Part VI: Should Jordan’s Neighbors and Allies Confront or Indulge Amman?

July 18, 2022

In previous parts, we reviewed Jordan’s current problematic behavior and the shift over the last years which that behavior represents not only vis a vis Israel but with respect to its other neighbors and geostrategic alignments. We also examined the foundations of the Jordanian state and the discouraging historical record of previous attempts to co-opt or preempt Arab and Palestinian nationalism. It emerges from these inquiries that Jordan and the problem of its policies reflect several much broader trends and questions concerning how the West, Israel and some of our other regional allies have traditionally understood the region and responded to it. Specifically, the unique tensions between the tribal and locally traditional structures of power, influence and access in Jordan – and even in Judea and Samaria – have faced a nearly two-century assault by external forces to upturn those traditional structures. Moreover, attempts to appease or co-opt those intrusions have only enflamed the situation and weakened calmer and stable structures.

Which brings us back to our original question: what does all this suggest to us regarding the right path to take in response to Jordan?

The choice

In the last five years, Jordan has crossed several red lines against Israel. And the pace is accelerating. It has dismissed Israeli (and Jewish) historical claims that touch upon the very foundation of Israeli and Jewish identity and interests. It has weakened Israel’s ability to control events in Jerusalem, which has led to a vacuum which radical forces are filling – the same mistake King Abdallah II’s father made in weakening the Hejazi tribal control in Judea and Samaria in 1957-1970, which let the PLO in. King Abdallah II has forced the further empowerment and vast expansion of the Waqf – the Islamic religious council in Jerusalem – at the same time that it has radicalized, restricted Christian and Jewish rights substantially over the last decades, and begun to provide safe haven for violent attack on Israel and Jews. Jordan also upheld the letter but damaged the spirit of peace by curtly demanding Israel return leased, farmed areas, such as Naharayim.

Not only have these policies failed to control incitement against Israel, but it has violated the peace treaty by itself inciting against Israel for violence and prolonging crises rather than calming them. Jordan also now harbors mass-murderers of Israelis and Americans (civilians and soldiers), such as the unrepentant Ahlam Tamimi, and gives terrorists who killed many Israeli children light sentences (Ahmad Daqamseh, who killed the schoolchildren at Naharayim). It balks not only at extraditing these criminals to either Israel or the US but fails to subject them to any sort of justice at all (they are given comfortable haven) in some cases. Ultimately, Amman has most recently escalated significantly by not only engaging in offensive, deliberately humiliating historical denial of any connection of the Jewish people to Jerusalem but is peddling position papers to regional powers and the United States that seek to reassert absolute Islamic control over Jewish and Christian holy sites in an attempt to turn the clock back to the Ottoman-era status quo of 1852.

Amman’s government-supported mouthpieces have descended the dark path to Holocaust denial and reopened not only the questions of 1967 – the dispensation of Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem – but the questions of 1948 – whether Israel should even exist.

Amman has also tempered its strong affiliation with the Western camp globally to support Russia in its latest Ukraine adventures. And it has acted against its Gulf Arab neighbors by trying to weaken, or even sabotage outright, the critically geo-strategic Abraham Accords in order to replace them with the three-decade failed and bloody Oslo process again. And Jordan has begun to set powerful tribal forces of the Hejaz adrift – which can also profoundly threaten the stability of the Saudi Kingdom — by shifting the foundations of the Jordan state in favor the Palestinians.

This parade of genuinely dangerous statements and actions by Jordan certainly raise the temptation by Israel, among some of Jordan’s neighbors, and even the United States to abandon their patience and indulgence of Jordanian noxious policies. Voices are multiplying that argue the time has come to finally draw red lines and demand from Amman a shift back to older foundations. Some have even suggested that perhaps the time has arrived to just cut Amman loose and outright abandon the constant effort to meet the incessant demands from Amman to help the Crown “save” itself at the cost of a pound of flesh, and then some, from Israel, Saudis, and even the West.

And yet, in Jordan’s defense, one must acknowledge that it is plagued by an impossible array of pressures (political, geo-strategic, economic and societal) and is forced to navigate a narrow bridge to survive. There is no indication that King Abdallah II holds any particular animus toward Israel or the Jews. His history, in fact, suggests he does not. The peace treaty with Israel — while fraying – more or less continues to hold. Geostrategic cooperation on keeping Iran and the eastern threats to the Levant at bay continue to both Israel’s and the West’s benefit. Jordan imperfectly but genuinely does try to keep its territory from becoming a free-flowing conduit of terrorist arms to Palestinians in Israel. The border with Jordan remains largely peaceful and prevents another front from emerging against Israel akin to what is happening on the Syrian and Lebanese borders. And while the Crown’s relations with the tribal structures underpinning the state are stressed, ominously simmering, and even rancorous, and while dangerous ideological trends appear to be filling the vacuum caused by the tribes being jilted in favor of new foundations being laid for the state, the Hejazi tribes remain, thus far, restricted in their growing opposition to letters and threats but have not erupted violently into a profound threat to both Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The lid on these problems may be rattling – indeed rattling menacingly — but it still sits atop the pot.

