplomatic strategy.” He went on to suggest that “pragmatism” should be seen as willful disobedience to the divine Will.”²⁸

In short, the inconsistency surrounding Iranian governmental statements and the fabrication or selective reporting on Khamenei’s fatwa on the nuclear issue tells us almost nothing about the regime’s theological view of the legitimacy of pursuing nuclear weapons, but it does expose the nature and theological foundations of the fissures within the regime.

Situation Report: Joe Biden’s Middle East trip

July 29, 2022

President Biden spent almost a week in the Middle East recently, during a period of critical regional importance, and manages to depart having alienated nearly every major player.

Iran is reaching the breakout point on a nuclear weapon. Israeli leaders were eager to speak face to face with their American counterparts about applying more muscle into forcing Iran to back down. The Saudis expected a shift in U.S. policy on both Iran and about the criticism of the Saudi government for the Khashoggi affair. Riyadh was signaling a willingness to turn over a new leaf in the U.S.-Saudi relationship by increasing oil production and moving quickly to establish deeper public relations with Israel.

The Palestinians expected the United States to press Israel into allowing the reopening of the formal U.S. consulate to the Palestinians. The consulate, located on Agron Street (in the pre-1967 western half of Jerusalem), was closed during the Trump administration. Reopening it would signal a shift aligned with American and global progressives and more hostile to Israel. Jordan, in addition to backing the Palestinians, expected the United States to reinforce its demand to erode, or even erase, any Israeli sovereignty over any part of eastern Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount.

Virtually nobody was pleased by the outcome of the trip, however.

The Palestinians and Jordanians failed to understand that while the staff of the Biden administration fully agrees with them, the President was in no position to publicly validate those policy shifts. American officials indulged and inflated Palestinian and Jordanian expectations but failed to deliver the goods in public.

Then again, the Palestinians have always been hostile, and were never going to be pleased with any U.S. overture. Jordan, which since 2017 has acted more as an advocate of the Palestinian Authority than a strategic partner, was also inevitably going to walk away dissatisfied. Yet, , the Palestinians and Jordanians did come away with symbolic confirmation at least that the U.S. has walked back from the Trump administration policies on Jerusalem.

The regional countries most critical to the U.S. position in the region – Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE- come away the biggest losers.

The Arab states have been falling over themselves in the 24 hours since President Biden left to appease Iran, with the UAE now seeking to establish diplomatic relations with Tehran. Clearly the message they received from the U.S. was disconcerting. Most likely, they measured up Washington, heard weakness, and are now reacting accordingly.

For Israel, this trip was about meeting face to face with its counterparts in an attempt to avert a weak deal with Tehran and unify the Western ranks toward a far tougher policy on Iran. Israel is in an election cycle, so the government is desperate not to show tension with U.S. Even so, Israeli officials are now openly admitting the U.S. and Israel are at odds over Iran policy, even as they try to put on a brave face by saying that at least the U.S. was presented an unvarnished and blunt message from the top of the Israeli government. But actions speak louder than words. Tellingly, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) chief of staff said last night that the IDF is kicking its preparations for a major direct war with Iran into high gear – alone if necessary.

Iran was not the only issue.

Saudi and the UAE are furious over the attempts by U.S. Secretary of State Blinken to force PLO and Jordan into the most sensitive Abraham Accords forums in all facets, including defense and investment, which has caused the Saudis walk back what they were willing to do in terms of normalization with Israel. As Ehud Yaari, the Arab affairs correspondent for Israel’s channel 12, noted, this U.S. effort is a severe blow because it would allow the PLO, which is committed to undermining the accords, to serve as a spoiler, which this U.S. policy will essentially allow.

By the time the President arrived in Saudi Arabia at the end of the week, the atmospherics had already changed from warm expectations to coldness. Whatever remnant of original expectations that the Saudis did deliver on was pro-forma. Israeli flights beyond the UAE could now pass-through Saudi airspace, but no further normalization, and at best a small increase of oil production only without a firm promise publicly from the Saudi side, and no timeline.

Finally, of course, the idea of a regional security alliance, which only a week ago seemed to be already happening, suddenly vaporized the moment the U.S. said that it was going to put itself in charge of shepherding it to completion. This attempt to insert the U.S. on top of the security ties in the region was perhaps the most destructive failure on several levels. First, it demoted the direct ties between Israel and the Arabs – which were developing nicely without the U.S. — and devastated the confidence the regional players had in such a structure since they have measured up the administration and believe it is not serious about regional defense. Trying to force Qatar –Saudi Arabia’s nemesis–and Jordan –serving as an agent of the Palestinians– was the death blow to the whole scheme.

Notably, under the table, it seems Saudi, UAE, Morocco and Israel are proceeding alone to create such a structure without the U.S.’ involvement. The IDF’s chief of staff is, in fact, traveling to Morocco today and several top military officials have also been moving around their Arab neighbors as well in recent days.

The final verdict on the trip appears to be that the Saudis, Bahrainis, and UAE trust Israel more than the U.S.

Part III: The foundations of the Jordanian state

June 13, 2022

By Dave Wurmser

In part one, I described the harsh and increasingly hostile anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic rhetoric recently employed by Amman, as well as its attempts to champion the Palestinian cause, wrest sovereignty from Israel on the Temple Mount and resurrect a pre-1852 status quo over Muslim, if not even all, holy sites in Jerusalem into some sort of “Vatican-like” status. I also outlined the accompanying geopolitical shifts in Amman that echo Russian and Non-Aligned Movement narratives rather than its traditional more pro-Western posture.

In part two I examined the various reactions in the West and Israel to this turn of events in Jordan, and the various options publicly debated over the best way to move forward.

In this section, in order to examine further whether Jordan should be confronted, indulged/ignored, or appeased I will both:

Describe the shift in Jordan’s policy. Although King Abdallah has never been identified with either anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic sentiment, and even though in fact he has had a deep investment and history of relations with England and the United States, he had until only a few years ago shown little interest in asserting Jordan’s role among Palestinians or in Jerusalem. Since it is unlikely that something happened that caused so profound a change of heart enough to radically alter his outlook across the board, it is more likely that this shift in policy is a result of pressures and circumstances and a strategic response on how to deal with that change.

Explore the foundations of Jordan’s stability to illustrate how serious a departure this new strategy is and how askew it is of the traditional policies that have secured Jordanian stability.

Jordan’s shift in 2017

The first visible signs of a significant shift in Jordan’s strategy in dealing with the Palestinians and Jerusalem, and by extension Israel, occurred six years ago, in the summer of 2017.

The first Temple Mount Crisis (2017)

In July 2017, three Arabs from Um al-Fahm in Israel traveled to Jerusalem and used the Temple Mount complex and the al-Aqsa Mosque as a hiding place and base of operations to smuggle and hide weapons which they would three days later use to launch a shooting attack on Israeli police. Emerging from the Temple Mount through the Gate of Tribes on July 14, the three terrorists gunned down two policemen standing near the Lion’s Gate of the city and wounded two more, one seriously. The terrorists then used the sanctity of the Temple Mount and al-Aqsa Mosque as a haven into which to retreat under the assumption that Israeli police would not follow them in hot pursuit – which is precisely one of the terms King Abdallah is demanding as an absolute from the Israelis (no Israeli police on Temple Mount ever for any condition, even in self defense or hot pursuit). In 2017, however, Israeli police did follow and successfully neutralized the terrorists.

As a result of this attack and the ongoing suspicion that the al-Aqsa Mosque could become a weapons storage repository by more Palestinian terrorists, Israel decided to install metal detectors to prevent the flow of potential weapons into the compound. What particularly disturbed the Israelis was that in the investigation of the attack, it became clear that members of the Islamic Waqf willfully assisted the attackers in smuggling and storing the weapons as well as harbored them. Moreover, when Israeli police raided the Mount to pursue the terrorists, they discovered that indeed the Waqf had begun storing a substantial amount of other weapons as well, and was using the sanctity of the area as cover to prevent Israeli police presence and observation.

In other words, the danger of the al-Aqsa mosque’s becoming a protected “armory” for the Palestinian factions with the acquiescence of the Waqf was not theoretical. It had just happened, which is what drove the Israeli government to install the magnetometers and cameras, as well as to close the Temple Mount to everyone for two days to calm the situation and to prevent mass demonstrations on the Mount as police swept the area searching for other arsenals. This closure was a response to the call by the Jordanian-sponsored Mufti of Jerusalem (essentially the head of the Waqf), Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, to all Muslims to come and ascend the Temple Mount and defy the Israelis. The Waqf – instead of being an instrument of administration and a voice for calm — had been caught helping to establish a terror infrastructure and haven and then serve as the cheerleaders for ensuing violence.

Jordan – who ostensibly was afforded a special status under the Peace Treaty over the Waqf in order to ensure its peaceful behavior and prevent third-parties from attacking Israel – instead immediately responded not with an apology over having failed in what had been expected of it under the Treaty, but with a sharp rebuke of Israel for installing the magnetometers and cameras. Ignoring entirely the events that had precipitated Israel’s action, Amman escalated its rhetoric in the following days and proceeded to continue to expand the Waqf, sided with the Palestinians, took the lead in escalating and further enflaming the crisis, and accused Jerusalem of changing the status quo of the Temple Mount and began to challenge Israel’s right to even be there.

Into this climate of rising Jordanian-Palestinian incendiary rhetoric and resulting rage – instigated by terrorists, sanctioned by the Waqf and enflamed further by the Jordanian government – it was not long in coming that a Jordanian construction worker, enraged by the course of events, attacked an Israeli diplomat (the deputy head of security in the Israeli embassy) in his apartment in Amman. The result of this attack on July 23, 2017, was unfortunately not only the attacking construction worker’s death but his co-worker as well, a result of the diplomat’s having defended himself.

This eventually led to a dangerous diplomatic standoff where the Israeli diplomat was prevented from leaving Amman, and was de facto held hostage by the Jordanian government as leverage to force Israel to yield on the Temple Mount, remove the metal detectors and cameras, and allow for further expansion of the Waqf. Indeed, a few days later Israel yielded to all of Jordan’s demands and removed the metal detectors installed in the access points to the Temple Mount and allowed the Waqf to expand, in return for which, the Israeli diplomat was allowed to return home.

The return of Naharayim (2018)

It was reinforced less than a year later by another action seen in Israel as hostile, although clearly it was under Jordan’s rights under the peace treaty. When the eastern Mandatory area had been separated from the western part and made into Jordan in 1921, a small area, which included an island and adjacent land where the Yarmouk and Jordan rivers flow together, was farmed by Jews, who remained in it throughout and after the 1948 war. Because the final armistice maps showed Israeli control there, the area remained in Israeli hands ever since, even though earlier maps indicated the small strip of land actually should have been considered outside the Rhodes armistice lines as part of Jordan.

It was a small tract, but it has some importance, especially since it included a power plant – which at one time in the 1920s and 1930s had supplied most of the Mandate with its electricity — and farm in the area of Naharayim on the Jordan River. In the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, however, Jordan asserted its claim to the land, and solution was found to formally recognize the land as part of Jordan, but that Israel could lease the land in 25-year renewable agreements. It was assumed that this was a long-term solution that would lay the issue aside for generations, but in 2018, Jordan suddenly gave notice that when the 25-year lease ended, Israel was to leave the area in entirety and simply abandon the 100-year investment in the power plant and fields. Israel complied because Jordan acted within its rights, but it left a significant amount of bitterness in Israel as behavior unbecoming of two nations in a genuine state of peace.

Traditional strategic cooperation before 2017

This episode marked a significant shift in Jordanian behavior. Amman had been careful not to challenge Israeli sovereignty over areas of Judea and Samaria. In return – as enshrined in the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty – Jordanian interests were given special consideration and Jordan granted an outsized role in the management of Islamic affairs on the Temple Mount was tolerated. It was a strategic relationship that benefitted both parties.

Prior to 2017, Israel-Jordanian cooperation was instrumental in reversing the chaos and bloodshed that had developed as a result of the Oslo process in 1993 and Israel’s precipitous withdrawal and indulgence of Yasir Arafat. This was especially important regarding Jerusalem.

Although Jordan had formally severed its ties to Judea and Samaria in 1988, Israel re-involved Jordan deeply as the Oslo process descended into increasing instability and violence. In particular, Jerusalem and Amman worked together to block increasing PLO and Hamas efforts – assisted in this destabilization by the Turkish government — to establish themselves over Jerusalem institutions. In particular, Israel had learned by the 1990s and 2000s the painful lesson of yielding the Waqf to the PLO’s dominance earlier in the 1990s.

The Oslo debacle

In 1994, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Sulaiman Ja’abari, died. The PLO moved quickly to appoint his successor, Ikrima Sa’id Sabri. Although Sabri was of the Muslim Brotherhood, Arafat had throughout the 1990s simultaneously cultivated , employed, suppressed and controlled Hamas and the Brotherhood. Arafat thus was thus comfortable in bringing into a position of power such a dangerous figure as Sabri, largely because he was confident that he could use Sabri’s talents to enflame and destabilize to his advantage.

Jordan, however, was having none of this. Having traditionally held dominance over the appointment of the Mufti, and highly sensitive to threats posed by the PLO from bitter decades of experience, King Hussein appointed another Mufti, Abdul Qader Abdeen, who was beholden neither to the PLO nor to the Muslim Brotherhood.

In a stark departure from amicable and coordinated Israeli-Jordanian strategies in dealing with Jerusalem for the preceding 30 years, Israel dissed the Jordanians and chose instead to appease the PLO and allow the PLO’s choice, Ikrima Sa’id Sabri – a Palestinian nationalist affiliated with the northern League of the Muslim brotherhood in Israel — to become Mufti of Jerusalem, a perch from which he energized Palestinian violence, threatened Israel, and rattled Amman.

After then having faced an unprecedented wave of violence in the 1990s and first two years of the 2000s, as a result of this catastrophic misstep, Israel realized its strategic mistake and happily seized upon the Jerusalem provisions of the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty. Israel pressed the PLO heavily to relent and bent Jerusalem’s Islamic structures toward Amman and away from the PLO and Hamas. Arafat had effectively used Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and its violence as an instrument throughout the 1990s, but eventually, after Arafat’s demise, Palestinian President Abu Mazen, lacking any real gravitas and facing so serious a threat over the growing and uncontrollable power of Sabri, especially after the PLO lost Gaza to Hamas in 2006, in private happily but publicly grousing, yielded to Israeli and Jordanian pressure, removed Sabri, and replaced him with another Mufti, Muhammad Ahmad Hussein.

In the great, but very quiet struggle which ensued in the following years, Jordan and Israel cooperated closely to prevent either Hamas or the PLO from weaponizing the issue of Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and the al-Aqsa Mosque in their internal struggles. Both Israel and Jordan knew that any Palestinian role over the sensitive sites would deteriorate into an internal rivalry and lead to a chaotic situation and violence – indeed, an intra-Palestinian bidding war paid in Israeli blood and Jordanian marginalization – that would threaten both Amman and Jerusalem, let alone their respective interests there (Israeli sovereignty and ultimate control and the lead given Jordan to administratively manage the area).

Indeed, by the mid-2000s, Israel and Jordan also began cooperating on a far broader strategic threat — the increasingly dangerous Turkish, neo-Ottoman imperial project launched by Erdogan and publicly, unapologetically touted by his foreign minister, Mehmet Davutoglu, and parliament speaker, Mustafa Sentop. Jordan and Israel together worked to prevent Ankara’s attempt to mobilize Muslims on the Jerusalem issue around Turkey’s new “Khaliphate” and hand the standard of leader of the Sunni world to Erdogan.

And to be sure, it was quite a war zone.

In the first decade and a half of the 2000s, Ankara invested effort and coin to challenge both Jordan and Israel and fill the expanding vacuum left among Palestinians as a result of the increasingly impoverished Hamas and increasingly limp PLO. Ankara aimed broadly, but it focused on Jerusalem and on the Temple Mount to replace the Jordanians. In Turkey’s endeavor to invest in encouraging a new leadership over Palestinian Muslims, it focused extensively, not solely, on Hamas as much as on the Northern league of the Muslim Brotherhood under Ra’ad Salah, and … Ikrima Sa’id Sabri.

Prime Minister Erdogan himself became involved, and soon labeled the very presence of Israel in Jerusalem as an insult to Islam and launched a quiet but overt Turkish governmental effort, led by Dr. Sardar Cam (a close associate of PM Erdogan who earlier had headed his office in parliament), to operate a largely governmentally-funded foundation called “Tika” under the ostensible cover of preserving and reinforcing the Islamic heritage of Jerusalem. By 2018, this foundation had spent USD 63 million in Jerusalem. The local leaders associated with Ankara’s efforts — Shaykh Raad Salah and ousted Mufti Ikrima Sa’id Sabri – used Turkish support and monies to escalate incitement and organized violent incidents against Israel. Another foundation tied to the Turkish government funded bus services to ferry members of the Murabitun and Murabitaat — both of which are banned organizations in Israel — to Jerusalem to conduct activities, many of which result in Israeli-Arab violence. Another organization, the “Agency for Our Heritage,” operated directly out of Istanbul and spent USD 40 million in the late 2010s.

Indeed, to help entangle Israel in law-fare, Ankara also sent old Ottoman land registries (some potentially forged) and lawyers to the Palestinians to challenge Israel everywhere on land ownership.

President Erdogan also has for most of the last two decades employed an increasingly hostile and serious parade of threats. With each year the rhetoric Erdogan employs against the West and Israel grows. By 2015, he even called on the Islamic world to follow him into organizing an Islamic army to “liberate” Jerusalem, which is essentially a declaration of war.

While strategic cooperation anchored to the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty functioned well enough to hamper Ankara’s schemes in the first decade, by the mid-2010s, Israel, in an attempt to tamp down Israeli-Turkish tensions, was loathe to continue to decisively confront Ankara and thus allowed Turkey considerable latitude rather than outright shut it down.

The result was not only an increased Turkish role in many critical places in Jerusalem. It also allowed the reemergence of Ra’ad Salah of the Northern League and Ikrima Sa’id Sabri as voices for Palestinian control and incitement focused on Jerusalem – which not only invited but demanded from Hamas and the PLO a competitive scramble to assert themselves over this most emotive issue. The situation was essentially beginning to spin out of Israel’s and Jordan’s control.

To note, though, Turkey’s primary target at the time was not Jordan, but Saudi Arabia. Ankara understood that by taking the lead in Jerusalem through its institutions and foundations, and through the rising fortunes of its allies Ra’ad Salah and Ikrima Sa’id Sabri, Ankara could begin to challenge Saudi Arabia’s claim to Sunni leadership which was emanating from its custodianship of the Two Holy Mosques — the al-Haram Mosque in Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina.

The intensity of this Turkish-Saudi, intra-Sunni cold war, and the fear that any weakening of Jordan could undermine Saudi Arabia helped shift Riyadh’s perception of Jordan. From being a traditional rival over the allegiance of the region’s tribes since the late 1910s, suddenly Saudi Arabia viewed Jordan, and indeed even Israel, as a strategic partner in its rivalry against Turkey. Jordan’s partnership in helping Israel prevent the radicalization of Jerusalem institutions by either Turkey, Iran or their local proxies, also strategically helped the Saudis, who had over the last decade found themselves as gravely threatened by Turkey’s neo-Ottoman project – especially the attempt to resurrect the Khaliphate to seize the standard of Sunni Islam — as anyone else in the region.

The Saudis understood how Turkey or Iran could use of the Temple Mount to open a new, violent and highly emotive front in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict to radicalize the region.

That this structure of several Arab states working together with Israel (some openly, some semi quietly) seemed to work so well makes it all the more befuddling and disconcerting that Jordan suddenly shifted the foundations of its policy in July 2017 and became part of the confrontation front on Jerusalem against Israel in cooperation with the PLO – and through the PLO’s complete failure and unpopularity to unwittingly opening the door for HAMAS to seize the issue — rather than assist Israel in keeping the situation there calm.

Why did Jordan do this?

What is Jordan?

To properly understand what would lead to such a dramatic and potentially self-destructive move by Amman, one has to examine the nature of what constitutes Jordanian stability, and indeed, what the very purpose and essence of the Hashemite dynasty is.

To understand the seriousness of the threat, and the gravity of Jordan’s missteps now, one has to first appreciate the geography and foundations of the Jordanian state.

Jordan, north of Amman, is largely part of the urbanized Levantine Sunni Arab structure, which includes Arab Palestinians. Some of these Jordanians are refugees from west of the Jordan River, but most are indigenous inhabitants of what once was called Trans-Jordanian Palestine (mirroring Cis-Jordanian Palestine which includes all the lands west of the Jordan River). These Arab Palestinians have long-standing and deep ties to their mirrored populations across the Jordan River, such as Karameh with Jericho, Zarqa with Jenin, Amman with Jerusalem. They are intertwined populations.

It is not a clean divide. Outside of the cities, some Bedouin tribes have long lived north of Amman, such as the Bani Hassan, who inhabit the areas of Jerash and Zarqa, and the Bani Sakher, who have been in the area of Amman and Madaba. Both thus have a long history in some of those areas North of Ma’an (just south of Amman) and Amman. Moreover, those Bedouin tribes had a history of rejecting the authority of the Ottoman Khalipha, and thus were the primary targets of the Ottoman empire in the 19^th century as it tried to settle Circassian and other Muslim populations from the Balkans and other areas of Samaria to break the geographic integrity of those tribes. As such, north of Amman, and in fact Samaria north of Jerusalem, is somewhat of a mishmash of populations emerging from Ottoman policies of internal exile, with urban populations aligned with the Ottomans in distinct tension with the tribes operating outside the cities in the area, and ultimately because of their hostility to the Ottomans aligned with the Arab Revolt and the Hashemites (led by Lawrence of Arabia).

South of Ma’an, the picture is much clearer. Jordan is the northern-most extension of the realms of the tribes of the Hejaz, among the largest in the northern Hejaz being the Banu Huwaitat of the Banu Laith, who are found primarily in the Wadi Rum area and around Petra.