These considerations would countenance continued strategic patience and indulgence from the United States, the Gulf Arabs and Israel, if not even cooperation in helping Amman co-opt the dangerous undercurrents which could threaten Abdallah II’s regime by trying to preempt their underlying grievances (address their roots causes). In other words, despite aggravating policies pursued by Amman, Jordan’s collapse is a grave threat to be averted at all costs, not a solution to be sought. And if the price to pay to help Amman survive is to try to reignite the Oslo process at all costs, and at Israel’s expense, then there are those who would countenance that so be it. Larger interests are at stake.

So which is it: confront or indulge Amman?

For those who advocate the first path, the choice is simple: demand Jordan abandon its attempt to appease radical forces locally, regionally and globally, return to the outlook and grounding of the Hashemite state of his father after 1970, and deepen strategic cooperation between Amman, the United States, with the Saudis and Israel to manage rather than champion Palestinian-Arab radicalism, reestablish the importance of the traditional leadership of the tribes and re-anchor Jordan to them. If Amman refuses to do so, then strategically Amman has chosen an adversarial path which none of its neighbors needs to suffer or indulge, especially at their own expense, vital interests, and identity.

The downside, of course, is that the United States, Israel and Jordan’s neighbors would essentially be proactively surrendering on a peace treaty which as rickety as it may be, still more or less holds, at least for the moment.

The other route is more complex. Can indulgence save the crown? Again here, the historical record is quite instructive. It warrants further investigation since the attempt to indulge Amman – attached as it is if not to hopes for potential success then at least to the promise of avoiding further harm and danger – is grounded in two critical but unexamined assumptions: the very concept of a “Palestinian” issue and the usefulness of addressing ostensible “root causes:”

The specific construct in question here – the Palestinian issue – has traditionally served as an artificial cover for a much more dangerous and disruptive body of ideas: the destruction of traditional Arab society. Nor is this recent, but dates back at least a century and a half.
The historical record of attempts to co-opt or preempt radicalization by championing their ostensibly underlying grievances has consistently failed, not only in Palestine (land of Israel), but in Syria and Egypt as well.

As such, given the problematic nature of these two assumptions, the attempt to create a stabilizing and quiescent Palestinian nationalism may not only be impossible at this point, but the very effort to do so deepens the crisis.

In other words, the idea that indulging Jordan is only mildly harmful when balanced against the potential for saving the Crown and the peace might be wrong. The harm might not be as negligible as assumed, and indeed might accelerate the demise of Jordan as we know it.

What is the essence of the Palestinian national movement?

Palestinian Arab nationalism never was a movement organically emerging from indigenous communities of Judea and Samaria. It always had been instigated and dominated as a tool of external forces that sought to use the Palestinian issue as a dagger-bearing tentacle aimed at traditional Arab power structures and states. That was true regarding the interplay between the Ottoman Sultan and the local populations as it is regarding the interplay between Iran and local traditional forces. The Palestinian issue is the language of radicalism through which the inter-Arab, inter-Muslim or geopolitical rivalries are conducted.

Traditional forms of authority – much of which was tribal, some of which was urban but still largely clan-oriented – has for the better part of the last two centuries been besieged from forces seeking to either clip, suppress or altogether eliminate traditional forms of authority in the region. In Ottoman times, the internal exile of problematic Muslims from other parts of the Ottoman empire were transplanted to the Palestine province to challenge local power brokers whose fealty to the Sultan was increasingly dubious. The Tanzimat reforms largely attempted to rationalize and centralize authority in the empire, and this challenge to local authorities inevitably generated resentments. The Ottoman Sultan hoped that a dislodged community imposed over a hostile local population would owe its allegiance ultimately to the imperial power protecting it rather than the neighbors who bristle at the intrusion and subjugation.