The Hejaz is the area encompassing northwestern Saudi Arabia, Jordan south of Amman — particularly south of Ma’an – and even southern Israel. This area is the cradle of Islam and the realm and heartland of Arab history and the dominant tribes – most of which emerged from the Nabatean kingdoms and the Ghassanid Arabs aligned with Rome a millennium and a half ago – are its aristocracy and custodians of its identity. The area includes the cities of Mecca and Medina, and the holy “Two Holy Mosques of Islam” within them — the al-Haram Mosque in Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. Thus, the most revered family among these tribes has always been the traditional custodian of the two mosques and the core Hashemite family of the Muslim Prophet himself, Muhammad.

Clearly, the Hashemite, Hejazi pedigree of Jordan’s ruling family – the Hashemites had been the family in in charge of being the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques until the end of World War I — has in the past led Saudi Arabia, which took control of the southern part of the Hejaz and supplanted the Hashemites as the Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques in the late 1910s, into tension with the Hashemites and Jordan. And yet, in recent decades a common purpose of fighting regional forces that threaten both and could undermine the stability of both via destabilization of the Hejaz has led not only to condominium, but even a climate of coordination between the two. In short, the stability of Jordan ever since the rise of Arab nationalism and the threat to Saudi Arabia from the Yemen War (1964) has gradually become ever more a core Saudi interest, with common enemies strategically driving the two into each others’ arms.

But Jordan also assumed in its north the eastern part of the Arab populations of Palestine. While Jordan’s ruling family and its reigning pillar of allies are part of a vast north-south alignment of Hejazi tribes, the urban Arabs of Palestine are oriented east-west on both the trans-Jordanian (Jordanian) and Cis-Jordanian (Israeli) sides of the Jordan River and are part of the more urbanized Levant with a complex history very separated from the Hejazi tribes as well as the tribes further east of Jordan, Iraq and northern Saudi Arabia. Indeed, one can almost think of the Jordan River like a mirror, which were the urban centers in the north and key urban Arab clans on one side have interacted and intermarried along east-west roads with their mirrored equivalents on the other side of the Jordan River, while Bedouin tribes – deeply suspicious of the urbanized Arabs as Ottoman allies – moved about around the cities. There was, indeed, very little north-south movement or interaction of these urban Arabs of northern Palestine, and very little common identity or affinity passing from north to south.

This particular east-west orientation of politics among urbanized Arab Palestinian posed both a threat but also opportunity for Jordan and its reigning structure of tribes and families after 1948. On the one hand, it meant that any unrest in Cis-Jordanian Palestine (Israel, Judea and Samaria) could threaten to spread into Trans-Jordanian Palestine (Jordan), but on the other it also meant that Jordan could also use its sway and control over the eastern Arabs of Palestine to control their western extensions, especially by alliance with the Bedouin tribes of the area (Banu Sakher and Adwan being the biggest in the north and in the Jordan Valley, although in conflict with each other, with lesser tribes in the north as well of the Rwala nomads and the Bani Khaled, Bani Hassan, Bani Sirhan, Sardiyeh and Isa). Against these tribes stood the urbanized populations, which posed a challenge to the Hashemites, especially given their east-west orientation of influence and affinity.

As such, this complex reality upholds the delicate balance in northern Jordan. Hebron can unsettle Ma’an, or Jericho can rattle Karameh, but so too can the control over the Jordanian-sanctioned elites of Ma’an and Karameh help stabilize Hebron and Karameh.

The same dynamic as governs Jordan also applies as well to Israel.

It is precisely this reality – this duality of threat and opportunity to both Amman and Jerusalem – which underpins the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty as both have a vital national interest to work together to ensure calm among the non-Hejazi urbanized (non-tribal) Arabs of both banks of Palestine. Thus, Jordanian-Israeli relations are not based on flowery western notions of peace emanating from a treaty, but on a mutual set of strategic realities that demand from each coordination of the other which long predated any formal peace treaty.

That is why the only unrest, let alone war, that has ever occurred on either of the banks of the Jordan River among the Palestinian was not a result of a Jordanian-Israeli conflict, but a result of an intrusion by external forces to that relationship that challenged the tribes and the Jordanian-cultivated elites of the big towns. Those external forces included a parade of revolutionary agents of upheaval and disruption of the carefully cultivated balance – the German-instigated Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Soviet-inspired Arab nationalists of Gamal Abdel Nasser and his tentacles (the PLO) in 1964-1970, or through the reintroduction of the PLO after 1993 by the Israelis.

As such, other than the brief period from 1993-1996 as a result of the Oslo process, the absolute exclusion of foreign actors was a foundation of Jordanian-Israeli relations and the vital interest of their American ally.

Until now.

Part IV will examine how a series of missteps – not only by Jordan, but by the US and others – rocked the Jordanian state and made wobbly its foundations.

Jordan: Stumbling into an Abyss

June 13, 2022

Part II: Reactions to Jordan’s incitement

By David Wurmser

In part one of this essay, I described the harsh and increasingly hostile anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic rhetoric recently employed by Amman, but also its attempts to champion the Palestinian cause and wrest sovereignty from Israel on the Temple Mount, if not all holy sites in Jerusalem into a some sort of “Vatican-like” status. I also outlined the accompanying geopolitical shifts that echo Russian and Non-Aligned Movement narratives.

In this second installment, I will examine the reactions in the West and in Israel to this turn of events, which essentially break down into three types:

Those whose patience is stressed to the limit with Jordan at such a sensitive moment and who advocate ignoring Amman’s demands when they are perceived to come at such an expense of Israeli interests that they threaten the essence of Israeli continued control over either Jerusalem or critical areas of Judea and Samaria.

Those who argue that Jordan is acting over the top unjustifiably, but that the larger interests and continued cooperation between Israel and Jordan remain so important that very narrow Israeli interests save but a few truly vital ones should transcend the imperative of maintaining the peace treaty and trying to keep Israeli-Jordanian relations on an even keel.

Those who argue that Israel has only itself to blame and that Jordan is simply reacting to Israel’s failure to satiate Palestinian demands, thereby “weakening” the Palestinian Authority(PA) which puts Amman in an impossible position wherein they have no choice other than to champion the PA.

In other words, should the reaction be to reject, excuse (but not necessarily accept), or appease Jordan’s demands?

Reject Amman’s demands

In 1967, Shai Agnon, as he received the Nobel Prize for literature, ascended the podium in Oslo, Norway and spoke:

“I tell you who I am. From the midst of a historical catastrophe, when Titus the King of Rome put Jerusalem to the sword and exiled Israel from its land, born I was in one of the cities of the Diaspora. Mourning was every moment. But I imagined myself as one who himself was born in Jerusalem. In dreams, and in night visions, I saw myself standing with my Levite brothers in the Temple, as I sing with them songs of David, King of Israel. On account of Jerusalem, I have written everything that G-d has given me in my heart and in my pen to write.”¹

In this, the great writer was no innovator, but a link in a long chain, from singing on the rivers of Babylon in the Bible, to the haunting song (“Jerusalem of Gold”) of Naomi Shemer, sung by Shuli Nathan, on the terrifying eve of the Six Day War, when Israel’s rapid victory was still in the future and the very real prospect of another catastrophic destruction of the Jewish people was descending.

It was a tradition of hope, moored to the mystical attachment to Mount Moriah, the Temple Mount, the Western Wall or whatever other name it carried, that focused on that one place, the one site on the globe, that allowed every Jew personally to look beyond the moment of hopelessness to redemption.

As Rabbi Soloveichik has noted, the irreconcilable mourning over the loss of Jerusalem two millennia ago, mixed with the uncompromising, indeed unquestioned hope driven by the certainty of return (reinforced by the idea that the destruction and exile followed by redemption and return had happened once before 2500 years ago), animated each generation of Jews to not only push on and survive but to harbor an impossible sense of hope and optimism. As Soloveichik noted, this quite possibly could be seen by a modern psychiatrist as a form of insanity, but it was what drove every Jew in his darkest moments to persevere.²

The essence was perhaps best expressed not through the words of the lofty intellectual, but through the eyes of a simple 19-year old Jewish teenager who grew up in a community isolated for millennia in Ethiopia which had left Israel in the first exile and had not even heard yet of the destruction of the Temple by Titus and the Roman legions. For her, as she plodded her way with the rest of her community on foot over a thousand miles in a march through the desert which many never survived led by Israeli agents to a collection point where quietly at night they were spirited out to Israel, their desperate journey was not driven by some modern idea of self-determination, but by a primordial cry of the soul. As she said, translated and cited by Rabbi Soloveichik:

“Until the age of 19, I grew up in a world in which the Beit Hamiqdash – the Holy Temple in Jerusalem – actually existed. I grew up hearing about the Kohanim – Holy Priests – and how they worked in the Temple. I fell asleep listening to the stories about the halo hovering over Jerusalem…We prayed and performed customs that expressed our yearning for Zion. We struggle to keep going despite the terrible conditions…because of our goal to reach Jerusalem of Gold, and after so many generations to stand at the gates of the Holy Temple.”³

Although there are some Israelis, like Amos Oz, who scoff at this spiritual attachment, the vast majority of Israelis – indeed Jews — believe the idea of return to Jerusalem itself – and by that was meant the Temple Mount, not some modern suburb – both spiritual and concrete was the irrepressible force upholding the beleaguered soul of the Jewish people. The epicenter of Jewish existence and survival is, thus, the Temple Mount.

In this context, Jordan’s statements in recent crises denigrating the right of the Jewish people to have any presence or standing on the Temple Mount, obliterating verbally any connection of the Jewish people to that site, strikes not only an emotive and painful chord among many Jews, but is deeply offensive and deserves an angry response. To many, thus, no modern power, monarch or idea or even superpower stands strongly enough to compete with four thousand years of Jewish history, belief, survival, hope, imagination, attachment – and ultimately essence — to the place because compromise on this is a betrayal of the legacy of about two hundred generations and an action tantamount to suicide. As poet Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896-1981) wrote: “Whoever rules the Temple Mount, rules the Land of Israel.”

Indeed, even the annual flag march through Jerusalem and its gates, while described almost universally in the Western press as a modern, indeed very recent jingoist provocation, is in fact an evolution of a ritual of longing conducted for perhaps a thousand years. As Talmudic scholar, Jeffrey Woolf of Bar Ilan University noted:

“There is a very long-standing tradition for hundreds of years, perhaps for millennia, of walking around and encountering the various gates of Jerusalem and expressing one’s love for Jerusalem. People would come from all over the world on pilgrimage, walk and say prayers at every single gate. And they would [similarly] walk around the gates of the Temple Mount.”⁴

And thus, if forced to choose between continued peace with Jordan and the convenience – or even survival — of King Abdallah, many, indeed most Israelis see it as obvious that they, as the roughly two hundred generations before, really can only choose their attachment to Jerusalem over their own or the Jordanian King’s convenience.

The answer of Prime Minister Bennett — though leading a left-leaning coalition with an Arab party in it (led by Mansour Abbas) and another Arab Party (Ayman Oudeh) outside it providing the buffer votes to allow it to continue – can only be understood in this context. Accusing Jordan of “backing those who resort to violence,”⁵ Bennett said also:

“There is no change or new evolution in the status on the Temple Mount – Israel’s sovereignty is preserved. All decisions on the Temple Mount will be made by the government of Israel from the context of our sovereignty, freedom of religion and security, and not as a result of pressures from foreign powers or political forces.”⁶

The last phrase is a direct rebuke of Jordan’s demands. Nor was this just PM Bennett. Even Israel’s left-leaning foreign minister, Yair Lapid, was reportedly so angered by the fact that the Jordanian government was seen as fueling rather than calming the tensions, that he considered a much sharper response and course of action against Jordan during the heat of the unrest in April.⁷

In essence, as one political commentator epitomized, the thought is growing in Israel that:

“Beware King Abdullah’s scheming in and around Jerusalem. The Hashemite Kingdom may be an important partner for Israel in maintaining stability along Israel’s longest border, and an ally in the fight against Iranian hegemonic ambitions…But Abdullah today is proving to be a foe in the struggle over Jerusalem, willing to employ historical falsifications, radical rhetoric, and shameless diplomatic guile to undermine Israeli rights at the holiest place on earth to the Jewish people. And he takes on this task with hands that are not at all clean.”⁸

In other words, the more Jordan sides with the Palestinians against Israel, especially on the issue of the Temple Mount, the less use, and thus tolerance, there is among many Israelis of the King’s demands.

Excusing and indulging Jordan

There are many analysts, unrivaled in their understanding of Jordan, who countenance patience with Amman, especially in the context of these internal threats. This line of thinking is perhaps closest to the traditional way in which Israeli-Jordanian relations have been understood since the 1960s, or possible even earlier.

At its core is the belief that Jordan serves several critical strategic functions:

It helps Israel manage the Palestinian population and helps obstruct the rise of radical militia that could challenge both Israel and the Hashemite King.

It provides a stable eastern border.
It prevents the dangerous politics of the Persian Gulf access to Israel’s center (as for example Syria has failed to do regarding Israel’s north).
It provides a cooperative structure to Israel to manage and administer sensitive Islamic sites and assets in Jerusalem.

The difficulty of Jordan’s position, its inability to digest instability emerging from the Palestinian issue and its serving as a buffer against other very aggressive and dangerous regional forces and nations, is both well understood and considered. As such, there is quite a bit of elasticity in understanding, indeed tolerance, in this camp that Amman is unwillingly forced to take actions and make statements at Israel’s expense. While such statements may grate many Israelis, they argue, one must consider the cause and the alternative. Indulging Amman’s rhetoric is a small price to pay for a continued, stable and highly strategic partner across the Jordan River.

The best formulation of this argument came from Robert Satloff, whose long years of refining his expertise on Jordan demand serious consideration:

“…Despite – or perhaps because of – the much more open royal embrace of Israel than in years past, …popular opinion – such as it is – was looking for an excuse to lash out. This is manifested in the 82 out of 109 MPs chomping at the bit to score a political point by urging [the] government to expel the Israeli ambassador, an act which could have triggered terrible downward spiral in this vital relationship. In this moment came the provocative comments by the Jordanian PM … not unreasonably interpreted as celebrating those actions of the Palestinians bent on stroking tensions and promoting confrontation. Problematic as his words may have been, my assessment is counter-intuitive – i.e., that his remarks were designed to get ahead of the parliamentary mob in an effort to defuse that explosive moment and ultimately protect the fundamentals of the Jordan-Israel relationship.”⁹

This is probably the most astute and accurate analysis of what is motivating the Jordanian leadership, none of whom have ever shown any particular penchant for wanton Israel-bashing. In the context of this outlook, one is hard pressed not to feel some sympathy for the Jordanian leadership in navigating its despair.

The security and diplomatic establishments in Israel, as well as some Jewish journals also advocate such a response, which is indeed very close to the traditional half-century paradigm of Israeli-Jordanian relations (long predating the codification in the 1994 peace treaty) and the spirit behind the strategic and security cooperation clauses of the peace treaty.

So, it was little surprise that just before the violence during Ramadan broke out, but after the wave of terror against Israel began, a series of high-level Israeli leaders traveled in a concentrated effort to Amman to enlist Jordan’s help in calming the situation, as has always been done to good effect until recently. One Israeli paper on March 30 noted the bewildering pace of Israeli travel to Amman in this context:

“Israel has pushed closer to Jordan in a massive effort to prevent an outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian violence next month that could destabilize both countries. President Isaac Herzog is set to make the first-ever “public and official” visit to Jordan, either by himself or by any of his predecessors since the country’s founding in 1948, …[to] discuss “deepening Israeli-Jordanian relations, maintaining regional stability with an emphasis on the upcoming holiday period, strengthening peace and normalization, and the many latent opportunities in relations between Israel, Jordan and the wider region … Herzog will meet with Abdullah in his palace, just one day after Defense Minister Benny Gantz visited and a week after Public Security Minister Omer Bar Lev was in Jordan to meet with the country’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi. Both countries understand that should security ties fail, not only will the king face instability at home, but the Jordanian street violence could spill over the border to Israel.”¹⁰

So as to put emphasis on this point, the Russian withdrawal from Syria resulting from Russia’s redirecting its efforts as a result of the Ukraine war has left a vacuum which is being filled by Iran, placing the IRGC and other Iranian terrorists not only closer to Israel’s border, but also along Jordan’s border. In the last weeks, this presence has begun to turn into terrorist operations against Jordan, about which King Abdallah said:

“We want everybody to be part of a new Middle East and to move forward, but we do have security challenges. We’re seeing border attacks on a regular basis and we know who’s behind that… Unfortunately we’re looking at maybe an escalation of problems on our borders,”¹¹

The King later was more specific:

 “That vacuum [left by the Russians] will be filled by the Iranians and their proxies..”¹²

Jordan’s role as a buffer to the Persian Gulf state system remains a vital Israeli as well as Saudi and US concern.

The violence in Jerusalem, and Jordan’s apparent encouragement of it, in the weeks following the rapid succession of visits by President Herzog, Defense Minister Gantz and Internal Security Minister Bar-Lev have placed the paradigm informing this effort under great stress. And to be sure, those who argue that Jordan should be indulged do not deny that Jordan is behaving inappropriately and provocatively, nor do they necessarily embrace the idea of Israel’s conceding to Jordan on Israel’s sovereignty over the Temple Mount. They simply argue that Israel must not give in to frustration and should instead keep its eye on the larger picture. Is the assertion of Israeli pique and the insistence on the application of its rights fully, they ask, worth jeopardizing the peace treaty, if not even Jordan’s survival, in the larger geo-strategic context? And is not Israel’s power and societal strength so solid that it can digest this indulgence?

As such, the conclusion is to counsel Israel to exercise strategic patience and work through the “noise,” to just digest the rhetoric or react moderately with measured response, and to some extent tred lightly in engaging in any further actions that could enflame the circumstance.

This argument is essentially an appeal to uphold the paradigm of Israeli-Jordanian relations reigning for the last six decades at least.

Appeasing and leveraging Jordan’s demands

Those far less sympathetic to Israel seek to exploit Jordan’s weakness and despair, and the threat of collapse, as leverage to further pressure Israel into concessions on the Palestinian track. Sadly, at this point, it is likely the US government under the Biden administration falls into this category.

In contrast to the argument made by those who are sympathetic to Israel who believe it is precisely Israeli strength that unlocks the potential for peace and allows Israel latitude of action,¹³ the Obama administration and indeed President Obama himself – the intellectual forerunner of the current administration – appears to have reversed that concept into policy a decade ago (August 2014) and argued that the central obstacle to peace is Israel’s failure to be more flexible, which is in essence a result of Israel’s immense power and consolidation which tempers its eagerness for peace.¹⁴ In other words, Israel is too strong to want peace.

Thus, the path to peace would necessitate some weakening of Israel not as a consequence of, but as a prerequisite for, achieving peace.

For this community of policymakers and opinion-setters, the exploitation of Jordan’s despair and the benefits provided by Israel’s central seven-decade long interest in maintaining Jordan’s survival and in a state of peace are highly useful assets into which to tap and to leverage to force Jerusalem to concede.

As such, the answer of this latter crowd is to demand rather than suggest Israel’s indulgence of Jordan’s hostility, as well as to cede sovereignty in part or in whole. In fact, Jordan’s hostility ultimately is understood as being a result of Israel’s failure to advance an attainable peace because of its intransigence and ultimately lack of interest in peace. In other words the message to Israel is: “It’s your fault anyway, so deal with it.” Leveraging Amman’s despair to weaken Israel both advances peace, and through that, shores up the Jordanian regime.

In this context, it was no surprise that the White House issued a statement on April 25, 2022, that essentially sided entirely with Jordan and abandoned any pretense of support or sympathy with Israel’s situation regarding its frustration with Jordan, let alone the issue of the Temple Mount. Issued after the harshest volleys of statements from Jordan by Prime Minister Kasawneh and Foreign Minister Safadi, the White House issued the following formal communique:

“Jordan is a critical ally and force for stability in the Middle East, and the President confirmed unwavering U.S. support for Jordan and His Majesty’s leadership… The President affirmed his strong support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and cited the need to preserve the historic status quo at the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount. The President also recognized the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s crucial role as the custodian of Muslim holy places in Jerusalem. The leaders discussed the political and economic benefits of further regional integration in infrastructure, energy, water, and climate projects, with Jordan a critical hub for such cooperation and investment.”¹⁵

Apart from completely ignoring Jordan’s role in fanning the flames of tension in the preceding weeks, the communique represents a shift in policy in many aspects and is a loaded statement full of coded language:

It recognizes Jordan as the custodian of the Muslim Holy places in Jerusalem.  Jordan was never “the custodian” of the holy places under any agreement.  Under the peace agreement, Israel is committed to giving preferential consideration to Jordanian — as opposed to other nations’ – concerns, and in this context, gives Jordan a special status in helping Israel administer the sites, but no more. Israel never agreed with Jordan in any document to cede its ultimate sovereign control over the Temple Mount.
The US now recognizes the Temple Mount as a whole as a Muslim Holy site, not just the al-Aqsa mosque.  While Israel has allowed the Waqf a role there until now, the whole area was formally never was considered a Muslim holy site other than the al-Aqsa mosque itself.
The “historic status quo” to which the President says the US now supports was never a term or concept until now.  Indeed, the term status quo refers to the situation as it was between 1967 to now, although that has constantly evolved, mostly to the detriment of Jews and Christians. Jordan has seized on this term “historic status quo” and then proceeds to define it in its recent policy paper in the context of the deterioration of Muslim rights since the 1852 circumstance, namely full Muslim sovereignty and control over ALL holy sites.  This concept was reinforced at the end of April by the foreign minister of Jordan, when he called Israel’s presence there illegal and ownership over the Temple Mount as being exclusively Palestinian.
The White House called Jordan helpful in calming rhetoric and preventing provocations. This is an outright inversion of truth. Jordan has not been helpful at all, and in fact, it has been one of the lead inciters over the last months. Indeed, its prime minister praised rioters, condemned Israeli Arabs who work with Israeli authorities, and encouraged more rioting attacks on Israelis in Jerusalem.  One does not need to humiliate Jordan in such a communique by criticizing King Abdallah during his visit, but praising Jordan as a partner in fighting and calming the raging rhetoric is inverted and — since the situation is highly charged (in good part because of Jordan’s rhetoric) and such incitement has led to dozens of dead Israelis thus far — itself incendiary.

And finally, in a completely new jab at Israel, Jordan has for several years been insisting that the resources of the entire Palestinian-Israeli-Jordanian area — including the water of the Sea of Galilee — be shared as a moral obligation. As such when Israel gives Israeli resources to Jordan under an agreement (such as sending large amounts of its precious water from the Sea of Galilee), Jordan regards it more as a payment of an owed debt or obligation by Israel rather than a willing concession. Since Jordan’s new policy sees itself now as the champion of the Palestinians and their advocate and strategic partner against Israel, Jordan also sees itself at the center of authority to properly manage the allocation of Cis-Jordanian (Israel and the Palestinian Authority) and Trans-Jordanian (Jordan) resources, and has thus arrogated to itself the controlling role of being the central hub, rather than Israel (which isn’t mentioned in this capacity), for distributing all of the resources of the area. Astonishingly, the US signed off on this concept in the last sentences of this communique.

On each point, the US echoed Jordan’s positions and distanced from Israel, ignored Israel’s interests and even showed little if any concession to Israel’s sovereignty.

Beyond these three basic outlooks, there are several other lines of thought emerging on Jordan. In particular, one should take note of an idea appearing in one of the leading periodicals published in the United States identified with the left side of the Democratic party, which outright called on Jordan to reoccupy the West Bank and make it part of Jordan.¹⁶ It is rather surprising that this argument is being made by some closely identified with Jordan since ultimately, it opens the Pandora’s box of the identity of Jordan, which is not only a Hashemite monarchy, but a state anchored to the tribal structures of the Hejaz (more on this in part III). And while those advocating this reversion to the pre-1967 situation look nostalgically on King Abdallah I’s embracing such a policy in 1950, the author conveniently ignores that Abdallah I’s moves cost him his life and nearly cost his son his throne a few years later.

At any rate, the basic question behind all these types of responses boil down to one core question: should Israel stand firm on its rights and accept come what may in Jordan, or should it defer its rights and stomach these provocations for the greater good of Jordan’s internal stability and external peacefulness?

Parts three and four of this essay will examine what the nature of the Hashemite Kingdom is in its essence, what stresses it faces to survive, and how understanding those dynamics could lead to a different, “fourth option” — or perhaps better described as a “scenario” since both the power and propriety of Israel’s or the US’s assuming they can shape Jordan’s future is far more limited than what is often assumed in Jerusalem or Washington at this point.

Jordan: Stumbling into an Abyss

May 25, 2022

By Dr. David Wurmser
Flaring tensions between Jordan and Israel, and in particular the escalating, hostile rhetoric coming from Amman, over the “status quo” on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem have stunned long-term observers of the situation. Even strong advocates who traditionally defend and even advocate increasing Jordan’s regional role were jarred. Israelis have been particularly shocked by the acerbic determination of Jordan’s exacerbation of this tension. As a result, some now question that relationship.

Moreover, that volley of harsh statements was made by the most senior Jordan officials over recent weeks against the backdrop of the most fatal terror wave Israel has faced in many years, with 20 Israeli fatalities in just over a month, and as hundreds of thousands of Muslims gathered on the Temple Mount to chant, “Khaybar, Khaybar Oh, Jew!; the army of Muhammad is returning,’ which is a blunt reference to the extermination of the Jews at Khaybar by Muhammad in 628 AD. The juxtaposition terror attacks and chants for another genocide of Jews against the verbal assault from Amman amplified the recoil Israelis felt from the substance of the statements and lead many who in the past supported Jordan to doubt Amman’s continued goodwill toward Israel and the resilience of the attending peace treaty.

Israel, the United States and those who view Arab-Israeli peace as positive should indeed be concerned about the survival of the peace treaty. Indeed, Jordan’s behavior in public plunged a dagger into the heart of the reigning Israeli defense concept since 1967; Jordan and Israel shared an interest in preventing the Palestinian issue from exploding out of control and threatening the Kingdom, and thus Amman could be counted upon by Israel to always help calm and manage the fallout of any increase in local and regional tension. Suddenly, Jordan was instead pouring kerosene onto Israeli-Palestinian tensions.

However, the statements themselves are not the problem, nor did this latest episodic flare-up in Palestinian violence cause the emerging “Jordanian problem.” It merely exposed something much deeper and more troubling about the state of affairs in Jordan.

Indeed, both the statements and Jordan’s vulnerability to Palestinian escalations are symptoms of a failing Jordanian policy. Or more accurately, Jordan’s instability and the more provocative and hostile Jordanian policy in fact both reflect and result from an underlying shift in King Abdallah’s strategic outlook. That shift not only is out of kilter with the spirit of various articles in the Israel-Jordanian peace treaty, but contradicts it.

The shift is not recent, but likely occurred between five and ten years ago. And the longer and deeper it takes root, not only will the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty come under further duress, but the purpose of the shift to shore up King Abdullah’s reign politically will fail. The stability of the Kingdom, in fact, will deteriorate further.

Jordan’s tantrum

Since April, Jordan has not only escalated its rhetoric against Israel, but has crossed several red lines in this round of conflict.

Echoing Palestinian incitement

Most particularly, it descended to unprecedented levels when its prime minister, Bisher al-Kasawneh, praised those who attacked the Jews and called those Arabs who work with Israeli authorities as legitimate targets for violence. He praised the rioters as those:

“who proudly stand like minarets, hurling their stones in a volley of clay at the Zionist sympathizers defiling al-Aqsa Mosque under the protection of the Israeli occupation government.”

The term “Zionist sympathizers” cut Israeli hard because it so closely echoed a highly inflammatory statement by the Israeli Arab List leader Ayman Oudeh made a week earlier right after a Christian Israeli-Arab policeman, Amir Khouri, was killed in the line of duty as several Israelis were being killed in a terror attack in Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv in March. The verbal assault by Oudeh on Arabs who have integrated into Israeli official institutions like the military and police was a clear attempt to denigrate their memory, especially since he then proceeded to call on Arab police in Israel to resign and resist. Jordanian PM’s Kasawneh’s words – which both praised resistance to Israel and denigrated those police who cooperate with Israel — on the heels Oudeh’s statement were inescapably to many seen as an intentional echo. The statement thus horrified Israelis and emboldened their adversaries.

Moreover, Jordan de facto accepted Israel’s ultimate control over the Temple Mount in the 1994 peace treaty. In return, Israel would prioritize consideration of Jordan’s special and historical role over Muslim holy sites. But Jordan, via Prime Minister Kasawneh’s statement annulled Israel’s legitimacy and erased any Jewish connection to the Temple mount by calling Israelis illegal colonial settlers, a second time a week after the first statement:

“Israel has no sovereignty over the holy sites in Jerusalem! It is a Muslim place of worship, and only the Jordanian Waqf has full authority over the management of the compound…This is occupied Palestinian land.”

These were particularly bitter pills for Israel to swallow coming in the wake of a sudden, unexpected wave of Palestinian terror that claimed 20 Israeli lives.

Contradicting the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty

And it was essentially annulling two critical parts of the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty. Article 2, paragraph 3 states that: “They will develop good neighbourly relations of co-operation between them to ensure lasting security, will refrain from the threat or use of force against each other and will settle all disputes between them by peaceful means.” The point is so important that the treaty returns, expands and dwells at length on this point again in Article 4, which states:

”Both Parties, acknowledging that mutual understanding and co-operation in security-related matters will form a significant part of their relations and will further enhance the security of the region, take upon themselves to base their security relations on mutual trust, advancement of joint interests and co- operation, and to aim towards a regional framework of partnership in peace…The Parties undertake, in accordance with the provisions of this Article, the following:  
to refrain from the threat or use of force or weapons, conventional, non-conventional or of any other kind, against each other, or of other actions or activities that adversely affect the security of the other Party;

to refrain from organising, instigating, inciting, assisting or participating in acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, subversion or violence against the other Party; 
to take necessary and effective measures to ensure that acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, subversion or violence against the other Party do not originate from, and are not committed within, through or over their territory (hereinafter the term “territory” includes the airspace and territorial waters). 
‘Consistent with the era of peace and with the efforts to build regional security and to avoid and prevent aggression and violence, the Parties further agree to refrain from the following:  
joining or in any way assisting, promoting or co-operating with any coalition, organisation or alliance with a military or security character with a third party, the objectives or activities of which include launching aggression or other acts of military hostility against the other Party, in contravention of the provisions of the present Treaty.“

In other words, Kasawneh’s statements – echoing Palestinian threats and allowing Jordanian territory to be a haven for factional heads calling for violence against Israel, praising those who attack Israelis by senior officials, and labeling Israeli Arabs who serve in Israel’s defense structures as traitors are all direct violations of the peace treaty.

The second inconsistency with the peace treaty emerged from Article 9, Paragraph 2 of the Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace, which says that:

“In this regard (i.e., regarding freedom of access to places of religious and historical significance), in accordance with the Washington Declaration, Israel respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim Holy shrines in Jerusalem…When negotiations on the permanent status will take place, Israel will give high priority to the Jordanian historic role in these shrines.”

While this article benefits Jordan greatly, it also enshrines Jordan’s acknowledgement of Israel’s ultimate control over the area. Kasawneh, in contrast, asserts Israel as a squatter and essentially promotes Jordan as the sovereign authority over the Temple Mount and Israel as an illegal occupier. In both his first and second statements, PM Kasawneh sought to criminalize the essence of Article 9 and through that, the very Israeli control through which Jordan derives its “special role” on the Mount in the peace treaty.

Moreover, this Jordanian behavior followed a particularly intense two-month period in which Israel’s leadership had invested great time and capital in coordinating with Jordan, including by offering major concessions and goodwill gestures to Amman and the Palestinians, in order to ensure that the Ramadan-Passover-Easter holiday trifecta would pass smoothly. Indeed, Israel paid some price in confidence among Gulf Arabs and Egypt by trying to bring Jordan and the Palestinian Authority into Abraham Accords structure at the United States’ behest during the recent Negev Summit in March. As such, Jordan’s turn toward a darker side not only raised doubts about that investment, but humiliated the Israeli government at a highly sensitive political moment, especially those political leaders most involved, namely Benny Gantz, Omer Bar-Lev and Yair Lapid.

Jordan suggests resurrecting the 1852 Ottoman status quo

Another troubling aspect of recent months has been that Jordan’s government drafted a position paper elevating and expanding its “legal” role in Jerusalem and demanding the revival of the “historic status quo.” It then released, or perhaps “leaked” portions to the public, not as an official Jordanian position, but as one of the Jerusalem Waqf.

The document is highly problematic and aggressive in its claims and demands. First, what is one to make of this new concept, “the historic status quo?” Anyone who has visited the Temple Mount since 1967 understands that there has never been a static status quo. It has evolved considerably over the five and half decades since then. And that evolution has invariably been in the Muslims’ favor:

There are ever increasing restrictions on visiting the site by non-Muslims, including the banning not only of any religious articles, but even non-Palestinian Authority sanctioned tour books.
The Waqf has increased the expanse and intensity of its Palestinian-Arab nationalist and Islamist political behavior, especially after 1994 when it fell under the control of Ikrima Said Sabri.
The Waqf also in several periods undertook activities that damaged the archeological, sacred remains of the temple.
The Waqf expanded – especially in recent years – the definition of “Muslim holy places” from originally the al-Aqsa mosque alone to now not only the entire Temple Mount compound but even the Western Wall (called by Muslims the al-Buraq wall after Muhammad’s horse which supposedly was tied up there).

The Jordanian document, instead of acknowledging the increasing, restrictive control by Muslims of the entire Temple Mount area, instead furthers a timeline of grievance of erosion of Muslim rights and control since 1852 which it noted as a prelude to demanding a restoration of the “historic status quo.” Placed in this context, the term “historic status quo” which Jordan seeks is clearly not a reference to anything which was in place or evolved since 1967 – since going backwards in the last 55 years increases non-Muslim rights — but a reference to the original rights enshrined by Ottoman edicts until the beginning of the erosion of exclusive Muslim control that started in 1852 upon which the document focuses.

Indeed, Jordan via this document demands full sovereignty essentially over the Temple Mount, even in cases of emergency or attack on Israel or Israelis. Indeed, even in conditions that worshippers are attacked at the Western Wall from atop the Mount, Israeli police could no longer be allowed on the Temple Mount for any condition or reason. Jordan also demands “giving the Waqf the authority to severely restrict non-Muslim visits to the Temple Mount; requiring non-Muslims to apply to visit in writing in advance; and setting restrictive tour routes of no more than 500 feet (150 meters) in each direction for non-Muslim visitors.”6

Official Jordanian statements in recent weeks since also outline the justification for such demands by the Jordanian government: Israel “illegally” occupies Jerusalem and that thus it has no right to determine realities and regulations governing the sites in it. In short, for all intents and purposes, the Jordanian government simultaneously insists that the Israeli presence in eastern Jerusalem is illegal, while at the same time insisting that under the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreements, Israel lent Jordan de facto, if not de jure, sovereignty over the holy sites. And the reference to 1852 raises the strong likelihood that “holy sites” means all “holy sites,” not only Muslim since that is the “historic status quo” as it stood in 1852 at the chosen beginning of Jordan’s timeline of grievance.

As if that was not provocative enough, Amman then shopped the document around the region and with officials in the United States. Such an action is inescapably hostile and can be seen only as a calculated humiliation of Israel, an attempt to raise tensions between Jerusalem and a relatively unsympathetic current administration in Washington, and finally also as an attempt to damage Jerusalem’s relations with some of its newer peace partners, such as the UAE.

Jordan moves to “Vaticanize” the holy sites

But if Jordan is trying to wrest sovereignty away from Israel, it will need a governing body with full authorities and heft to function effectively as the sovereign government of the Temple Mount complex. Which is where the issue of the size and role of the Waqf authority and structure comes in.

A decade ago, the Jerusalem Waqf was a rather small, administrative body primarily concerned with the preservation of Islamic structures, institutions and interests over Muslim holy sites. Over the last half decade, however, it has ballooned and changed into primarily a political institution advancing Palestinian national interests and monitoring and harassing the presence of non-Muslims who test their rights to freedom of worship (also enshrined in the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty) or presence on the Temple Mount and posing a direct challenge to Israel’s sovereignty over the area. In other words, for the first time since World War II under Hajamin al-Husseini, who sided with and strategically helped the Nazis, the office of the Mufti in Jerusalem has become a political instrument of confrontation. True, there has been some movement in that direction several decades ago under Ikrima Sabri as the Mufti in the 1990s, but his removal and replacement with a more pro-Jordanian Mufti halted that drift in the first decade and a half of the 2000s.

But since 2016, something began to change. The Size of the Waqf and its employees expanded dramatically, to the point where there were as many as 850 employees by the beginning of this year – a size vastly greater than any administrative structure over the area required.

Indeed, as if that was not odd enough, the Jordanian monarch asked for an additional four dozen to be hired by the Waqf over the last several weeks. Israel has thus far refused that request.7

And not only has the Waqf employee base been expanded, so too has its administrative council over the last several years under Jordanian pressure.8 Both tracks are designed to increase Jordan’s control over the religious sites, but these moves also largely expand the power of key, and notably corrupt, PLO officials (such as Yousef Dajani, who is an Abu Mazen crony and the former head of the East Jerusalem Electric Company).9 To note, the peace treaty bars Jordan from siding with any third party to undermine Israel in any of the territory west beyond the Jordan river.

To be clear, what Jordan is trying to do with the vast expansion is to create a sovereign structure ruling not only over the Temple Mount, but other holy places as well given the context of the references to 1852 and “the historic status quo,” at which time the Ottoman Khaliph had ultimate sovereignty and authority over all religious sites, not only Muslim. In short, Jordan is trying to turn the holy sites of Jerusalem into a status akin to the Vatican in Rome and over Catholic assets, except in this case, such a dispensation would also govern the key Christian and many Jewish holy sites too (the Western wall has been redefined by the Waqf, for example, as the al-Buraq wall, marking the wall to which Muhammad’s horse, al-Buraq had been tied during his night journey to the furthest [al-Aqsa] mosque, which thus makes it a Muslim holy site).

Underlying it is the same concern Jordan has about the Palestinian population more broadly. Jordan fears the complete loss of control by Abu Mazen over his population and ceding of the leadership to Turkey, Hamas and Iranian-oriented factions. Having spectacularly failed to employ elections last spring (2021) to validate the decade-and-half rule of Abu Mazen – another effort led by Jordan and Abu Mazen which led to war and weakening of Abu Mazen – Jordan embarked on another shibboleth designed to shore up Abu Mazen and Jordan’s leadership among Palestinians, this time to try to preempt Hamas, Turkey, Iran and Iran on this issue. However, this effort led to the opposite result.

By expanding the Waqf, expanding Jordan’s control over the Waqf along with the PLO’s leadership, King Abdallah hoped to preempt its complete takeover by Hamas and other geopolitically threatening factions. The problem is that not only is this failing to shore up either the PLO’s leadership role or Jordan’s currency among Palestinians, this all is being done at the expense of Israel, and at the expense of delegitimizing and undercutting Israel’s sovereignty and control over the site. The result is not that Jordan replaces Israel to fill the expanding vacuum left by Israel, but that Hamas dashes in successfully to fill it. In other words, Jordan’s strategy is enabling rather than preempting a greater role and control of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and others.

As such, most disturbing is that the Waqf – which answer ostensibly to the Jordanian King – was directly involved in encouraging and inciting the violence centered on the al-Aqsa mosque. Jordan is creating a Frankenstein’s monster that weakens both it and Israel.

Indeed, it is easily predictable that such a vast expansion of the Waqf and erosion of Israeli continued legitimacy on the Mount (a policy onto which the Biden administration has now signed) becomes exponentially more disturbing as the Waqf – instead of being essentially an administrative body – assumes the role of instigator and organizer of the riots that occurred over the last three months on and around the Temple Mount (including the very serious attempt to cause a riot and embarrass Israel during Easter services at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre).

Jordan shifts geopolitically away from the West

This shift in Jordan toward the Arab nationalist camp also carries with it a geopolitical shift more reflective of the historical alignment of Arab nationalism against the West, including for example in supporting Russia against Ukraine. Jordanian papers – especially “state-sponsored” daily, al-Rai – are increasingly tolerant of and even echo some of the worst Holocaust denial theories de jour, and peddle extreme versions of anti-Semitic attacks and re-writes of history that convolute Nazism and Judaism, narratives which are by their very essence incitement. Muhammad Kharroub wrote on May 8, for example:

“[It was] the heroic Soviet soldiers and generals who invaded the Third Reich, flew the Red Flag over its headquarters and declared the defeat of Nazism while the Zionist movement and a group of Jewish leaders made a pact with its leader, Hitler.”10

And employing the concept of global Jewish conspiracies that dominate superpowers: “[Disagreements between Israel and Russia] have attracted the attention of political and media circles and research centers in Russia, and some of them have opened the ‘dossiers’ of the Jews and Zionists and [to discuss] the role their institutions played in dismantling the Soviet union and in usurping the Soviet-Russian civil sector and privatizing it for paltry sums in favor of U.S.-supported Jewish mafias.”11

Another writer in the same state-sponsored paper wrote: “Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov exhibited courage when he refuted the ostensible contradiction between Judaism and Nazism by making a statement that will in no doubt go down in history that ‘Adolf Hitler had Jewish blood in his veins.”12 And “This lie was followed by another one, amplifying the Jewish Holocaust and falsifying a lot of information about it as Zionist propaganda maintained that the Nazis killed almost six million Jews during World War II out of the 11 million Jews worldwide at the time. This figure is hard to believe.”13

Such articles in organs affiliated with the Jordanian state are calculated to instigate violence. And observers of Jordan have noted with alarm for several years the rising intensity and increasing frequency of these sorts of grotesque anti-Semitic incitement and conspiracy theorizing over the last half decade, to the point where Jordan is rapidly becoming an epicenter of the new anti-Semitic literary and journalistic scene.

This deterioration is perhaps most intense lately, but it is not a recent addition. Since 2017 at least, Jordan has turned to a much more confrontational path with Israel.

And one must also recall the role played by Jordan last year in the sequence of events that led to the summer 2021 war and the underlying dynamics that led to last May’s escalation into war. Indeed, the war began months earlier when Jordan, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the newly minted Biden administration launched a plan to resurrect the Palestinian Authority by holding an election that they believed would lend the PA an easy electoral victory which then could be leveraged to validate its authority, strengthen it, and through that to resurrect the moribund Palestinian “peace process.”

The plan went horribly awry, however, when it became clear that Abu Mazen’s PLO would face not victory, but a certain catastrophic electoral annihilation and with it political collapse. Thus, the PA chose to cancel the elections rather than follow through. Cancelling elections because of imminent loss only deepened the PLO’s loss of legitimacy, which thus encountered an enormous backlash and threat of civil war – which in turn would certainly have been won by Hamas. As a result, the PA attempted to deflect blame for cancelling the elections onto Israel and began whipping up a war hysteria. That war hysteria (for which Hamas had long prepared) led eventually to war (for which Hamas had also long prepared). Hamas held all the cards.

Jordan failed, however, to learn from this failure. Instead of revisiting its policy of based on championing the most damaging aspects of the PA’s failed narrative and strategy to itself regain control of Palestinian Authority leadership, Jordan tied itself ever deeper to this rudderless PLO which has been reduced strategically to employing a one-trick deck show (Defend Jerusalem from the Jews!) as its ship sinks.