Enter the British in World War I and its effort to turn besieged Arab tribes and clans against their Ottoman-imposed local representatives and instigate a revolt. The point of the meticulous intelligence work of Sir T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and Lady Gertrude Bell was to understand and navigate these traditional power structures who were becoming so frustrated with the pressures from Istanbul that their increasing alienation from the Sultan and their local allies could be turned as a useful asset to mobilize against the Ottoman Empire in the approaching war. It was no easy task since the fissures among tribes, and the law of tribal life, demanded great insight, empathy and acumen to manage properly and avoid simply instigating anarchy. For they knew that erasing Ottoman authority comes with a price, namely a vacuum. Filling that vacuum was a tricky affair, navigated somewhat well by the first team (Sir Reginal Wingate, Sir T.E. Lawrence, Lady Gertrude Bell, etc.), but not well at all by the follow-up replacement in the Levant and Egypt (Lord Herbert Samuel, Lord Alfred Millner).

But during and after World War I as the Ottoman empire collapsed, Lawrence’s and Bell’s efforts paid off and these traditional Arab and Muslim structures in Mandatory Palestine and elsewhere became the foundation of British power in the region. Which meant the German Kaiser and inter-war German intelligence – who hardly had reconciled to the permanence of British predominance — naturally settled on tapping into and expanding those forces in region that challenged that traditional power structure. They focused particularly those elements that had now been orphaned by the collapse of the Sultanate (the crown of the Ottoman Empire), or even the Khaliphate (the mantle of leader of the faithful). As such, the great power competition between Germany and Great Britain, and then between the West and the Soviet Union animated an upheaval wherein Germany (interwar and in World War II) and then the Soviet Union (post-War) was a battle of radical, externally encouraged forces laying siege to traditional power structures. And it has been an ongoing struggle over which the West, its foreign office elites and its local allies (Israel and Jordan) have often lost their focus, or even departed from its comprehension.

The reason for the enduring particular attraction of Palestinian Arabs to radical ideas, which has rendered them consistently the incubator of regional radical ideas, emerges from this founding and history. As the Hashemites in Jordan grew out of the British-mentored tribal Arab revolt against the Ottomans, and have thus ever since been aligned with occasional deviations with British and American strategic objectives, the Arab and Muslim nationalist movement (for they were not separate in the 1930s) emerged as a politically organized modern movement intertwined with the original German subversive networks between World Wars I and II, and then as part of the Nazi subversive networks during the war, of which Haj Amin al-Husseini and the Arabs of Palestine were the vanguard. Those networks never went away, but passed to Soviet control after World War II and then became loose cannons available to any movement radically challenging the reigning order and traditional political structures of the region.

In other words, until the mid-1960s, the anti-Zionist project in Palestine did not assume or refer to a unique Palestinian national character, but was really a concept embodying a radical, upheaval-seeking form of revolutionary politics. One need look no further than the leadership of the Arab Palestinian nationalist movement itself for confirmation of this. In in 1937, the founder of the pan-Arab nationalist Istiqlal party, Awni Bey Abd al-Hadi, who paralleled Hajamin al-Husseini’s radical pan-Islamic leadership of the Arabs in the area: “There is no such country as Palestine. Palestine is a Zionist term invented by Jews. Palestine is alien to us. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria”¹ He saw the Arabs of Palestine not as a unique people, but part of far broader Islamic or Arab entity, and politically – if the Arab nation were not unified into one – at least as part of the Syrian nation that was being formed.

Indeed, Abd al-Hadi’s political activity — including the reason for which he created the Istiqlal party — was animated primarily around an attack on the Nashishibi family – namely a revolutionary struggle against the most established and prominent Arab leadership.² His co-founders of the party were  Fahmi al-Abboushi, Mu’in al-Madi, Akram Zu’aytir, ‘Ajaj Nuwayhid, Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim, Subhi al-Khadra, and Salim Salamah – all of whom were the central leaders of the 1936-39 Arab revolt in Palestine. While ostensibly the revolt was about destroying the Jewish national endeavor and expelling the Arabs, it was a bloody orgy of killing against fellow Arabs as part of a purge of the traditional Arab leadership and suppression of their remnants into quiescence on behalf of pan-Arab nationalism.

As such, Abd al-Hadi’s real aim – as was his more Islamist equivalent, Hajamin al-Husseinei –was not Arab enfranchisement, but the diminution, indeed, defeat, of traditional grand Arab families/clans of Jerusalem, Samaria, Judea, Syria and the Trans-Jordanian Palestinian area. It is no wonder then that he spent most of the rest of his life in Egypt, with the exception of the five years before the 1958 upheaval in Jordan.