Where to from here?

This point of this article is neither to question Jordan’s intent on remaining within the peace treaty with Israel, nor to review of the genuinely disturbing rising anti-Semitic nature of Jordanian discourse, although both legitimately have led some in Israel to begin to weigh the costs of continuing to answer to Jordan’s steady diet of demands or indulge its provocations.

Indeed, one has to acknowledge that Jordan’s King has for decades actually had amicable relations with Jews and has never been considered in any way particularly hostile to the Jewish people. This shift and recent anti-Israeli behavior is, to be true to the historical record, quite out of character. So much so that this new wave is likely not the result of any heartfelt or genuine anger, but a more calculated move driven by the increasing desperation.

Moreover, almost all years Netanyahu was prime minister, other than his last four, were calm years in Israeli-Jordanian relations, in contrast to disturbed relations not only in the last five years, but even now when Jordan faces a rather sympathetic government in Jerusalem.

Rather, Jordan is reacting to the failure of the Oslo process to produce a new Palestinian leadership capable of actually leading the Palestinian Arabs rather than pillaging them, and encouraging them into peace rather than employing incitement to divert internal anger. The complete failure of the Oslo process to transform the revolutionary, externally-imposed leadership into a genuine governing structure left a power vacuum among Palestinians, which was additionally exacerbated by the dilution of Jordanian influence over the Palestinians caused by decisions both by those made early by Moshe Dayan after Israel assumed control of the area in 1967 and by King Abdallah’s father’s (King Hussein’s) decision in 1988 to sever his ties and claims to the areas of Judea and Samaria.

In essence, this led to a situation today where Jordan knows a vacuum has emerged among the Palestinians that is being filled by dangerous regional forces, but at the same time Jordan has left very little effective ability to control Palestinian politics.

That, however, is a manageable circumstance, and Israel will eventually prevail over Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and any other foreign power like Turkey or Iran that seeks to lord over the Palestinians and ride their plight to pursue fantasies of Israel’s destruction. What is far harder to manage is Jordan’s strategic misstep in handling this circumstance – the answer to which will be addressed in following parts of this essay.

The Reckoning of Western Foreign Policy Elites

March 08, 2022

As yet, it is barely perceptible, but with each day it is becoming more apparent that only a week into a globe-shaping crisis, we are seeing the first signs of a new phase.

It is clear that the United States is not whole-heartedly engaged and is lagging far behind its European allies in showing resolve. For example, while the EU has sanctioned 490 entities as of March 3, and Switzerland 371, the United States has only sanctioned 118. Moreover, leaks from the administration show signs of faltering rather than steeling will. Articles are appearing in elite Western papers, such as the New York Times, which only a week ago led the charge into confrontation, already laying out intellectual paths to backing off and yielding to Putin. In conversations in the last 24 hours with people in the bordering lands north of Russia, from what I gather the populations of the Baltic states are beginning to assess that they are next in Putin’s plans, but that they will not be saved by NATO despite all the talk and commitments. As a result, in the last 24 hours, there has been a drop in the hitherto lava-hot housing market in all those lands, and we are even seeing the first signs of an exodus from them. Population movements are among the best indicators of what people really think since they are voting with their feet at the cost of great disruption. In this case, they are voting on their appreciation as to whether the US – as the only genuine leader that can pilot the Western world — will go the distance on this and draw the hard border on Putin to stop the slide at and within Ukraine and no further, or whether the United States will back off after the initial hoopla, which will then set everyone up for Putin’s next thrust of which those closest to Russia will pay first and hardest.

Israel, the UAE and the Saudis are on the other end of this rising Eurasian power and face off against one of its most important allies, Iran. While the West demands fealty on Ukraine, all are deeply fearful that if they go blazing in, they will be picking a fight with a colossus and be left alone holding the bag. Arab nations and Israel just do not have faith yet that the US is genuinely changed, is now serious and has effectively begun mobilizing for the long haul. The emerging Iran deal, in fact, tells them the opposite.

There also appears as yet to be no appreciation in the West as to how great and disruptive sanctions will have to become to genuinely sever Russia and isolate its economy – which is one of the first steps as the globe enters another Cold War. There is no way to do this but to also sever the West from China, since Beijing will cut out banks that commit to the sanctions, and others that won’t. For example, Chinese banks can just hide and transfer monies internally between the two, therein positioning China as a money-laundering superpower on a scale never before seen. At this point, our elites are hesitant on truly isolating Russia, and thus are hardly in a position to really draw the line on China too.

In fact, we are not even willing to disrupt our dependence on Russian oil and gas. The White House, via its spokesperson, Jen Psaki, has made that clear a dozen times over the week since the invasion of Ukraine. As a whole Germany is more serious, as are several other European nations. For this they are to be commended. And yet, in the end, even Germany is willing to suspend NordStream2, which was not going to truly come on line until next winter. In other words, it took a stand for which payment is expected to come due only after Ukraine falls or wins. In contrast, Germany allows NordStream to continue to flow. Again, Germany and some of its European allies are still to be given credit for what it has done, but we should be sober. The sanctions all Western nations have imposed on Russia via SWIFT structures are riddled with holes because of this continued trade.

If we are really not willing to wean ourselves off Russian gas and oil, then it is unlikely that we will be willing to do so on everything else. Once Ukraine settles into a festering mess (it will never be truly subjugated by Russia, even if the Ukrainian army dissolves as a coherent conventional fighting force, which is itself not even certain), we will begin to feel the full effects of severed economic ties to Russia — the consequences of which (devastated supply chains, for example) we really have not thought through, and certainly not felt, yet.

In general, at this moment, when suddenly things really matter and everything becomes deadly serious, there seems to be a verdict on the reckoning of the US foreign policy establishment and of its uninspiring record of missteps, delusions, inconsistencies and lapses since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, despite the unveiling by Putin of a chilling manifesto last summer, US diplomats, indeed our Under Secretary of State for Policy, Victoria Nuland, this last October traveled to Moscow and left the impression that we were distancing ourselves from Ukraine, and even reprimanding it for its resolute interpretation of the 2014 Minsk Agreement. For a leader like Putin, who outlined last summer a dangerous imperial vision, that was like throwing steak to a tiger. He understood this as weakness and an invitation to invasion. A seasoned official like Nuland should have understood, given the troubling evolution of Putin’s thinking as unveiled over the last half decade, that whatever diplomatic nicety or polite deference she expressed, and any light she showed between the United States and Ukraine, would be met by man who brags about physically subjugating tigers and bears as weakness, not refinement.

Thus, as Ukraine fights for its freedom, its identity and its survival, nations around the world and their peoples will settle into a hedging pattern until they are convinced the US has it in it to go the distance here linearly and decisively, rather than in a partial, waivering and hesitant process, the consequences of which are that many closest to the fire will pay a horrific price until the US finally comes around clearly and determinedly.

Sadly, the problem is not just the shortcomings of the Biden team. If it was, then we could just fix it by changing leaders. The problem is far deeper. It is, in fact, a civilizational reckoning. People are beginning to take note of the speeches and writings of Putin and his clique of intellectuals – teaching us once again that we are ill served us when we ignore the earnest nature of what others with ambition say. And yet, while people are beginning to realize the expanse of the challenge he poses, there is little discussion of the magnitude. The geographic parameters of Putin’s ambitions are coming into focus, but still ignored is his civilization critique of the West and his grandiose solution, which in the end is a far more dangerous assault than any real estate. He believes the rise of Western freedom has corrupted Christianity, and that his Eurasian fantasy is the salvation of European civilization. Along the way, he has no need for the small and weak, all of whom should be retuned to the strong and bog as minions.

In as far as Putin judges the flaws of Western civilization (as distinct from his grandiose answer), it is important the West appreciates that there may be part of this critique which demands serious introspection on our part. Indeed, there is a common thread uniting Hitler, Japan, the Soviet Union, Khomeini, and bin-Ladin with Putin: they all believed that the West was a soul-less, corrupted civilization that confronted with strong will can be swept aside as easily as breezes scatter dust on a floor. While Hitler and Japan were buried decisively and immediately when a relentless America obliterated both their armies and their ideas, continental European powers and elites had until that point failed and were in fact swept aside.

It bears consideration as to why that was so. European elites, led by failing aristocracies, had become a pessimistic lot that had traded the souls of their national identity for an increasingly performative but ultimately hollow rising set of international ideas and institutions. In the end, those elites never really internalized that they were part of their nations or accepted the passing of the baton of defining “legitimate” culture to their whole populations. They thus increasingly distanced themselves from their own people, whom they believed had rejected their inherently superior status. The elites, led by a dying aristocratic class, felt jilted. Hitler gauged that Europe’s elites simply could no longer tap into and leverage their nation’s cultures for power, and thus with utter disdain he played upon the elites’ resulting impotence, internally and externally. His appreciation of the continent was correct, and despite Germany’s initial weakness and his personally tenuous grip on power, it fell to him within half of a decade. He then leveraged this as a parade of Western retreats not only to destroy, but to humiliate along the way, his internal doubters.

And yet, America was different, and its elites at that time were still products of the culture and its informing ideas that all Americans shared. Thus, when either Hitler or the Japanese imperial leadership slammed against America, it slammed against an insurmountable tide of power. It took a still confident America a bit longer to lead the world to devastate the Soviet Union, but win it did in the end. Still, there were some warning signs along the way as elites in the 1970s increasingly began to resemble the elites of their trans-Atlantic allies who lacked civilizational confidence and instead of confidently tapping the sinews of power of their own cultures, increasingly invested in international structures, institutions and norms to codify inertia – or which they hoped would at least — and hide their fading self-confidence.

Reading Putin and his intellectuals for years, it is this question which most animates him. The imperial expansion of geography is the aim, but his imagination that he can realize his ambitions emerge from his appreciation of the rot and corruption of the West, which he fingers as emanating from freedom itself rather than from the Western elites’ abandonment (rather than embrace) of their cultural identity and soul. For Putin, the West is a desert of nobody people, but the new Russia is a land of faith and a soul. His substance will vanquish our emptiness. In this civilizational challenge, Putin follows in the footsteps of the Hitlers, Ishiwara Kanjis, Mussolinis, Stalins, Nassers, Che Guevaras, Maos, Xis, Khomeiinis and bin-Ladins.

So where is America today as we enter the next great challenge? Do people outside America measure us as a rising confident civilization with a strong sense of who we are? Or do our urban and foreign policy elites — which after all is what is most visible to the outside, not the patriot with a pickup truck sitting in a diner in Fargo with a gun rack on the back window — either act with deep pessimism as if either we assume our own decline or behave as if we are a nobody people (no soul, no faith, no history, no identity)?

Putin, and for that matter Xi, ISIS, al Qaida, Iran too, measured us up as deficient. The real question, the answer to which will determine how far and fast the world will mobilize around the new order — which is not yet clearly either a cold war or a world war, but which is rapidly approaching somewhere on that level of seriousness — is whether people eventually see Putin’s, Xi’s, bin-Ladin’s and Khomeini’s assessment as the better bet or not.

Ukraine is an opportunity, not only a bellwether, in this regard. Putin views core elements of the West’s foundations with disdain. Our response to the Ukraine crisis ultimately must be a reassertion of our confidence as a civilization and the values (that unique combination of Greek, Roman, Judeo-Christian, Renaissance and early Enlightenment foundations) upon which it is grounded, not a specific policy or action.

The first signs are the American people are beginning to appreciate the true civilizational nature of this challenge. But our political elites face a reckoning. For many decades so far, they have failed us. Will our foreign policy be based on the platform of our culture and values, or on a ratatouille of academic theories, reactive scrambling and shifting values based on diplomatic expediency?

A Littoral Foothold Strategy for Africa

March 01, 2022

By Dr. David Wurmser

One of the most intense and potentially most important battlegrounds of the new Cold War between the United States and China is sub-Saharan Africa. Absent from the competition, the United States, and for the most part Europe, Japan and other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries as well, have largely ceded the entire sub-Saharan continent to China over the last few decades as part of China’s amorphous Belt and Road slogan. And yet, at the same time, the OECD lands need with great urgency to begin to find alternatives to raw and rare materials to replace those coming from either Chinese or Russian origins. In this context, the United States and its OECD allies have little choice but to consider how the stability and development of sub-Saharan Africa, the proper husbanding of its resources, and the development of its ports are becoming a vital US interest.

The bad news is China has spent several decades anchoring its dominance on the continent. China is not just ahead of Europe and the US; the latter two are not even on the playing field yet. The good news is two-fold. First, China’s heavy-handed and exploitative behavior has left many African nations bristling and seeking to reorient to the West, provided it pursues appropriate development strategies while leveraging their resources. Second, rapid shifts in the energy sector – both in terms of focusing on non-hydrocarbon energy production (such as nuclear) as well as the rise in importance of energy storage in addition to production – are transforming global industry but demanding many raw materials still untapped which have remained out of China’s grip in Sub-Saharan Africa. The United States, leading its OECD allies, thus, has an opportunity as well as need to develop a strategy to gain a foothold on the continent which will serve as a model to offer African nations a different, more mutually beneficial path than that offered by the exploitative Chinese Belt and Road campaign.

Background – Chinese neo-Imperialism in Africa

Over the last decades, China has aggressively pursued its interests in sub-Saharan Africa under the ”Belt and Road” slogan. To a lesser extent, Russia has cultivated its ties as well. While the precise meaning of China’s “Belt and Road” slogan is at best misty – perhaps intentionally so — the pattern under which China operated was clear and consistent. China offered the promise of vast economic development by building grand infrastructure projects, starting with the Chinese financed and built “Tazara” railway project in 1975 to transport primarily copper to the Tanzanian coast from landlocked Zambia. China began the pattern of a trifecta win for itself: 1) witheringly indebting countries, 2) exporting its own labor and goods to build the railway, which then 3) serviced China’s keen interest in securing a critical resource, which in this case was copper. Recent rail projects dominated by China are the Kinshasa-Mombasa port railway in Kenya, and the Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway in Ethiopia and Djibouti ports – essentially granting China control of Africa’s Indian Ocean coastal ports from the Red Sea to the Tanzanian coast. China’s EXIM bank provided 70 percent of the funding for this grand project.

These projects are often of highly dubious utility, but China offered to provide the funding, the expertise, materials (capital equipment) and even labor force to execute the projects. As such, it essentially exported internal Chinese labor pressures and guaranteed export of Chinese equipment at the cost of a foreign country’s incurring insurmountable debt. Of course, these grand projects involved very little local labor or industry, ensuring that the Chinese labor market and its industrial export sectors would be the prime benefactors.

The infrastructure built was thus grand but basically useless other than for the Chinese, and most became unmaintainable boondoggles that in the end left nations with jumbo debts and white elephant memorials. The Addis Ababa-Djibouti line, for example, was billed and sold to these two nations as the spine of a new Africa rail network to service the passenger pressures emanating from the rapidly urbanizing African population. And yet, this rail network carries only about 84,000 people per year last year – far less than the Washington, DC subway carries in one day. This essentially leaves only freight service of consequence, most of which services Chinese firms extracting raw materials from Africa to fuel and supply industry and employment in China, leaving almost no economic and industrial growth in Africa itself. Overall, this project is returning only about USD 40 million in revenue per year, while the cost of operating the line is USD 70 million. There is a similar story with the Nairobi-Mombasa line in Kenya, 90% of which was financed by China’s EXIM bank to the tune of USD 4.7 billion.1 Not only are both Ethiopia and Djibouti unable to even begin recouping enough money to begin to pay the debt on initial investment and construction expenses (Kenya is unable to pay the USD 245 million loan payment due already on its railway to China), but both are continually hemorrhaging more money per year on the gap between revenue and ongoing operating costs.2 The result: Djibouti became China’s first military base in Africa, turning the Horn of Africa into a Chinese strategic asset.

Essentially, these projects – the Chinese funded portion of which amounts to 42 percent of all construction and infrastructure spending on the African continent – have become a modern rendition of colonialism following the worst practices of the old colonial powers of a century or two ago. Having ironically originated in the 1955 Bandung Conference, which was ostensibly organized to de-colonialize the world from Western imperial control, these projects are predatory and serve exclusively Chinese economic and strategic interests, not those of Africans.

There was also a geopolitical dimension to this ensnarement via debt. China was quick to follow by leveraging the debt and the attending erosion of sovereignty not only to secure access and control local resources (rare earth as well as critical raw materials), establish dominance in many critical ports, but also to demand fealty in global international institutions, such as UNESCO, the UN Human Rights Commission or the UN General Assembly and Security Council itself – leading to such embarrassments as Tedros Ghebreyesus to lead the WHO.

Recently, China forged new alliances with Iran and Turkey, reducing both to dependence on Beijing in exchange for Beijing’s floating their sinking economies. This not only strongly positioned China as a dominant player along the old silk and caravan routes of Central Asia and the Near East, especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it further entrenched Chinese control in sub-Sharan Africa by exploiting Iranian/Hizballah networks in sub-Saharan Africa and Turkey’s machinations in eastern Africa (Somalia especially) and the Maghreb (such as western Libya), as well as Turkey’s robust port operations companies. As such, the West now finds itself having essentially surrendered sub-Saharan Africa, its nations, its resources and its ports strategically on the eve of an era of heightened geo-political tensions.

And yet, China may have seized the wallets and resources of the African continent, but they have not won the hearts and minds. China – and many of its admirers among the Western elites — may tout the success of its “soft-power” influence strategy, but underneath, China is really facing a soon-to-erupt geyser of pent-up local resentment at indebtedness, loss of independence, and the exploitation of resources in ways that produce neither African wealth nor local industrial development. The emerging resentment to China’s heavy-handed subordination of African economies has opened unprecedented opportunities to the West to reenter the continent, provided it is done so on a very different footing than the Chinese and encourages local wealth accumulation and industrial development in ways that help these nations regain their independence.

Industrial and Strategic Shifts Changing the Role of Africa

The United States officially began to take note of this gathering danger and rising opportunity on the African continent during the Trump administration. The NSC under Ambassador John Bolton coordinated with Ambassador Peter Pham at State (Secretary

of State Mike Pompeo’s Sahel region and de facto Great Lakes/sub-Saharan Africa point person) to developing a strategy to help states across Africa break their entrapment via “predatory” debt to China and to some extent Russia as well. The strategy was first revealed in December 2018 by Ambassador Bolton at a speech to the Heritage Foundation. Apparently, the classified version of the strategy outlined was reported to be far more expansive and specific.

Bolton described China thus in targeting this strategy:

“China uses bribes, opaque agreements and the strategic use of debt to hold states in Africa captive to Beijing’s wishes and demands. Its investment ventures are riddled with corruption and do not meet the same environmental or ethical standards as US development projects.”

After Ambassador’s Bolton’s departure, Matthew Pottinger at the NSC (Deputy NSC Adv) continued to coordinate with Pham to try to bend the IMF — by campaigning to secure a sympathetic leader there in order to restructure sovereign debts and begin to challenge China’s domination of the African continent via indebtedness. But the problem was that the IMF and other US structures (and especially US NGOs who were under the sway of George Soros) placed demands on these African leaders for restricting loans that were tantamount to their endangering their own power. Dangling the prospect of governmental suicide is hardly an effective enticement to strategically reorient toward the West away from China or Russia. As such, the effort launched by Bolton and Pham, and furthered by Pottinger, faced a constant headwind that left only minor initial progress by the end of the Trump era. Still, the contours remained and, as Ambassador Pham noted, continuity in Africa policy historically persists between administrations, and it likely will continue to some extent going forward into the Biden years.

But substantial changes in industry and patterns of demand of raw materials offer the West a brief window to break China’s grip on Africa. Specifically, the transformation of the energy sector from exclusive focus on energy production to additional focus now on energy storage changes the mix of raw materials in high demand. While China has locked up many sources of critical raw materials in sub-Sharan Africa, it did not entirely anticipate the speed with which a new category of raw materials would be demanded – such as lithium and graphite. Having left such critical materials still up for grabs is a strategic lacuna of China’s and a great opportunity of ours. It leads to a unique opportunity for the West to try to help African nations, many of whom bristle with great

resentment not only at their loss of sovereignty to China but also at the complete absence of China’s use of local labor or industry, to wean themselves off of Chinese debt, build wealth through the export of these raw materials, allow for local employment and ultimately give African nations the ability to leverage the wealth to finally develop their economies properly. And a coherent strategy with our allies to help some of these nations — starting with some sort of littoral foothold — to mine, develop industry to employ locals, and build modern and efficient port structures not only will further contribute to local employment, but also help begin the process of nudging China out of critical areas.

The Great Lakes Basin as a Foothold for Change

There are several potential openings in Africa at this point, but the Great Lakes Basin and adjacent lands might be a place to start. One of the key principles upon which Bolton, Pham and Pottinger focused was the need to replace the predatory practices of China and Russia with genuine development policies that allow local African governments to become more independent, accrue national wealth and genuinely grow the local economies and expand local industry and employment.

With the vast debt, however, with which China has saddled many of these nations, they must carefully but aggressively leverage their natural resources to build national wealth, wean themselves off Chinese debt, and establish sovereign wealth funds as vehicles to grow the prosperity and reinvest revenues in their economies and when necessary and economically prudent, build out infrastructure.

While the politics of some nations can be challenging, the geology of the Great Lakes Basin is particularly promising. Burundi, in addition to copper, nickel, cobalt and vanadium also has rare earth elements. Its Waga, the Musongati and the Nyabikere deposits rich in nickel, cobalt and copper – are all critical for energy transmission and storage — are already owned by the UK’s Kermas Group rather than China. The Democratic Republic of Congo is the source of a great deal with the world’s copper and cobalt.

And then there is Tanzania, which has substantial deposits of the critical raw materials of graphite and lithium. The Great Lakes Basin, especially Tanzania, might thus represent an interesting place to begin. The graphite resources in Tanzania are naturally recurring jumbo-flake deposits, which are practically non-existent elsewhere other than synthetically produced but are critical for the nuclear power industry, particularly in encasing spent nuclear fuel.

Flake graphite is also critical for making lithium-ion batteries, but even more necessary in making fuel cells, meaning any eco-friendly vehicle requires it. Not only is graphite — which in Tanzania occurs as a very pure deposit — as a whole critical for so many industrial sectors at this point, as its strength and light weight allows for replacement of metal, but the jumbo-flake graphite occurring in Tanzanian deposits are also critical for the nuclear power industry.

As the current limits on wind and solar power become apparent, the move away from hydrocarbons by Western economies will highlight the continued importance of nuclear power. Over time it is likely that the demand for the materials needed to supply the nuclear power sector will only grow in importance as many nations begin to realize there is no path to green energy that also includes rapid and total simultaneous elimination of both all hydrocarbon and nuclear power. Germany will soon discover that its decision to shut down its last power plants was a significant misstep in strategic and energy policy. It reduced Germany to dependence on Russian natural gas supply just as the Ukrainian crisis began in earnest. It is hard to imagine that Germany will likely not eventually be forced to reconsider this decision. France, in contrast to Germany, has already realized the continued potential of nuclear power. President Emmanuel Macron announced on February 10, 2022, that it will place a priority on reinvigorating its nuclear power industry to usher in a French nuclear industry “renaissance.” And even the United States over recent weeks has returned to considering nuclear power as a “green” energy, and thus a rehabilitation of our nuclear power industry appears more desirable. Indeed, even Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said in early February that, “U.S. nuclear power plants are essential to achieving President Biden’s climate goals and that the DOE is committed to keeping 100% clean electricity flowing and preventing premature closures.” The more the OECD lands return to nuclear power, the more they will value many of the resources the Great Lakes Basin hold, not the least important of which is the jumbo-flake graphite deposits of Tanzania.

As far as infrastructure to extract these materials or downstream industrial use of them to develop local industry there needs to be a focused port through which to send these products to the world. Sadly, Djibouti has allowed the Doraleh container port to fall to Chinese control, and thus the Horn of Africa. But the strategicallylocated port of Dar Es-Salaam, which is a deep water port in a strategically critical area, is still out of China’s grip and adds to Tanzania’s importance, especially given how Tanzania suddenly finds itself in possession of two critical raw materials of great value over which China has not yet asserted control.

So by serendipity of geopolitics, economic change, and supply demands, Tanzania manifests a unique nexus between a government which is eager, indeed very eager, to wean itself off of Chinese debt, has world class resources that service growing industrial demand in exactly those materials that can be tapped and used as a foundation not only to extract itself from that debt but for broader industrial investment, and a geopolitically important location with direct access to the sea and the potential for making Dar Es-Salaam a major West Indian Ocean port and hub. These resources can help in what might be considered a US “foothold” strategy, wherein the combination of Tanzanian government willingness and export resources availability with rising global demands, and a critically strategic port can be combined under US and European encouragement to become a foothold and serve as a model for other nations in the sub-Continent to strip China of its influence and dominant presence as well as deny China, along with Russia, their domination over critical resources. Adding the other Great Lakes Basin countries to this bloc can create an industrial/resources development zone with its own port structure, to anchor an African revival and US strategy.

Conclusion

It is likely that in the coming years, the emergence of a new Russian civilizational challenge to the West will combine with the increasing assertiveness of Chinese communist leaders to painfully remind the West that its geopolitical inattentiveness and excessive reliance on cheap production costs in China had led it to be highly vulnerable to geopolitical blackmail. Supply chains, raw material access, energy production and storage capabilities, mining capacity among other things are now preserved only at the indulgence of these emerging adversaries.

As the ensuing threat is more broadly realized, the West will begin to mobilize, both in terms of reconstituting its power, but also addressing its geopolitical position, reinforcing its structure of alliances, strengthening its global presence (including in a network of port structures) and remedying its supply chain dependencies.

At the same time, there will be dramatic shifts in the mix of industries and materials needed. On the one hand, change from production alone to linked production-storage-use structures in the energy sectors, and the rise of a new cluster of materials (hitherto of far more limited use if any) needed for cutting edge industries – such as neodymium for new non-polar magnetic structures in quantum computing – will change our understanding of the geography of economic reliance. For example, lithium mines will become as strategically important as oil wells. These changes will make parts of the world important that were hitherto largely ignored.

In short, the West finds itself with a great economic and strategic opportunity if it embarks on a plan to partner with an African nation or nations who seek to regain their independence from China’s tightening grip. And this can serve as a foundation for the West to establish a foothold.

But with one significant caveat.

Predatory haughtiness burdens China and Russia in their relations with Africa. Africans are beginning to see their “altruism” for what it is: neo-colonialism. As such, when Ambassador Bolton unveiled the new Africa strategy in 2018, he carefully noted the predatory nature of China’s involvement, and emphasized the need for partnership with the US rather than control by it. And it was consistent with a broader change in US policy globally in the last several years. The US had always correctly used the language of partnership and decolonization, but in practice, our diplomacy and strategic posture was based on control. It was perhaps a function of the Cold War when containment demanded a tightly controlled alliance structure to damn up Soviet expansion and maintain a stable cordon around it. But any policy on Africa that aims to succeed will assert American leadership and strategic confidence, but at the same time demonstrate to Africans that we are the antithesis of Chinese Communist haughtiness or Russian

The Crisis of Materials Supply Chains and Competitiveness

November 01, 2021

By David Wurmser

The current supply chain crisis is largely anchored to faltering transport and port services. We will get over the problems as little more than temporary disruptions caused by various market forces and government missteps. But while this crisis will pass, it is a wake-up call for a much greater and dangerous crisis emerging that touches upon both the supply chain of raw materials and the supply chain of innovation over the long run. The more profoundly menacing specter of this crisis results from deep distortions, many of which are strategically threatening and some of which are intentionally encouraged by our adversaries as part of an organized attempt to weaken us. Unless, as a nation, we urgently and resolutely address our supply chain frailties and dependencies resulting from these distortions, our way of life and wealth will not survive the coming supply chain crisis. Moreover, the supply chain crisis is not an isolated failure. The vulnerability into which we have navigated ourselves itself reflects a far deeper crisis in the cultural fiber of the nation, the identification and repair of which is necessary as a first step.

The problem

The structure of securing a reliable supply of critical raw materials for US industry, civilian as well as defense, has been largely neglected since the end of the Cold War. There has been no overarching government strategy document or structure that seeks to understand the cultural and industrial foundations of American strength or mobilizes the breadth of US governmental resources to properly husband the production and supply of critical raw materials. Nor has a policy been set which governs the interactions with the private sector and the citizenry that builds upon deep cultural values and characteristics that can be enlisted to help protect and elevate our national strength.

Moreover, the absence of a crisp, guiding strategic document has allowed the US government to stumble into swelling the mass of procedures, regulations and incentives to such an extent that it both suffocates innovation and offshores our production and supply chains. The result has been greater reliance for raw materials – not only for the high-tech sector, but even for such basic sectors as food supply — in ways that that carry significant political risk and force dependence on inimical powers to whom also a great wealth transfer is occurring.

Along with dependence and wealth transfer comes the surrender of basic industrial knowledge to mine and produce these materials. This latter failure guarantees that even when the West wakes from its strategic slumber in this regard, it may lack the human capital and skills necessary to restore its own industrial supply line. This should concern both sides of the political spectrum since both green technologies and defense industries rely extensively on a growing list of materials that are mined and produced in undependable or hostile areas.

The underlying cause of this national crisis affecting industry from raw materials supply to research may run quite deep, the repair of which is a prerequisite for reinvigorating and solidifying the entire industrial continuum but will require great leadership and vision.

Underneath the many proximate causes may lie the long-term consequence of the pessimism held by our elites in the supremacy of the values and philosophical foundations of America’s founders. That pessimism has crept silently even into the boardroom and now infuses industry, which increasingly does not see its interests tied umbilically to the national interest. And it has led our elites to attempt through increasingly aggressive dictates to reshape what they believe is the “flawed” national soul rather than draft national policies and issue strategic documents that confirm our traditional national spirit and seek to leverage it to elevated goals.

So too with supply chains of raw materials, the shape and incentivization of which are increasingly subject to serve and express these top-down ideological dictates rather than elevate our deeply-held, culturally-generated national aspirations. Thus, our elites in almost every sector now do as much to douse our national energy and creativity in an attempt to redirect and reinvent it rather than invigorate and stimulate it. As such, the early indications of how we will respond to our raw materials supply chain crisis (which is distinct from the more acute port and transport supply chain crisis seizing current headlines) suggests the malaise will even further deepen.

How the US traditionally addressed the issue

In the late 1940s, the United States government set out under the lead of Paul Nitze at the State Department’s Policy Planning bureau to develop an overarching strategic plan to govern the prosecution of the Cold War. The result was the NSC-68 document.

This document, originated in a philosophical discourse sent from the US Embassy in Moscow by Ambassador George Kennan in 1946 (republished without authorization as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in Foreign Affairs in 1947 under the pseudonym “X”). Kennan’s analysis of Soviet hostility clarified for the political leadership in Washington that further attempts at accommodation and condominium with the Soviet Union were futile, and that a strategy was needed to answer the Soviet challenge. In other words, it clearly defined the threat against which an industrial policy would need to be defined.

Secretary of State Dean Acheson and President Truman entrusted to Paul Nitze the task of crafting such a strategy. He interpreted Kennan’s analysis and the subsequent behavior of the Soviets in eastern and central Europe to suggest that the United States was locked in a twilight struggle propelled by two hostile and irreconcilable systems of ideological organization from which only one power will eventually emerge. As a result, Nitze believed the United States had to mobilize its power fully – essentially as a continuation of its vast mobilization during World War II – to secure the victory of freedom over communism.

Paul Nitze had been one of the primary authors of the US Strategic Bombing Survey, which analyzed how effective the United States’ strategic bombing of German and Japanese industry actually was during World War II. The authors of that report had concluded that it actually was a more modest contribution to victory than assumed, which led Nitze to believe that a vast nuclear strike against Soviet industrial capacity would not necessarily paralyze them and lead to immediate defeat. There was no “silver bullet” attack which would so paralyze Russia that it would cease to exist. As such, Nitze concluded the United States had to mobilize its industrial, human and moral power as extensively as possible to arm, fight and win decisively and totally the prolonged conventional war he expected with the Soviet Union. NSC-68, thus, was the plan to organize the United States to prepare for fighting and winning this expected war. A bit later President Eisenhower convened a reexamination, called Project Solarium, which produced NSC-162/2 (1953). NSC 162/2 basically updated and expanded NSC 68.

As part of this effort, these documents defined:

• The critical values of the nation which need to be protected, nurtured and leveraged to secure national greatness and serve as a foundation for military and industrial policy.
• The vital industries not only for both civilian and defense supremacy, but also to maintain our way of life, the resources (including capital, labor and raw materials) necessary to supply and fuel industry, the geographies in which critical materials and industrial activity was located, and the attending military structures that will be needed to protect the supply chains from soil to product. In other words, it provided a framework for prioritizing, without which any industrial mobilization plan would be haphazard and ineffective.
• And then, in a loop, what sort of industries, talent and labor, raw materials, and logistical lines are necessary to maintain the required military structure and deployment?

The United States thus entered the Cold War not only aware of its national character, values, and vital interests, but with confidence in those values and a plan to mobilize and leverage the power and strengths of the United States in a way to define priorities and bring order, unity and coordination between the branches of the US government and private industry.

Since 1989, however, the United States has lacked a similar, new strategic plan, although many of the bureaus, agencies and activities which came into being as a result of these documents continue to exist.

Cultural influences propelling American self-reliance and logistical security

Culturally, Americans reject the more cynical European view that Great Powers rise and fall organically, and that some force of history or logic of over-extension guarantees the decline of America – ideas made popular in the 1980s by Paul Kennedy in his seminal work, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers. Kennedy’s title was a play on the great 18th century work of Sir Edward Gibbon, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but his conclusion was diametrically opposed to Gibbon’s. Building on the works of Suetonius, Livy and Machiavelli, Gibbon described the moral decay of Rome and how Rome’s residually immense power had obscured this decay for several centuries. Gibbon rejected the idea that inherent limits on power led to Roman decline and collapse, and indeed argued that it was decay itself, hidden by surplus power, that was at fault. Every educated young American read Sir Gibbon’s work – with their outlook being either influenced or confirmed by its conclusions — with the purpose of comparing America to Rome to identify the key inflection points toward failure, thus allowing America to consciously turn away to avoid a similar demise. Until the latter 20th century, Americans saw greatness as a function of choice and the preservation of civic virtue and thus viewed national weakness not as a given condition, but as a key measure — really an early indicator — of its moral solidity.

At the heart of the concept of civic virtue was the model of the early Roman leader Cincinnatus, who repeatedly relinquished power to return to his humble origins at the farm. Cincinnatus embodied agrarian virtue, including self-reliance and humility. While America was one of the earliest to industrialize, Americans culturally translated the agrarian virtues embodied by Cincinnatus into industrial policy.

In this context, two aspects of Rome suggested itself to Americans in these analyses as an indicator of decline. First, Christianity – and with it a new concept of civic virtue – failed to define the residual elites of Western Rome, and thus set the stage for its collapse in the 5th century (as opposed to eastern Rome, which survived another millennium). Second, Rome’s industrial strength, roads, and ownership of the Mediterranean were legend. The rise of Rome’s geographically specialized but diffused industries allowed for great efficiency and technological advance in production. And yet, Rome became reliant on far flung minions to secure the diffused activity and thus exposed its critical supply chains to the point at which it threatened its industrial structure with a potentially precipitous collapse if compromised. It was a symbol of how far Rome had come in 500 years since Cincinnatus by the 1st century; it had arrogantly assumed the permanence of its power and ignored the guiding agrarian principle of localized self-reliance. Along with the erosion of family and social structures prior to the rise of Christianity as the official imperial religion, the excessive reliance on such regional specialization and overconfidence in maintaining logistical lines of trade and communication were seen as fatal flaws reflecting the decline in civic virtue.

For Rome, that threat came not only in the 5th century with the political fall of Rome to barbarians, but also in the 8th century with the collapse of western Roman civilization itself (largely adopted by the barbarians). To note, eastern Rome otherwise capped a four-century thriving resurrection of Roman power and life which in the traditional American view was caused by the rise of Christianity and survived until other European powers gutted it and left it fatally wounded a millennium later during the Crusades. Indeed, in traditional American writings, despite the rise of personal virtue with the spread of Christianity prior to the 8th century, the continued failure to internalize the decay of the agrarian virtue of self-reliance and the continued arrogance of assuming permanently Rome’s superior power led to the far more catastrophic loss of the 8th century compared to 5th. Talent and specialized production centers were overrun or decayed because their supply lines were cut and their geography relegated to the edge of the Empire. As a result, real knowledge was lost. It took the Florentine architect Brunelleschi well until the 15th century to rediscover the cement and architectural secrets of Rome which had been used to build the Pantheon. 1 The renaissance itself picked up essentially where Rome had left off in the early 8th century.

The lesson was clear and had been baked into the American cultural DNA for three centuries: The agrarian virtue of self-reliance – which in the American imagination applied ultimately to industry rather than just agriculture — had been compromised by Rome. Were America to do the same, then it too would go the way of Rome.

A new Rome?

Today, moving goods, specializing production, and outsourcing talent is easy, cheap and efficient – perhaps more so than any time in history. But absent a strategic framework and vision to guide and temper it, unfiltered considerations of cost and marginal utility reign unhampered, regardless of the ensuing vulnerabilities or moral failings. Comfort, specialization and crude cost calculations crowd out many other long-term important strategic considerations, akin to what happened to Rome in its last century.

The Trump administration – aware that many of our supply chains pass through China – initiated a far-reaching examination under an executive order (13806) from 2018 to examine our supply chain vulnerabilities. The resulting report was called Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States (released October 2018). 2 The new Biden administration in February 2021 ordered an update of the study, commenced by the previous administration and issued its findings in a June 2021 report under Executive Order 14017. EO 14017 outlined the problem, and the underlying industrial habits that led to it:

“Our private sector and public policy approach to domestic production, which for years, prioritized efficiency and low costs over security, sustainability and resilience, has resulted in the supply chain risks identified in this report.”

These reports are important and well done, and credit goes to both administrations, President Trump’s for initiating the first and President Biden’s for following through on the second EO, but both reports are insufficient:

• They focus almost exclusively on high-tech and defense industrial activity. But a broad-based strategic policy must also look at the security of food supply and other less glamourous things.
• They are not ambitious enough. Their analyses are based on existing supply chains and technologies. While it scratches at the idea of cutting-edge research, it does not extrapolate what might arise in terms of demand and then build the mechanisms for a government wide effort at coordination.
• In failing to examine the ideas and cultural patterns that have made America a great nation, the reports do not address the underlying causes that led to both stifling national vitality and leading to the emerging raw material (and innovation) crisis.
• They report stovepipe industries and sectors. A strategic plan needs to view every sector in one fluid picture.
• They do not even come close to the breadth of NSC 68 or NSC 162/2, nor do they seek to, in examining the philosophy and resulting essence of the United States and of its adversary (which at this point must be considered China) to establish the existence of a strategic competition with unique characteristics. They neither outline the foundations of our and our adversary’s industrial, let alone military, strength, nor survey the geographic ramifications of that. As such, EOs 13806 and 14017 are not deliberate plans to organize the United States into a broad-based strategic competition. They are only descriptive situation reports, although alarming ones.

The new administration has set up a task force – the Supply Chain Disruption Task Force – with cabinet-level firepower in June, presumptively as a result of EO 14017, but it still lacks an overarching strategy, let alone strategic document, to serve as the foundation for informing and organizing the effort. As such, it will likely remain a reactive committee – addressing already acute, politically-loaded failures rather than planning far ahead for them – and thus continues to fail to provide a proactive strategic framework.

Such supply chain issues concern our allies too. The EU commission issued a report in 2020, Critical Raw Materials for Strategic Technologies and Sectors in the EU, which as its title suggests reviewed the vulnerabilities of its own supply chain. While it is an ambitious and also impressive report and does have some elements of strategic mobilization, it is limited to the high-tech sector and focuses greatly on non-defense, much more “green” technologies, including batteries.

Still, the precedent of NSC-68 and Solarium, and some of the insights from EO 14017, as well as the EU Commission’s report on raw materials, helps us focus on a number of principles that work against the purely cost-cutting and efficiency-based ethos of current business practice against which EO 14017 warned above.

Practical, strategic and moral considerations

We have diminished the value of proximity. There is great utility and protection in prioritizing keeping segments of the supply chain as close to each other as practical. Currently, Elon Musk is building a new Tesla factory in Germany. Tesla automobiles, using batteries, rely on a robust supply of phosphates and lithium. Musk’s current supply of phosphates comes from Morocco or China, rather than Norway (which has large phosphate deposits) and is thus vulnerable to all sorts of disturbance and interference. Damaging, let alone severing, this one international supply link could potentially paralyze the industry. If, on the other hand, the mine and the factory are very close, even co-located in a friendly country, then damage is limited. It is obvious that having the bulk of our Phosphates come from Western Sahara and our Vanadium (used to reinforce steel for hundreds of different applications from armor to car frames) from China and Russia rather than from such a good ally as Norway (in which both elements are present) is a problem.

Ultimately, this is not only about stability of supply. While rare earth and critical raw materials need to be protected from political risks, their supply structure should also align with national strategic and moral imperatives. Supply chains should only be preferred in nations with shared values, even if costs are higher. As EO 14017 notes, the strong imperative of cheap production costs has established dominant patterns of supply and trade in which companies have turned to questionable suppliers of labor and raw materials – such as slave and child labor, organized crime, conflict spoils – to reduce costs. Some on the left have taken the initiative to boycott certain companies to pressure them to consider the social costs. The problems with their taking the lead are great, however. These organizations quite bluntly do not share the values of the United States. Indeed, their values drive a highly selective assault on key US allies, often informed by a concern to harass or even paralyze key allies as part of a larger attempt to strategically weaken the United States. The Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) against Israel is one such example.

Moreover, so much urgency is currently attached to green energy that it overpowers due diligence. Western extraction standards in mines can be strict, expensive and by necessity will involve the compromise of beautiful areas of nature. But green products need both materials and energy and will drive demand for raw materials with cost pressures favoring lower cost supply chains. While the end use product may easily appear green, the value-added supply chain thus is neither green nor moral. Nor is the occurrence of this obvious at times. China, for example, is exporting not only raw materials, but it is producing and exporting further up the value-added chain. In doing so, it obscures, even hides, the sourcing of the raw material. So strategic policy, business and government intelligence, and economic efficiency needs to be in alignment to ensure thorough due diligence and a truly green and moral policy. As bad as a mine in Norway may be environmentally, it will be done in a far more responsible and environmentally friendly manner than a Chinese mine. Similarly, there is no zero-emissions car on the market. A fully electric car still needs to be charged with electricity that comes from a power plant, the increased demand for the construction of which is in part the result of increased electric car energy demands. These shifted and hidden costs need to be factored in honestly, but often are not.

The decline of US critical material stockpiles and supply structure

Sadly, the problem is deeper – and far more troubling — than just distasteful supply chains. We in the US have been ramping down our strategic planning in all matters connected to the supply chain. The Defense Logistics Agency Strategic Materials (DLA SM) reports on strategic and critical material markets in Strategic and Critical Materials 2021 Report on Stockpile Requirements. The report has annually offered detailed insights into the supply and demand market conditions of strategic and critical materials, and highlighted relevant dependencies and potential choke points and bottlenecks under national emergency conditions. Unfortunately, the 2021 report was the final edition, due to the repeal of this reporting requirement this year. 3

The Non-Availability of Domestic Supplies Stockpile (NDS) is designed to stockpile materials vital to our national security. The NDS liquidated many of its stockpiles during the post-Cold War sell-off, and it will shortly reduce its NDS Transaction Fund – the fund used to purchase raw materials — to near zero by 2024. For example, the Department of Commerce recently investigated titanium sponge supply under Section 232 of The Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and noted that the NDS had liquidated its stocks of titanium sponge entirely. The US Department of the Interior named titanium as one of the 35 most critical raw materials. It used from the defense sector to electric vehicle manufacturers, as well as highly specialized industries such as aerospace.4 While the interagency Titanium Sponge Working Group is figuring out now how to rebuild the Titanium supply chain, including new stockpile purchases, it is largely increasing its stocks of titanium only by recycling it from end-of-life weapon systems.5 The US no longer has a significant titanium mining capability, and thus relies on imports almost entirely from China and Russia.6

Moreover, the NDS completely disconnects defense from civilian infrastructure on this in the US. But in the end, the NDS is a strategic, not economic stockpile.7 It is designed to offset supply chain risks to defense and essential civilian industry for a national emergency event, and not to guarantee the continued smooth production of American industry.

In contrast, China does have a national strategy, and it has established the relevant bureaus similar to the NDS. However, in China’s case, these bureaus deal with both the civilian and military structures as one whole (which in China is a better way to view its industrial structures anyway) to guide its polices on such critical materials. As EO 14017 notes, the State Reserve Bureau is an economic stockpile and is more interventionist in markets, actively combatting price volatility or supporting particular industry segments.

A similar story can be told about the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS). The DFARS is an approval structure that qualifies friendly countries to enter into reciprocal defense procurement agreements with the United States to remove barriers to the purchase of supplies. We have so greatly complicated this activity – that it has for all practical purposes been limited still to just Japan and Australia essentially — while China has pushed ahead with its program, called GoOut China. 8

Returning for a moment to the titanium supply conundrum, China and Russia hold a near monopoly on the mining of the element.9 The Norge mine in Norway holds large deposits of titanium (along with vanadium and phosphate), but the failure to expand DFARS (along with imposing higher import tariffs on non-DFARS nations) to strategic allies can easily hamper tapping into this resource to replenish US stockpiles in this critical raw material.10 Another similar story could be told about vanadium, which is critical for armor and other uses for greatly hardened metals such as high-speed tools. It may also be a critical element in future battery production. And yet, about 98% of all the world’s vanadium comes from Russia, China and South Africa. Fortunately, the Norge mine holds a lot of that element too, but unless DFARS is updated and includes preferential import regulations and taxes to favor our allies over our adversaries, that too may remain inaccessible or competitively too costly to US industries. 11

Energy storage as a critical raw material

NSC 68 and 162/2 spent much ink on identifying key industrial areas, reviewing which of those areas the Soviets already possessed and which we still possessed and needed to ensure remain in Western hands, and finally which areas are up for grabs. Moreover, the fuel that breathed life into these industrial areas – hydrocarbons – were also identified as a critical and thus considerable similar analysis was done in these reports about the need to secure their geographic locations, particularly in the Middle East (leading to one of the first confrontations of the Cold War in Iran, even before NSC 68).

But there has been great industrial change since 1945. The new economy is still driven by the need for energy, although its form is changing in revolutionary ways. While new forms of energy production are still not yet fully economical – so hydrocarbons in one form or another will continue to be important long into the future – there has been a revolution in energy storage, namely battery technology, which in turn has revolutionized production, transport, communication and consumption. These changes drive a great increase in the need for several critical raw materials, such as phosphates and lithium. Currently, the world’s phosphates – which are also a vital part of the food chain since they are critical to fertilizers — come almost entirely from Western Sahara, China and Russia. Any disruption of phosphate can leave the world starving while it sits in powerless electric cars unable to call friends to complain on battery-less phones.

The European Union may be ahead of the United States on this. The EU Commission report on raw materials and new technologies identifies and extrapolates currently existing technologies into as yet underappreciated directions that will revolutionize industry. Five years ago, the EU prioritized battery supply chains and established the European Battery Alliance (2017) as a community-wide strategy to secure battery manufacturing and access to critical materials across the entire supply chain. The fund behind this was established in 2019 with an initial seed of $3.5 billion to promote research and development of new-generation batteries.12 The EU expects approximately $5.5 billion in private sector investment in the region shortly, including from major private concerns, such as BASF, BMW, Opel, and Varta.

Ideas as a critical raw material

The current EU Commission report on raw materials and new technologies identifies and extrapolates currently existing technologies. And yet, some of the most strategically important changes may come from beyond existing technologies. Neither EO 14017 nor the EU Commission adequately capture this dynamic, let alone extrapolate cutting edge research which will lead to currently non-existing technologies that will radically alter or render obsolete current concepts. We need to widen the aperture.

For example, the pages of the most advanced research on quantum physics and the emerging quantum revolution contain articles on the use of neodymium in producing crystals that exhibit spiral (helical) magnetism (as opposed to polar) that arise from Weyl electrons. Neodymium is currently mined primarily in China, which produces 80% of the world’s supply, and is already used in powerful magnets found in cell phones to Toyota vehicles, but this new research adds a new and potentially revolutionary dimension.13 Neither the EU commission report on raw materials nor the US EO 14017 has thought through the implications and applications of this or other technologies that could be wedded to quantum computing advances, let alone the materials which these new advances would demand.

Research institutes, incubators and innovation centers driving basic research are the first draft of the future. A proper strategic policy would need to monitor such key centers of innovation, incubation and education to extrapolate preemptively the sorts of new supply chains they will demand and to proactively secure, explore, or protect those raw materials before others place a strangle hold on their production and export.

In terms of encouraging advanced research, the US has retained some of its capabilities, although only at the same level since the end of the Cold War. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a public-private cooperative structure established in 1958 to seed and stitch together the activities of universities, industrial labs, scientists, and others at the forefront of research and innovation into organized efforts to help the US defense structures stay generations ahead technologically of its adversaries. It currently has six offices (biological technology, defense sciences, information innovation, microsystems technology, strategic technology, and tactical technology) and is trying to create a seventh, quantum revolution office. DARPA was often at the forefront of developing technologies that define modern life. Al Gore not withstanding, DARPA-encouraged projects invented the digital protocols, for example, that led to the information revolution and the internet, as well as GPS and stealth technology.

DARPA’s current budget in 2021 dollars was a little over USD 3.5 billion 14 — about the amount the EU dedicated to developing their battery strategy alone — having essentially not grown (actually slightly declined) in 15 years in real terms from its 2007 budget of USD 3.3 billion. 15 While DARPA is thus far still funded at a mostly steady level, it is falling away from China, and even the EU, which are both accelerating their DARPA-like activities.

But there are two limits to DARPA. First, like the NDS, it deals with defense-related technologies only and is not mandated to help civilian industry in the United States compete with an adversary’s industry such as China’s. Our competition with China, unlike that with the Soviets, has economic dimensions; China is mobilizing its entire society to compete with us geopolitically not only in traditional terms, but in industrial terms, as well. In short, DARPA can only tangentially help US industry compete strategically with China’s, but all of China’s ostensibly private companies enjoy immense government financial and intelligence support (because Chinese industry is inherently never truly “private,” but serves as part of the national effort to prove the superiority of its system and eventually defeat the West).

Second, DARPA is not the trigger mechanism for a supply chain stockpile and protection structure. If a DARPA project suggests that a certain element is going to become critical and in high demand when these technologies reach fruition, there is no follow-on mechanism attached to the DNS or DFARS system to mobilize those agencies, nor reported in the DLA SM report – which is anyway now discontinued — to secure the supply of the element (and even if they were, it would still only be limited to defense industries). Those linkages would need the existence of an overarching national strategic doctrine, and defining document, to encourage.

New industrial geography

Moreover, the transition from an industrial economy to a high-tech driven economy has also altered the geography of industry since the 1940s. NSC 68 and 162/2 identified key industrial centers – even if they were razed by strategic bombings of 1940-45 – around the world whose control constitutes a vital strategic asset. Even destroyed, it was recognized that the retained human capital will allow these geographic areas to quickly reemerge into their former industrial centrality. As such, it defined the geography of American strategic interests around those centers.

And yet, the rapid pace of developments and application of research into ideas that define and drive new products has economically essentially levelled the playing field, allowing new players to become vital centers of industrial importance which were marginal or even non-existent in 1950. In the 1940s, industrial capacity was defined through vast structures of development, supply, production, and distribution. It was almost impossible for an upstart to suddenly bootstrap itself effectively to compete with General Motors, General Electric or General Foods. Moreover, economies of scale reigned. Nations that by 1940 were not leaders in the industrial revolution faced a daunting uphill struggle to compete. And the innovations that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s and were essential to US industrial and military dominance were dominated by the US – which was within the mandate of DARPA to encourge and assist.

In contrast, the rise of the high-tech economy has given new players a chance to compete without an inherently insurmountable disadvantage. As a result, in the new post-industrial economy, entirely new geographies – out of DAPRA’s mandate — have now arisen. Nations such as Israel, Finland and Estonia have become centers of activity as vital to the West as were the major global industrial centers of 1948. So too Taiwan’s microchip production. And yet, absent a new NSC-68, there is no national strategic policy governing the consideration of protecting and ensuring those centers remain accessible and oriented toward the West as a vital national security interest. In short, though innovation is now a “critical raw material” of sorts for the US and the West, its global supply chain remains essentially without national-level strategic consideration or protection.

Finance and the diffusion of investment centers

Ideas need funding. Indeed, key investment centers are handmaidens to innovation and incubation centers.

In 1950, the focus of international finance and the generation of cutting-edge industrial innovation was so dominated by centers at the core of the West (such as New York, London, Zurich in finance, and Detroit, Seattle, Chicago, Milan and even LA and other areas in innovation) that these areas governed little attention in NSC-68 or NSC 192/2. But the location of innovation and finance has changed in the last decades, and thus so too must a strategic analysis now consider both innovation and finance/investment – and their new geographic centers — as critical raw materials of sorts. Moreover, while ideas are dependent on funding, they also eventually develop new technologies that will demand a new collection of critical raw materials.

Consider the UAE and the strategically economic implications of the Abraham Accords. Not only do they wed the financial and innovation centers of UAE and Israel together, but geopolitically, it weds the emerging eastern Mediterranean strategic area anchored to Israel and Greece with the Indian Ocean and east Asian strategic area anchored to the UAE, India and Japan. This should be conceived of as a powerful cultural and economic unity, not just military and geopolitical.

Surrendering human capital

Knowledge is not all about innovation. The West has dangerously neglected its current knowledge and human capital, namely skills. As EO 14017 notes, Western countries’ lowering of value creation and outsourcing, especially in fields like mining, has led to a rise in the atrophying of talent in key sectors in industrial nations. 16 Other US agencies have noted this as well. The Department of Defense’s Fiscal Year 2020 Industrial Capabilities Report to Congress:

“The entire U.S. critical minerals supply chain faces workforce challenges, including aging and retiring personnel and faculty; public perceptions about the nature of mining and mineral processing; and foreign competition for U.S. talent. Unless these challenges are addressed, there may not be enough qualified U.S. workers to meet domestic production needs across the entire critical minerals supply chain.” 17

In 1995 the US Bureau of Mines (USBM) was defunded. It issued educational grants and assisted university programs across the country. Slowly, the human talent developed over centuries in mining and geology is eroding. Our skilled mining workforce is aging, and youth have no incentive to enter studies that lack scholarships and are denigrated as environmentally criminal by many of their young friends and colleagues. And universities lack the moral fortitude to persist in teaching these fields if both the money is not there and the politically correct reactions are withering. By way of comparison, China has 39 universities granting mineral processing and metallurgy degrees, thousands of undergraduate and graduate students. 18

At some point in the future, the will, if not even the urgent need, will arise for the United States to reopen mines and discover new ones to compensate for the denial of critical and rare materials by our adversaries. But while the money and will may still be there, we may be unable to do so.

And mining is only an example. There are many other fields where the proclivity to outsource for reasons of cost and efficiency have essentially stripped the United States and its allies of the talent necessary to continue were there global-level disruptions. When Rome fell, the world lost a treasure of knowledge on construction and science. The West is not conquered, but it is unlearning and losing the basic skill sets that run daily life and allow for any supply chain to even exist.

Conclusion: Where is it all coming from and what to do?

Following the publication of the NSC EO 14017, the Biden administration ordered all agencies to undergo a self-review in their areas of supply chain vulnerabilities. While the verdict is still out on this effort, its beginnings raise concerns.

First, vulnerability from what? Is it a vulnerability from a hurricane hitting a coast with refineries, from a factory in France which may suffer labor shortages, or from a mine in Ohio that may suffer protests? These are temporary distortions which proper contingency plans – which are worthy of organizing — can handle. A labor stoppage threat in France does not mean that one should abandon French supply, but it does mean that a plan B should be put on the shelf to serve as an off-the-shelf stopgap.

But temporary disruptions are not the same level of threat as long-term distortions, some of which are intentionally encouraged by adversaries to strategically weaken us. Are we trying to reinforce our supply chains from acts of God or from the hostility of adversaries and the vulnerability of the denial of critical raw materials over which an adversary has a monopoly? For example, several years ago, China used a momentary dearth of investment in the high-tech health sector to try to invest enough in Israel’s health sector to distort it into patterns of research and production inappropriate for Western demand. This exposed Israel greatly to China’s bullying because so much of its health industry suddenly became beholden to China. Absent a definition of the threat and an analysis of how that threat might play out, it is difficult to anticipate and organize a response. Disruptions in supply are vastly different in terms of demanding strategic response than fundamental distortions by our adversaries. Disruptions can be handled tactically by contingency plans. Distortions require national-level strategic efforts to reverse the vulnerability before it can be exploited. Such definitions of vulnerability must come from, rather than inform, a coherent strategic framework. And such a framework defining our values, our adversary’s, and the sources of power for us and them, is currently absent. There is, in fact, no mention of supply chain monopolies run by adversaries in any of the directives to agencies tasked to examine their supply chain vulnerabilities.

Second, ordering separate agencies on their own to conduct such an investigation without coordination inherently stovepipes the problem. While each agency may identify temporary localized solutions sufficient to handle supply disruptions, the taxing of those solutions by several sectors at once may be overwhelming.

Third, the directives given the bureaus are unfocused. Take for example the June 8 government fact sheet, in which it outlined how it was going to secure our nation’s battery supply. It listed the following priorities:

• “Catalyze private capital with new federal grant programs…
• Electrify the nation’s school bus fleet…
• Accelerate the electrification of the nation’s transit bus fleet…
• Provide consumer rebates and tax incentives to spur consumer adoption of EVs…
• Invest in the production of high-capacity batteries and products that use these batteries to support good-paying, union jobs. Tax credits, lending and grants offered to businesses to produce in the U.S. must require the creation of quality jobs with the right to organize for workers… Other standards that should be included are: (1) mandated hiring percentages from registered apprenticeships and other labor or labor-management training programs, (2) project labor, community labor and local hire requirements, and (3) employer neutrality agreements.
• Develop strong environmental review permitting practices for the extraction of critical minerals. We recommend Congress develop legislation to replace outdated mining laws …These should be updated to have stronger environmental standards, up-to-date fiscal reforms, better enforcement, inspection and bonding requirements, and clear reclamation planning requirements.” 19

Of these, the first might help, depending on how it is defined and invested. The next four bullets, however, have nothing to do with securing supply chains, but they do advance ideological objectives that may actually deepen our dependence on supply chains running through China. And the last bullet is distinctly anti-mining and is likely to shut down and deeply retard our mining industry, leaving nations which have no such regulatory limitations as the only remaining suppliers of raw materials thus deepening the very dependency such an effort should be relieving.

These policy documents suggest the new administration is flailing and cannot resist mixing ideological policy preferences with economic necessities and genuine strategic vulnerabilities. The emphasis on such ideological imperatives, such as green energy and technology, union support, risks the danger of creating pressures of seeking supply without requisite due diligence. The demand that a supply of government fleet vehicles ensures both being green and secure their battery supply chain can lead to greater reliance on adversaries rather than less as agencies seek to maximize their supply sources rather than narrow them to reliable, but potentially more expensive ones.

Indeed, this comes from the top. The Biden administration set a blurry tone to its aims in its first days:

“Resilient American supply chains will revitalize and rebuild domestic manufacturing capacity, maintain America’s competitive edge in research and development, and create well-paying jobs. They will also support small businesses, promote prosperity, advance the fight against climate change, and encourage economic growth in communities of color and economically distressed areas. More resilient supply chains are secure and diverse — facilitating greater domestic production, a range of supply, built-in redundancies, adequate stockpiles, safe and secure digital networks, and a world-class American manufacturing base and workforce.” 20

This is pablum. Objectives, such as better wages, enfranchising communities of color, advancing the fight against climate change, are worthy goals that may well demand strategic prioritization, but they are not related to securing supply chains from disruption or distortion. Indeed, such aims could lead to greater reliance on questionable sources of supply. Distressed communities need cheap goods. China provides them. This increases supply chain dependence on China. The pursuit of robust supply chains will likely, in fact, cut into profits and reduce wages, make goods a bit more expensive, and might even slow growth, which is precisely why a national level framework guided by a strategic document is necessary – otherwise, businesses, who are legally bound to provide their investors with value, would do this on their own for their own financial reasons. Such choices are questions of national values and priorities, the outlines of which are absent at this time in any guiding national document. Prioritizing everything prioritizes nothing.

Clearly, the good news is that Washington is beginning to take note of the dangers of our vast dependence on supply chains over which there has been until now scant control, planning or strategic contemplation. And yet, the response has been inadequate, too laden with the danger of ideological abuse, uninformed by any guiding national and strategic vision and completely lacking in any concept or principles to define the nature of threats or identify adversaries. In short, there is no NSC 68 equivalent to guide the effort.

And indeed, the problem may be even deeper than that. There may be underlying issues affecting American culture which prevent us from thinking in these strategic terms, and unable to pursue them even if conceived.

It would, of course, be seductive for some to look to Europe and simply follow their lead. Yielding to a new international regulatory structure set by our European allies would be the easy path, and we could convince ourselves that it advances our common values and secures the supply chain that drives our economic vitality and military power. It would also be tempting to try to overpower the market and aggressively legislate American industry into compliance with these international regulations. And it would be easy to expose American businesses to international courts upholding those regulations.

The problem is that the European Union does not genuinely share our most basic values. Instead, it issues from a fundamentally different philosophical foundation from the United States. We emerged from the evolution of the Italian Renaissance, 17th century British politics and 15th-18th early enlightenment thinkers in the United Kingdom and France. The European Union in contrast, is largely animated by 18th century French philosophers, like Rousseau, and the underlying philosophy of the French Revolution. The latter believes in a population too ignorant to truly understand its self interest and “social contract” – the support of which defines the possession of citizenship and rights — and thus must be led by an enlightened vanguard leadership guiding the people to their own interests and morality. As such, embedded in this outlook traditionally lies the effort by a vanguard elite to realize the “social contract” which the general population is too informed to appreciate on its own, by launching a campaign of interventionist legislation, activist (even “legislating”) laws and courts, government regulations, international organizations, and the intertwining of business with government to the point of blurring the line that which the United States traditionally has done through public-private policy coordination and incentives and the principle of preserving inalienable personal freedoms (including the right to property). Moreover, the EU’s elites employ the governmental, legal and bureaucratic structures to execute a distorted concept of morality they believe embodies the “social contract,” and thus such interventions are not driven by purely economic or strategic considerations to secure the supply chain, but are informed by an attempt to guide Europe industrially according to elite values and not.

Second, our problem is not truly lack of regulations and administrative directives. In fact, it is the opposite. Those in the technology fields, for example, complain mightily that the United States has burdened its innovative soul with such regulatory and administrative knots and complexities that it has effectively tied the hands both of government and of the citizen alike, rather than provided a proper governmental and corporate framework for responsibility, initiative and creativity. Indeed, we suffer the sort of regulatory and administrative morass that Phillip K. Howard describes in The Rule of Nobody.

Howard argues that the US needs to return to setting national goals and boundaries that elevate our aspirations and validate our foundational values and philosophy rather than dictate public choices. Or as Michael Barone said of Howard’s argument: [his] “central insight – that ordinary Americans can be trusted to behave responsibly – is a good starting place in reforming government.” 21

Indeed, going beyond Howard’s argument, the drift toward such dictation – namely the EU way of doing things — suggests a certain disdain our elites hold regarding the virtuousness of the national soul and the aristocratic suspicion they harbor of its foundations. This assault both causes and confirms the surrender of our last vestiges of popularly-held civic virtue, since virtue is not held by citizenry but imposed on them. And if everything is imposed, regulated, or forbidden – namely controlled — then personal or corporate initiative to take control of the situation, to operate voluntarily according to a code of ethics, or to concern oneself with the public good all withers. Nobody takes responsibility for anything – which is essentially the point Howard is making. In some ways, that failing more than any other lies at the heart of why we have allowed our industrial policy altogether, to become so haphazard, vulnerable and largely unattended … and frankly pessimistic. This lies at the core of the national crisis affecting everything from supply chains to production to innovation. Nobody is in charge and our elites are unintentionally, but still collectively, allowing the nation to flounder suffering under a thousand cuts.

Indeed, this goes some way to explain the deep chasm emerging in America between the aristocratic pessimism and wistful glance toward Europe as a model which has gripped American elites – which now constitute a new rigid aristocracy of governmental and business elites — and the gritty self-confidence that grips America more popularly, especially between the coasts. For a decade now, the United States has politically experienced an anti-establishment sentiment animating both sides of the political spectrum. 22 This impulse to disruption is both necessary and useful to reinvigorating the national spirit, but without constructive leadership following, it can also be dangerous and simply destructive rather than disruptive.

At any rate, private citizens and business have on the one hand been loaded with an increasingly burdensome, non-economic mass of regulations designed to dictate new national values, while at the same time faced a decades-long assault by NGOs and non-profits to bend to increasingly ideological and unprofitable set of behaviors to advance those new national values. And yet, simultaneously on the other hand, with respect to supply chains, offshoring production, and foreign trade, business has been allowed to embrace a hyper laissez-faire attitude externally to overcome the internal regulatory environment, thus encouraging business to increase profit by aggressively offshoring and subcontracting to foreign ventures which can perform absent the sort of internal regulatory tethering domestic production entails. Together, these pressures have combined to create a business environment that forces the export of business activity abroad and essentially jettisons the very concept of civic virtue and corporate citizenship. Instead, it replaces genuine civic virtue with an imposed sort of Code Napoleon of corporate responsibility dictated by elites, activists and a self-anointed international aristocracy — and then finds rationalizations to justify the dependency on adversaries as well as the wealth and tech transfer to them they are deepening.

As such, while many dream of moving the United States toward a European foundation, culturally and philosophically the population of United States will continue to view blurring the government-business divide, government activism, mindless further bureaucratization of regulation, and surrender of personal sovereignty (including business autonomy) to self-anointed elites and international structures with great suspicion, or indeed outright hostility. As a nation, we are beginning to wheeze and stifle under the weight of the “rule of nobody” that Howard so well describes. Americans have, since long before their founding, been profoundly suspicious of top-down, elite-driven, virtue-shaping activism, such as the corporate social-justice activism now dominating Fortune-500 business. As a result, populist pressures will eventually work to sabotage any industrial policy in the United States that does not issue from a public-private partnership that builds on national values rather than a governmental or bureaucratic command to reshape them. Thus, the European approach and model to resolving such questions will remain largely inappropriate to US realities and culture.

The only way forward must start with a new NSC-68 that is a fundamental examination of our national values:

• the sources of our strength from the foundations of human and social capital and the reinvigoration of values to the supply of raw materials;
• mercilessly and unsentimentally reexamines the entire regulatory and administrative structures of the US government, code and law, unhesitatingly and without ideological prisms; and
• crisply identifies adversaries and examines the global distortions economically caused by reliance of adversarial actors, and establishes a framework of priorities, clear definitions, government programs, and popularly-convincing policy positions to signal the private sector what is expected of it.

While legislation and regulation are part of the mix – they were with NSC 68 as well – these must be the product of domestic cooperation and popular approval – namely proper legislation and statute debated and vetted by the public. They cannot be the result of some hidden commitment made by diplomats or corporate executives in the international corridors of Davos led by businessmen and activists, or businessmen-activists, decrying the evils of the very system under which they made their fortunes, such as Klaus Schwab.

Finally, even something as distant from supply chains and technology as the question of immigration needs to be revisited. The lawlessness and loss of control signaled by a collapse of our border control does not create a national mood or norm of the meticulousness that should govern production from mine to product, the fastidiousness that should define business ethics, and the sort of stable background that ironically most allows for the disruptive economic instability behind innovation. At the same time, the United States had been built not only on immigration, but on high-quality immigration – essentially drawing the greatest minds of the globe seeking nothing more than a proper environment and freedom to realize their talents. And yet, our current immigration laws, while unapplied and thus allowing an open border, at the same time are highly restrictive in terms of allowing the world’s top talent to immigrate legally and become part of the American innovative ecosystem. As a result, these haphazard immigration policies encourage low-skilled labor and lawlessness while at the same time discouraging the immigration of highly skilled talent legally. This contributes to our losing our unchallenged primacy in innovation as we slouch toward seeing even our adversaries whittle away to a shadow the several-generational superiority we once held over even our European allies in the 1960s.

Sadly, Washington at the moment seems unable to muster such a nationally-engaging bipartisan effort, even to properly sound the alarm. As a result, eventually there will be cataclysmic moment – as there always has been – of geopolitical tensions which will go badly for us and will thus force a refocusing of the attentions of the usually strategically reactive Western nations. Perhaps then, it will jolt elites into finally returning to the fundamental values and philosophical understandings of our founders and construct a new strategic vision with a clear understanding of the threat to the nation and our way of life, develop a new mobilization plan to coordinate and organize the nations around that vision, identify a new concept of the geography of critical industrial production, and map out a new geography of prioritized raw materials. The United States has throughout its history reinvented itself – and yes emerged both “built back better” and “made great again” for it. That both parties seem to believe that employing slogans implying such a rebirth is politically important hopefully suggests that the American people will yet again reinvent themselves to an even higher level.

Citations

1. Ross King, Brunelleschi’s Dome (Penguin Books, 2001).

2. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/07/26/2017-15860/assessing-and-strengthening-the-manufacturing-and-defense-industrial-base-and-supply-chain

3. This report, including key assumptions related to shipping losses, war damage, and other factors covered by 50 U.S.C. 98h-5, are included in Appendix A.

4. https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/05/13/us_titanium_supply_chain_needed_for_national_security_776880.html

5. EO 14017, p. 189

6. https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/05/13/us_titanium_supply_chain_needed_for_national_security_776880.html

7. EO 14017, pp. 188-9

8. EO 14017, p. 164.

9. https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/05/13/us_titanium_supply_chain_needed_for_national_security_776880.html

10. Norge Mining annual report/. Other reports

11. https://www.livescience.com/29155-vanadium.html

12. European Commission, European Battery Alliance, “Annex to the Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions”, Brussels, 17.5.2018 COM(2018) 293 final ANNEX 2, Page 2.

13. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/18/neodymium-china-controls-rare-earth-used-in-phones-electric-cars.html

14. https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/DARPA_PB_2022_19MAY2021_FINAL.pdf

15. https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/(2G10)%20Global%20Nav%20-%20About%20Us%20-%20Budget%20-%20Budget%20Entries%20-%20FY2007%20(Approved).pdf and https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/(2G10)%20Global%20Nav%20-%20About%20Us%20-%20Budget%20-%20Budget%20Entries%20-%20FY2007%20(Approved).pdf

16. EO 14017

17. U.S. Department of Commerce, A Federal Strategy to Ensure Secure and Reliable Supplies of Critical Minerals (June 4, 2019), https://commerce.gov/sites/default/files/2020-01/Critical_Minerals_Strategy_Final.pdf

18. EO 14017 p. 180.

19. https://www.energy.gov/articles/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-100-day-battery-supply-chain-review

20. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/02/24/executive-order-on-americas-supply-chains/

21. https://philipkhoward.com/book/the-rule-of-nobody/

22. Howard has in a recent article argued that the rise of anti-establishmentarian views, epically in the form of extremism, is the logical conclusion of the rule of nobody. See: https://www.newsweek.com/vaccines-showcase-american-extremism-vs-legitimate-authority-opinion-1632615

Lebanon and the Geography of Arab Change

July 29, 2021

By Dr. David Wurmser
July 29, 2021

In a summer of brewing crises, from Havana through Caracas to Tehran (and other Iranian cities), Lebanon’s descent into crisis tends to be overlooked. And yet, it is part of a larger picture in which our greatest adversaries are on the ropes (Communists in Cuba and Venezuela, the Khomeinist regime in Iran, and Hizballah in Lebanon). While this is clearly a fortuitous moment, the emergence of which can properly be attributed to the policies of the previous administration, the Obama administration’s catastrophic failure to turn previous crises into opportunities should provide a cautionary tale. These crises can be weathered by our adversaries or hijacked by others as dangerous (or even more so) if the United States abandons the underlying policies that led these inimical regimes into their cul de sac. There is no predetermined arc of history, for better or worse: decisions matter. And this administration is dangerously close to fumbling.

The dream palace of Arab nationalism
Lebanon and to some extent Syria have always been both a bellwether and symbol of regional politics. The land of the cedars is an incubator of Arab politics, and thus its history is the first draft of the regional history of ideas. And nobody embodies the swirling development of ideas better than my old doctoral advisor, Fouad Ajami, who himself is a child of Ansar from the heart of the Jabal Amel Shiite community in Lebanon’s embattled south. The progression of his books are like a roadmap to understanding the ebb and flow of both the content and geography of ideas in the region.

In The Arab Predicament (1981), Ajami reflected upon the crises of Arab nationalism. It promised to deliver the great renaissance of the Arab world. Instead, it suffered its most decisive and humiliating defeat in 1967 at Israel’s hands. While in the West, the 1970s may have been the heyday of admiration for the international symbol of Arab nationalism – the Ray-Ban bespectacled Yasir Arafat – those in the region understood something was dying. For those who cared to see, Arafat’s expulsion from south Lebanon in 1978 and Beirut in 1982 marked the end of his Arab nationalism.

Courting Arab nationalists remained the foundation of policy in Western capitals (and still does via the Oslo peace process obsession) – with the exception of the great scholar of the region, Bernard Lewis, who was the first westerner to discern the resurfacing of Islam as politics. But the rubble of Arab nationalism was not given to reconstruction and instead yielded new forces. Fouad Ajami captured the final tortured moment and despairing departure of the soul of the idea in The Dream Palace of the Arabs (1999), and the immense swath of destruction of Arab society left regionally in its place.

The resurfacing of Islam
The new lingua franca of Arab politics was a return to authenticity of the old through the language of Islam. While a few lingering leaders still held a corner of the stage for their final performance, the stage itself was now dominated by actors vying to control the legacy of the mystic past for control over the clouded future.

Arafat knew better than we the region’s trajectory. Arafat himself was already reconnecting to his underlying Islamic essence. When the Islamist threat challenged and then seized power with the rise of Khomeini in Iran, exposed its brutality in the seizure of the great Mosque in Mecca for a month, and revealed its penetration of the structures of power in the murder by the Gamaat al-Islamiyya in Cairo of President Sadat, Arafat was already a step ahead. He beat a path to Tehran – the first foreign “leader” to do so. And his top aid in Force 17, Emad Mughniya, became the developing architect of Hizballah. And Arafat asked of his Libyan allies that the leader of the Lebanese Shiite Awakening, Musa al-Sadr, be eliminated – probably at the behest of the Iranian Revolution, since such a charismatic and potent Shiite leader with greater credentials and a stronger claim to standard-bearing than the upstart Iranian regime posed a grave threat to Khomeini’s leadership. Lebanon again played the unwelcome role of regional incubator.

The first act was actually quite early, and took place in Lebanon. Indeed, the first act was the story of Musa al-Sadr. The tumultuous transition from the heady seduction of Arab nationalism — which though in most of the fertile crescent was a veiled form of Sunni dominance that nevertheless still drew the imagination of young Shiites — to a “Shiite Awakening” was captured with heart-tugging empathy and brilliance in The Vanished Imam (1986). Here were two ironies wrapped up in one: First, the return to Islam, with which the region and outsiders alike have had to contend for the last three decades, arose not from the heart of the Sunni world, but from the suppressed, backward and impoverished Shiite hamlets of southern and eastern Lebanon. Second, this Shiite Awakening came far from Lebanon, and not from the heart of Shiite Islam — Iran and southern Iraq. It manifested itself years before the Iranian revolution, which has ever since tried to claim fathership over an older and more tried “son.” Lebanon’s Shiite leadership thus controlled the claim to authenticity and true fatherhood over the Shiite Awakening – a claim which was so deeply and jealously sought by the Iranian revolution. True, the Shiites extended the tentacles of Iran’s central nervous system to the Levant, but as it extended Iranian power, it also profoundly threatened it. Iraq’s Shiites could have represented this duality as well, but they lived invisibly under the withering hand of Saddam. For that moment at least, the ownership and future of the Shiite Awakening was to be battled out in the south of Lebanon, not in Iraq’s ancient mosques in Kufa, Khadimain, Najaf and Karbala.

The Iraq war
For Ajami, that moment ended in 2003 when the inevitable angel of death, dressed as the American armed forces, claimed the lingering ghost of Arab nationalism in Baghdad. Ajami, being a Lebanese Shiite, understood that as much as this might influence the region, the battle over the Shiite Awakening had shifted from Jabal Amel to the cradle of Shiism itself in Iraq. Iran had spent two decades subjugating with tenuous success the competing center of the Shiite Awakening in Jebel Amal only to find itself now facing a far greater, closer and more serious competitor in an untethered Iraq. The prospect burst onto the Arab stage that at least a Shiite corner of it might find a better future out of Arab nationalism’s rubble.

Ajami captured in The Foreigner’s Gift, that brief ambivalent moment unleashed by the Iraq war in which the hope of freedom was at the same time haunted by fear. Iran despaired of facing this new Shiite challenge coming from the cradle of Shiism, so it was inevitable that it would launch its must-win war to control the Shiites of this newly liberated realm. Ajami in this book passionately echoed a century earlier when the works of Polish expatriate writer, Joseph Conrad, captured this tension between brutality, despair and hope in an unhinged political environment. Ajami also understood that Western eyes failed to see this battle over the soul of Iraqi Shiism – echoing the same battle over ownership of authenticity which Lebanon’s Shiites had posed.

Iraq’s Shiites were both a threat and a weapon for the West. They could be either the tentacle of Iran’s schemes or a dagger plunged into Iran’s heart. But the West’s elites, schooled almost exclusively in the Sunni narrative, could not fathom the existence of this internal Shiite battle nor the magnitude of its stakes. So with historic clumsiness, the West’s elites – especially the British Foreign Office and the American Foreign Service — sought their peace with Iraqi Shiites by preemptively surrendering them to Iran, ensuring the defeat at once of both themselves and of Iraq’s Shiites who so intrinsically threatened Iran’s revolution. Along with the surrender came the belief that Iraq could only be properly stabilized by accomplishing a larger accommodation of Iran regionally—giving birth to the two decade attempt now to invent Iranian-regime moderates and to pursue a nuclear understanding with it. A very different story could have been told, one which might have led to a very different Iran, but wasn’t.

Still, Ajami understood that the vast wasteland left by Arab nationalism was still waiting to be filled, and that the fragile order the foreigners broke was not easily restored. And the struggle between the forces of chaos and restoration shifted yet again to Beirut and Damascus. Instead of seizing control of the forces of chaos and change to ensure they deliver a shift in a favorable direction, Western elites sided with the forces of restoration, while at the same time insisting that the agents of restoration be changed. That was akin to validating the goal of restoring the old communist order in eastern Europe, but at the same time demanding that the leadership be changed to one more palatable. But the result of this muddled perplexity was that the West again imposed irrelevance on itself. The battleground now shifted between the old order’s elites – Assad and Russia – their uncomfortable ally – Iran – and the new parade of Khaliphs, from bin Ladin through Zarqawi and al-Baghdadi to Erdogan.

The collapse of Syria was described by Ajami as the clash of two immutable forces – the people shaking off their dictator and the regime determined to survive — in his book The Syrian Rebellion (2012), but he also quickly understood how regional geopolitical forces had reasserted themselves in the Levant and turned this clash in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon once again into their battlefield in his book, Struggle for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent (2014). The history of the fertile crescent has been written ever since by the interplay of these actors.

The question of Saudi Arabia
Ajami understood that if chaos was to be yielded to the new Khaliphs in Ankara and Deir Zuheir and their nostalgic imperial schemes, then there was to be a preference toward restoration, but it had to lay on a path to greater calmness than reversion to the old order and its masters in Moscow, Damascus and Tehran. He looked to those who withstood the charms of Nasser, the dynamism of Tehran or the new beacon of Ankara. He looked to an unlikely place. He looked south into the Arabian peninsula, which hitherto had been a desert in the geography of terrain and ideas other than the dangerous ideas of Salafism with which the Kingdom had now broken. Perhaps Ajami understood it was destined that a restoration based on some sort of change might yet come from this new periphery rather than the core.

Ajami wrote Crosswinds: The Way of Saudi Arabia in 2010, though it was published after his death in 2020. This itself was a comment on the state of Arab political thought: it was becoming so impoverished as a whole – and the intellectual heartland of Arab thought in Beirut and Damascus so stagnant — that the history of Islam and Arabdom was being written either in the non-Arab capitals of Ankara and Tehran or was being surrendered to mediocre secondary franchises in the Arab world. Islam itself, he notes, was moving in that direction, where the generation of fatwas and other religious decisions moved to “Shaykh Google” and populist, unrefined religious leaders, while traditional Islamic elites were increasingly relegated to being the Islamic equivalent of “Dear Abby” and commenting on issues of sexuality and sorcery.

Saudi Arabia seemed an unlikely place for intellectual movement at the time. It was a land of harshness which Ajami argues induced a conservative retrenchment into a system that leaves room for those that stray and seek their own path, but ultimately absorbs them. The irony, he noted, was that the very harshness of the land and environment produced a society of rules, but also found patient accommodation of those that strayed from the rules. The loner always returns when he finds that the harshness of the environment leaves no room for the loner.

And yet, it was in the chaos of the Arab world and the rise of Shaykh Google that the outside world laid siege to the Saudi realm. As Ajami put it, “once upon a time, Saudis were consumers of the literature of Beirut and Damascus. Now they render their own world.” Commenting on Ajami’s opus, a friend of Ajami’s, Charlie Hill, noted that it emerged from the shock that Saudi Arabia had defined itself as a sovereign state and as the embodiment of Islam, and then discovered in the 1980s that these are two incompatible and the Saud were riding “two galloping steeds at the same time.”

Ajami never carried through this intriguing line of thinking before he died because the drama of the clash between the forces of collapse, of change and of brutality took his mind elsewhere shortly afterwards, back to Lebanon and Syria, and he put the book aside unpublished. But from its pages, it was clear that he seemed confident to the end that the Arabian Arabs would somehow reassert their ability to absord the wandering loners and survive. They would find their path, and maybe even this was the path for the region to survive. Perhaps it is a stretch, but one could in some ways even say that he envisioned the Abraham Accords a decade before they happened.

Exhaustion, reflection and retrenchment
In his last book before cancer claimed him, In this Arab Time: the Pursuit of Deliverance (both in 2014) Ajami retreated into a retrospective and wistful survey of the outstanding – but often solitary – liberal voices of the Arab century, as well as the creative but also the destructive voices of ideologies and their battles in the shadow of events shaking the Arab universe. The retrospective nature of the anthology reflected perhaps his sense of his own approaching death, but it also captured the mood in the region of an end of a journey of potential and promise that in its various forms all were drawing now to an end.

It was a sort of eulogy of the world from which he came but within which he could not think and live. There were no great ideas or hopes looking ahead, only reflection on the colorful parade of promising ideas that failed.

By 2014, the struggle between chaos and restoration were dominated almost entirely by the voices of brutality. The new order of the 20th century had sidelined the old order of centuries, but left only chaos in its demise. And the softer nature of Arab politics of the earlier part of the century, when overthrown leaders were sent into exile and debate tolerated within margins, had yielded by the 60s and 70s to the brutal new generation where public inhumanity became common and horrifically tortured murder of dissent became normal. Besieged and in retreat, as well as abandoned by the West under the Obama years, the calmer voices of order in the region had out of despair realized they had no choice but to find their own path to survival, but at the same time they knew that they lacked the power on their own to do so. When Ajami died, in parallel the region had reached a chaotic and very dangerous abyss. And it was no longer the stage of great ideas, but the soapbox of very small ideas, demagogues and elixir peddlers. And with it any shred of charm, dignity and toleration was gone.

Left at the margins of this maelstrom was what Ajami had discerned in the Saudi kingdom: a world of smaller ideas and street fare was emerging. And a system that learned not only to survive but to forgive and absorb those who have deviated. And as an earlier generation of Saudi royals learned to preserve their system internally and protect it externally by making their peace with the West to survive the turbulence of a region flailing to find its moorings, seduced by dream palaces, and besieged by great power rivalries, so too was this generation of royals willing to make their pragmatic peace with the rising local power, namely Israel, which for lack of choice began to fill the regional void that was opened by an America fatigued by the withering hopelessness of the region to which it sought to bring great hope.

Lebanon returns to center stage
But then Lebanon, which had always regarded its role as the crucible of Arab thought as a guilded curse, could nonetheless not let go. What was happening in Lebanon in the last years is again the first writing of the next chapter of Arab history.

With the demise of grand ideas seeking to paint a vast new regional canvas, communities which earlier had thought that their participation in the dreaming, sketching and painting of the contours of such grand new epochs would allow them a new, integrated and common identity. But now they instead found themselves again on the outside. Again, as always, they were alone, different, and threatened. Minorities, who had spent over a century trying to transcend who they were to join a greater whole now realized that their only path to survival lay in the other direction. They could do nothing else but remember who they always were and retreat into that shell. The world of sects, tribes, clans and ethnicities had never really left; the region’s elites – especially among the minorities who let their hopes overpower their judgment — only imagined they had. But those loyalties survived. They adapted themselves to the new vocabularies and also appropriately wore the dress of the latest fashionably dominant ideology in the cavalcade of ideologies. But in the end, those ancient loyalties and affinities were the only true safety and identity, so underneath it all, they remained the bottom line.

It was through the nexus of the rivalries of greater powers and the rampaging of franchised ideologues that these minority communities – especially those who lived along the seam lines of the fertile crescent — knew they were particularly precarious. And nowhere was this dynamic more early and clearly palpable than in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria in the last few years. And while these minority communities retreated into themselves to provide the illusion of safety, they also knew they had to seek a hand of support from a distance. Adrift in chaos, all cling to the familiar and scan the horizon to seek the ship of their salvation.

Israel was close, but uninterested in playing the role of savior. It had been scorched a generation earlier trying to navigate Lebanon’s communal politics, and the trauma of that adventure lingered. True, Israeli leaders nearly universally understand the imperative of preventing the subordination entirely of Lebanon and Syria to the region’s ambitious Ayatollahs, self-anointed Khaliphs and raw dictators. And yet, at the same time, there is almost as universally no Israeli leader who entertains the idea of trying to save either Lebanon or Syria, and perhaps the region more broadly, from itself.

Salvation, however, could not wait. A Hizballah stash of ammonium nitrate exploded and tore the center of Beirut to shreds in August 2020. The veneer of calm which masked a deeply unsettled reality yielded. Any semblance of national community crystallized into anger at the domineering outsider — namely, Iran and its local agent Hizballah. And in the anger, something new seemed to emerge among Lebanese: the hope no longer to be a regional incubator, but instead to be just left alone. Lebanese took to the streets to demand their quiet and the solitude to live their lives. Perhaps this is symbolic of the region; a popular desire emerging among many to just stick their heads down, live their lives and finally just be left alone – exhausted from a century of grand ideas that ushered in upheaval and grand destruction. We hear of such voices in other lands, and even among the people whose very existence was the product of the grand idea of Arab nationalism itself, the Palestinians. Even as far away culturally and geographically as Iran we hear Iranians demonstrating also to be just left alone: “not Gaza nor Lebanon nor Syria; Iran for Iranians” they chant on the streets of Tehran, Ahwaz, Isfahan and Tabriz and elsewhere in anger toward the Ayatollahs and their grandiose projects.

And yet, also symbolic of the region as a whole, the Lebanese were not to be indulged in their simple dream. Into their chaos immediately intruded all the ambitious actors, who redoubled their efforts to tear apart the region more broadly, especially Turkey (which saw an opportunity) and Iran (which sought to preserve its position). Lebanon was such a prize for decades, as well as the treasure chest to raid and the conduit to channel wealth, corruption, trafficking and laundering for the dark forces of the region. Money flowed from all corners of the earth through Lebanon’s dominated institutions to conduct all sorts of nefarious activities from Iraq to Palestine and further line the wealth of the region’s corrupt elites from Tehran to Ankara. It is an asset of utmost critical value for all the region’s malevolent actors and thus cannot be ceded under any circumstances since doing so could threaten their very survival, let alone their further enrichment and empowerment. These oppressors, thus, will subject Lebanon to any cost, no matter how horrifying, to stay in power. And unfortunately, entangling Israel to the south may be part, even their most important part, of their perverse toolbox to do so by changing the subject into an active regional war.

So now we have the two trends converging. On the one hand, the pillaging of Lebanon by outsiders, led by Iran and to some extent Turkey, has reached such a level that it has left the Lebanese people with nothing to lose. And in contrast, the populations are so broken that they wish nothing more than to withdraw from the region spiritually and just be left alone to mind their own business not in condominium, but in isolation.

But it is at this moment that Lebanon does offer hope. When a population has its back against the wall and nothing left to lose, the domineering outsiders face a collapse of their position to a potentially volcanic challenge from the street. That challenge is swelling as I write. So Lebanon now returns to where it has always returned: the laboratory concocting the region’s trends and ideas and the vessel through which the region’s actors pursue their ambitions.

Despite the hopes of Western elites, Lebanon’s institutions, from its government to its armed forces, stand helpless and powerless, as they always have, to the sway of those internal and regional dynamics. Indeed, it was always a western fantasy to believe that any institution, agreement and border, rather than leaders and ancient communal bonds, moved reality. To invest in those institutions as realities is to follow the leprechaun to the end of the rainbow.

So we are left with two immutable forces destined to clash: on the one hand, a restive and imminently erupting population fatigued of grand ideas and has nothing to lose, and on the other hand powerful regional actors with raw ambition who have proven they will act to win at all costs. And lurking in the wings are street ideologues with their small ideas selling their wares as well.

The squandering of opportunity
Which takes us back to the beginning. Our policies over the last several years have so weakened and besieged the nefarious actors in the region that the balance was tipped, and there was lent a modicum of hope to the despairing populations from Tehran to Beirut that there might be a chance to prevail, and the age of exhausted introversion might be brewing. That is what is playing out these weeks in the streets of Iran and Lebanon (and in Caracas and Havana too).

We have been here before in other places and other lands – for example, in central and eastern Europe in the late 1980s – and we have learned one thing in all those places: which side of the fork in the road is travelled between victory of peoples over their oppressors on the one hand and the gut-wrenching crushing of dreams on the other, is set greatly by the tone in the capital of freedom, the United States and its most powerful allies.

In other words, if Washington and its powerful ally to Lebanon’s south, unwilling as it may be, build on the policies of the past administration and understand the nature and stakes of the coming clash and embark on a robust policy of support of the Lebanese people, and if we support our ally Israel if attacked by Hizballah in their effort to change the subject, and if Hizballah is left tattered, or even better eradicated, then Tehran may reach the end of its road, not only in Lebanon, but in Tehran itself. The battle over the great prize of Lebanon has the power to set regional trends and crown regional winners, but also to bury regional losers.

And yet, Washington’s attentions are elsewhere. It is torn between not noticing, governed by obliviousness to currents on the ground, still obsessing over the dream palaces of old which long ago died in the Arab world (and their frameworks like peace processes), investing in institutions whose existences are empty (such as the Lebanese Armed Forces or the UN Interim Force In Lebanon), and unattuned – or misinformed — to the broad regional geopolitics which are playing out on the Lebanese stage. So, instead of placing our powerful hand to tip the scales toward the people of Lebanon, the United States is emerging as an eclipsing and powerful but utterly irrelevant non-player by its own doing, which is sad.

What happens in any one of these current upheavals in the seats of evil – Havana, Caracas, Tehran or Beirut – will set the tone for all the rest. But supporting the demonstrators does not seem to be the guiding principle of the current U.S. administration. Sanctions are lifted on Caracas and Tehran, weak platitudes are extended the freedom fighters in Havana, and dead silence is greeting the Lebanese and Iranians who clearly have had it. The summer of 2021 may yet be remembered more like the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and Prague Spring of 1968: the age of crushed hopes – but this time because the West could have at almost no cost helped those aspirations prevail, but instead chose to do nothing.

But if the collapse of Iran and the frustration of Turkey is deferred (not cancelled), it will come, but the issue is whether it comes now, or years in the future.

Conclusion
Lebanon has become once again the microcosm, or more accurately the herald of the region to come. The tragedy of Lebanon is that the Lebanon as we have known it for a century is about to implode and die. There is no rehabilitation or resurrection. Yes, there is a noble attempt to seize the state intact by the people of Lebanon who are unified by the desire to exorcise the demons hijacking them — as we all had briefly hoped after the horrific destruction of the exploded Hizballah depot last August. And yet, all that is left of that state – especially its internal structures of authority and power, including finance, education, culture and favor — is mastered by the region’s two greatest imperialists, Iran and Turkey. So total is their domination that their removal would leave not institutions worthy of inheritance, but only a vast, razed expanse of societal and governmental debris. And yet, avoiding that collapse only leaves these reprehensible actors in power and Lebanon still shackled to their continued predatory ambitions. It is an unenviable choice, but the former – the collapse of the Lebanese state — is the only path to true freedom. If there is to be change, Lebanon faces sadly the need for it to be revolutionary, not velvet, as we have learned in the last three decades in the former Soviet lands.

And yet, as will go Lebanon, so too will go the region. And thus, it is critical for the world on the outside, and the collection of forces under assault by Iran and Turkey (including and especially the United States which remains oblivious to its being their target), band together to stand with the Lebanese as they inescapably must pass through Mordor’s scorched Plateau of Gorgoroth on their way to build anew, not rebuild.

If successful, what will emerge there, as in its neighbor Syria, eventually is unlikely to be a truly Western sense of freedom, let alone democracy. But it will be an exhausted, perhaps impatient, and not necessarily unified introversion among a collection of besieged and defensive minority communities, tribes, clans and sects which is, after all, a good incubator for the generation of new ideas that the regio

Why we might be closer to war than we think.

June 14, 2021

By Dr. David Wurmser
June 14, 2021

Over the last week, there have been increasing signs that Hamas may be preparing to re-initiate hostilities, starting along the border at a trickle, and then more as they go along.

These threats should be taken seriously since the underlying tectonic forces that in part led to the last war are still in place.

And yet, in this particular situation, there is a new dimension that can further fuel the choice toward escalation by Hamas, as well as for the panoply of other actors that previously played a contributing role in detonating the region last month. It is likely that Hamas, the Palestinian Authority (PA), the Joint Arab List party ( HaReshima Meshutefet) in Israel and Iran and Turkey outside Israel all have a strong common interest in sabotaging the new government taking shape, which is most easily done via escalation, particularly because of their being threatened by Mansour Abbas and his United Arab List party (Raam). It is possible that even Jordan might harbor hostility, and not because the incoming Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, is seen as a symbol of the settler movement, but because they cannot comfortably accept the success of Mansour Abbas.

Let me explain.

So, what does Mansour Abbas represent? First of all, what he is not. He is not a dreamy peace processor, nor is he a man given to grand theories of regional cooperation, nor even of some contractual permanent change that would demand an alteration of his basic system of Islamic beliefs. Nor would such leaders in any Arab society survive. The cultural root of Arab society is nomadic, and tribal traditions which even preexist Islam are as important as religious dogma. Any civilization anchored to a nomadic soul views its survival through the personal capability and following of leadership of the tribe, which is really a quite different matter than our image of tribes shaped by Hollywood in Westerns. Families, or clans, are part of the Middle Eastern tribe, a discussion of which is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say, though, that institutions in such societies are not envisioned as “trusts,” as they are in urban societies of the West, but are embodiments of the tribal leader, who in turn is not a custodian of a permanent institution or “office,” but its very essence. When Muhammad died, Abu Baqr was named the Khaliph, but the tribes revolted. This was not because they opposed Abu Baqr, but because they had no institutional loyalty to the the Khaliphate; Abu Baqr had to personally renegotiate the terms of loyalty with each tribe, each of which would continue in revolt until he did. It is a very personal affair between the leader and his “tribe” of followers. Contrast this with the concept of leader and institution in the West. While any leader in the West owes those in society that helped him rise to the top, the office he assumes and the institution which he heads have their own existence as a possession of all the people of community. A U.S. president, while obviously trying to realize policies that deliver for his supporters, is bound to talk about being the president of all Americans. He loses his personal validity the moment he tries to limit the office or institution to the narrow purview of clan or tribal head. And there are strict laws against such favoritism in U.S. politics. Not so in the Middle East. The inverse is true. A leader that does not pursue the interests of his tribe has betrayed their personal trust in him, and he has lost his claim to loyalty and following, and thus his personal validity.

In short, the mission or purpose of the tribal leader, and the clans which make up the tribe, is primarily to deliver the survival and welfare of that tribe. In an urban setting, traditional tribes, or the identity of having come from a tribe, still exist and are important but are weaker. Still, one’s tribal origins are part of one’s soul. Moreover, the patterns of politics and the nature of leadership remains baked into the culture despite having been urbanized. And is understood in those terms as well. The Prime Minister of Israel is seen as much in the Middle East in personal terms as the leader of the Jewish tribe, rather as he is understood in the West as the custodian of the institution of the Israeli state. Indeed, the United States president is seen in such terms as well and is expected to act as required along those lines. When Israelis or Americans talk in larger theoretical terms of global order or regional peace, it is simply confusing. What tribal leader would talk about regional structures of conflict resolution and “interests of the international community” which stand above the interests of the Jewish or American tribes they represent? What tribal leader in his right mind would give in to expectations to cede his tribal authority voluntarily?

Since survival as a community is the basic aim in a harsh environment, the legitimacy of one’s being the tribal leader is based on how well he protects and provides for the tribe. In turn, each tribe member understands that his survival and welfare is derivative of the tribe, so his purpose is to help his tribe survive, and in turn, he exists under the tribe’s protection. If some member wants to be individualistic, he can do so as a dead person.

The tribal leader thus, to provide and protect his tribe, must always be on the lookout for the strong horse to which he attaches his tribe and to whom he links their fate. The wrong choice, or some “principled” choice, represents a fundamental failure and abdication of authority. So the basis of all leadership and politics is seeking and signing with the rising power.

Mansour Abbas has made the choice — to some extent similar to the choice made by the tribal leaders of Abu Ghosh in 1948 — as such a “tribal” leader that identifies Israel as the strongest horse. It is the same choice the UAE has made as well. Mansour Abbas has attached his fate to Israel, based on the expectation of Israel’s being and remaining a rising power.

The other Arab leaders in this picture all hedge or think Israel will not prevail. They follow in the footsteps of so many Arab leaders before, who have climbed up and over the precipice into the abyss in viewing Nazism, Communism, China, Saddam’s Iraq, Iran, Turkey or ISIS and bin Ladin as the rising and prevailing power. So they, as these previous Arab leaders have done, attach themselves to any movement against Israel and the U.S.

As long as the U.S. and Israel understand that they are viewed in the region as the tribal leaders for their “tribes,” they can navigate the region successfully, and gather power and following along the way. But when we try to be above it all, and think like a detached academic or politic utopians who believe in conflict resolution or pacifism, or worse engage in self-denigrating or conciliatory actions, like the U.S. and Israel have often done before, and which the United States is now asking again of its ally, then we and Israel will lose all value as the strong horse. The U.S. and the Israelis become toxic and are to be fled from as fast as possible, and we will find ourselves alone and under attack even by those who just a moment ago were our “best friends.” In fact, in particularly by those who were just recently our best friends because they have to disassociate themselves the most from the catastrophic choice of having misread us as a strong horse.

Mansour Abbas is essentially now a “tribal” leader of a substantial group of Arabs, esoteric the Negev Arabs of whom most are Bedouin, and as his “tribe’s” leader, he relates to Israel as the strong horse with whom it is in his tribe’s best interest to align, assuming Israel understands and accepts its role as the strong horse. In this way, it is quite possible that Mansour Abbas sees PM Bennett’s pedigree as a hard liner and a graduate of the General Staff commando unit as advantages, not as an offense.

The participation of Mansour Abbas thus means several things for the other Arabs:

1. Mansour Abbas bartered his support for the Israeli strong horse in exchange for the real empowerment of an Arab party — something the Joint Arab List leadership has forfeited for decades by its choice to champion the Palestinian flag over the Israeli, and serve consistently as apologists for the violence and rejection of the state of Israel that this represents. In some ways, Mansour Abbas’ fate is tied and dependent on his gamble, namely on his bet on Israel’s success and remaining strong. Mansour Abbas, thus, is the domestic Arab opposite of the local Arabs who are the followers of the external rejection front led by Syria, Iran, the PLO, Turkey and others (in practice even Qatar) — namely Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the PLO’s many factions, including Fatah and Abu Mazen — some members of whom have even wound up in exile in the capitals of their preferred external “strong horses.” All these rejectionist forces, inside and outside, have staked the credibility of their leadership over their “tribes” and clans on Israel’s weakness, temptation to conciliation and peace processes, which it is assumed will lead to its retreat and ultimately to Israel’s demise. In contrast, Mansour Abbas can roughly be considered the internal Israeli Arab equivalent of the UAE and Abraham Accords — namely while his informing dogma may still not, and likely never will, accept the genuine legitimacy of the Jewish state, the “tribal” leader he represents — and his irreducible need to deliver protection and validation for his followers — drives him to reconcile and seek the fulfillment of his community’s interests through some sort of reconciliation and accommodation with Israel. As such, the success of Mansour Abbas essentially embodies the Abraham Accords.

In the process, Abbas has rendered himself the mortal enemy of these rival “tribes” and their leadership, namely those whose primary allegiance is to the various shades of the rejectionist front. This is a fight to the death, so they will do anything to tear Abbas down. As Iran and Turkey view the Abraham Accords as a mortal strategic threat, so too will they view Mansour Abbas.

2. The outside forces of the rejectionist front — which ultimately includes the PLO, as well, despite the fiction clung to by western elites of its moderation — have been forced to surrender their monopoly and with agony watch their rival, Mansour Abbas, leverage his access to Israeli power to deliver to his followers what they cannot. Mansour Abbas, like the UAE externally, annulled their veto over any movement toward reconciliation. Jews and Arabs, this time internally as opposed to regionally, could find formulas to work together when their interests converge even without having to first solve the “Palestinian issue” over which the rejectionist front held a veto. The other Abbas, Muhammad Abbas of the PA and head of the PLO had, once again had his rudimentary persona and purpose rejected. So apart from Muhammad Abbas’ having a new rival (Mansour Abbas) for the street from which he largely already is humiliatingly rejected, he also suddenly finds himself, his movement, and the balloon of the PA’s importance as “the indispensable factor” punctured. Mansour Abbas threatens Muhammad Abbas as much as the Abraham Accords did.

3. Hamas, Iran and Turkey invested immensely in creating the sort of fundamental breakdown of law and order that was expressed through the Arab Spring instigated during the recent war between Israel and Hamas. For the first time since 1948, the internal fabric of Israeli society was ripped and the very real danger of an Arab-Jewish communal civil war threatened within just last month. And now, only a few weeks later, the leader of a party whose platform stands to the right of the outgoing Israeli government, Yemina, embraced Mansour Abbas and invited him into the inner circle of Israeli power structures. Symbolically, the greatest achievement of the war for Hamas has been challenged, eroded, and potentially burst as suddenly as it exploded last month. They have been humiliated by Mansour Abbas.

4. Palestinians in Gaza, Judea and Samaria have increasingly looked with envy at the ability of Israelis to be free and express themselves. While still uneasy about accepting the image of political chaos as potentially an expression and form of strength rather than weakness, there is an increasing attraction to Israeli society among Palestinians when juxtaposed against the suppression, corruption and brutality of the governments they live under in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. This unnerves, and properly so, those governments and possess a threat to the legitimacy of their rule. This may also threaten other regional leaders since Mansour Abbas and Israel have managed to deliver the only genuinely democratic path to enfranchisement of Arabs in the Middle East, not the Arab Spring nor any other fashionable Arab ideological movement of the last century.

5. Iran and Turkey invested heavily in effort and coin in creating a new Palestinian Arab leadership that echoes and furthers their regional power ambitions. And then along comes Mansour Abbas out of nowhere and grabs the standard of leadership of Israeli Arabs, especially but not only the Bedouin. Another balloon bursts, and the vast resources spent by Iran, Turkey and Qatar go up in flames.

6. Mansour Abbas also places King Abdallah of Jordan potentially in a difficult position, largely because King Abdallah has spent the last decade making a series of grave mistakes. First among these, King Abdallah of Jordan has allowed himself to be defined so consistently as the cheerleader for the Palestinian camp led by Abu Mazen that he has become its shadow. But King Abdallah is not a Palestinian. He may be the decedent of the Prophet Muhammad, and thus a pan-Arab and pan-Islamic leader, but he also is essentially the current head of the Hejazi tribes from when he hails. As such, he gained little real following among the people of whom he is not — the Palestinians — but forfeited the following of the people of whom he is, the Hejazi Bedouin tribes. In the process, he offended the Hejazi Bedouin tribes which traditionally form the core of the Hashemite kingdom and without whose support the state of Jordan loses its raison d’etre. The symbol of this misplaced attention was in 2017, when King Abdallah intervened, mostly unhelpfully, in the Temple Mount unrest following a terror attack which was launched from within the Temple Mount complex that killed two Israeli police, while at the same time the Hawaitat tribe — which had been loyal to the Hashemite family since the Arab Revolt in World War I a century ago — threatened to withdraw its loyalty from the King for his prosecution of two of its members for a terror attack on American soldiers. King Abdallah chose to focus on the Palestinian crisis rather than his own regime-threatening one. In short, King Abdallah has been so busy entangling himself with the PLO-based Palestinian movement, and becoming Abu Mazen’s champion among Western establishments, that he forgot he was the tribal head of the Hejazi Bedouin tribal core of the state. He is acting like man without a tribe. This ultimately is what underlies the dangerous rift between himself and Prince Hamza, who clearly had powerful supporters among the Hejazi tribes.

Across the African rift valley in the Negev in southern Israel, Mansour Abbas established his leadership most by championing the cause of the Bedouin Negev tribes. Their concerns and issues formed the unsurrenderable core of the demands to which Mansour Abbas held in negotiating his entry into the Israeli government. He delivered. So in some ways, he is the tribal leader now de facto of the Negev Arab Bedouin tribes.

Despite the harshness and difficulty of the landscape of the African Rift Valley, there is effectively no border dividing the Hejazi tribes from the Bedouin of the Negev. Historically, indeed going all the way back to the ancient Nabateans, the tribal allegiances of today’s southern Jordan and Israel ran up and down from the north in Ma’an to south in the Hejaz, but equally from the east in Ma’an to the West in Be’er Sheva. It is unclear how solid the tribal connections are still now after 1948, but the rise of a de facto champion of the Negev Bedouin must register on the Hejazi tribal radar — which has been left dangerously abandoned and orphaned by the Palestinian-focused, British-groomed Jordanian King who still fits more comfortably in the meeting halls of Davos than a tent near Aqaba.

To note, when a tribal member or group is abandoned in Arab society his life or existence is forfeited. When the Prophet Muhammad fled Mecca to Medina, since his uncle had to surrender his protection, it was understood by both Muhammad and the Meccan establishment as tantamount to a death sentence. One can only imagine what the Hejazi tribes today feel as they sense their abandonment by King Abdallah for his Palestinian allies. They are looking for a champion, and the Saudis — who reside over those same Hejazi tribes on their side of the border — anxiously look at King Abdallah’s failure and probably hope the tribes find a new patron, perhaps one attached to a strong horse like Israel.

So, it is possible Mansour Abbas as the most prominent champion right now of Bedouin interests threatens even King Abdallah. The UAE and the Saudis fears over the unhinged status of the Hejazi tribes by Jordan’s straying — who drifting abandoned could easily wander to a new patron hostile to Riyadh or Abu Dhabi, like Turkey — could be somewhat allayed by the success of Mansour Abbas among the Bedouin Arabs. The drift of the Negev Arabs was dangerously close to Hamas and to regional malefactors, particularly Turkey whose nemeses are Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It is dubious that Abdallah is shrewd enough at this point to realize this, but eventually he could see this as a threat.

In other words, the success of Mansour Abbas represents a catastrophe for powerful interests everywhere.

It is to be expected that interested parties, all of whom have the power to act, will in fact sabotage Mansour Abbas at all costs, the quickest and easiest route being escalation to violence or war.