This rejection by the Arabs of Palestine themselves of a unique Palestinian peoplehood or nationality – and the use of their struggle as part of a pan-Arabist radical regional revolution against existing elites — persisted until quite recently, in fact. Hence the jolting assertion (in terms of today’s discourse) by a member of the PLO’s executive committee, Zahir Muhse’in, as late as 1977 to a Dutch newspaper, Trouw, that: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against Israel and for our Arab unity [italics mine]. In reality today, there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people.”³

But the 1960s were a time of change and geopolitical competitions answered also to a new Soviet overlord. The PLO was created by Nasser as a weapon internal to Arab politics to destabilize key traditional governments and as a weapon against traditional society, not as agent of peoplehood, and by the Soviet Union – using the model deliberately and in consultation with the Vietcong and French FLN – as part of a global strategy to tap into de-colonization to undermine the West’s containment and circumvent the stalemate it created in Europe globally to change the overall “international correlation of forces,” project a rising Marxist tide and crumbling Western world.⁴ The PLO’s employment of the concept of unique Palestinian peoplehood and championing of self-determination was thus only acquired in the following years (1970s onwards) by the Soviets, and was directed at doting self-flagellating Westerners. Indeed, not only did it become part of the overall Soviet national liberation ideological universe exploiting the West’s anti-colonial self-immolation emanating intellectually from Europe’s growing leftist fad of nihilism and existentialism thought developed by Franz Fanon, but it became one of the most important protection, training, logistical and ideologically-inculcating structures of that universe. The Palestine liberation cult assumed the leadership and umbrella structure of the hydra-like world of chic liberation guerilla movements.

In other words, Palestinian nationalism is not led by those who unwisely chose the wrong side of history; it was a creation of those forces. It is not plagued by radicalism; it is the embodiment of radicalism. It was always a means to assault the underlying power structures which even before World War I were seen as threats needing harnessing or erasing by the Ottoman Khaliph, and as a result naturally gravitated toward the British and then Americans.

The framers of the Oslo “peace” process had erroneously hoped that Palestinian nationalism could be domesticated. They imagined that Palestinianism was a bounded quest by local inhabitants for political enfranchisement and increasing autonomy. But, the record shows it was far from that either modest or introverted essence. Palestinian nationalism in fact is a movement inherently existing only as a vehicle for revolutionary struggle and radicalizing upheaval. Which is why every genuine attempt at granting the inhabitants of Judea and Samaria any “national” authority of any sort or any level of sovereignty descends instantly into a brutal assault on the local Arab population (and traditional Jordanian-aligned or tribal elites) – since that is the essence of the movement – and a perpetuation of conflict with Israel – since that is the validating cover of this eternal revolutionary upheaval – and a geopolitical alignment with the world’s global aggressive powers, since it was ultimately created and sustained by them. And it also why no matter what Jordan, Israel or the West try to do, Palestinian nationalism will inherently gravitate toward any regional ideology and geopolitical force advocating upheaval, revolution and the overturning of the traditional order of Arab society. And it is also why any great external power will see in the structure of Palestinian nationalism a ready and valuable asset. Taming Palestinian nationalism, or its Arab nationalist umbrella, is thus not only impossible, but dangerous.

Again, the very construct of a “Palestinian people” is really a recent vehicle (last 150 years) for the radical upturning of traditional Arab order, and thus the elites of Palestinian nationalism are inherently a revolutionary elite against traditional elites. But they cannot in their failed exhaustion moderate. The immense destruction wrought on Arab and Muslim society by this revolutionary clique not only was destined to fail but also to leave a vacuum in the wake of their failure that would be filled not with the reemerging traditional elites, but a parade of ever more violent, radical forces. In other words, there is no promise of a better future without a fundamental, bottom-up rebuilding of the Arab polity in in Judea and Samaria – an enterprise of generations, not months – to replace the amorphous vehicle of radical destruction, namely Palestinian nationalism, with normal politics based on local communities and the remnants of traditional leaderships (tribal, sectarian or clan) aligning in pursuit of introverted objectives of self-interest.

Moreover, it is unlikely that this can be done through independence and internally only, since the prejudice for radical solutions will continue to tempt and succeed. The Palestinian national project stands as the barrier to that evolution because it will be intentionally encouraged and dominated by any new radical ideology seeking to overturn the region since at its core, that has always been the purpose of that fantasy.

Since Palestinian nationalism did not choose to side with the wrong side of history, but rather was an integral part of it, will likely require an external overlay while local Palestinian Arab structures might evolve bottom-up and emerge over time into a self-sustaining and self-absorbed political body.

This is not to say that the populations of Judea and Samaria, and the non-tribal population of Jordan, should remain entirely disenfranchised and abjectly powerless. But what it does mean is that a new foundation of politics would need to be nourished based on restoring the residual tribal, clan, sectarian and familial power structures (inasmuch as they still exist) that had existed in the centuries prior to the last century of radical challenge and distortion of Arab society in the areas of Israel, Jordan and Palestine. While perhaps too distorted, a successful return to that structure of authority and order essentially returns the populations to an era prior to the rise of Arab nationalism and “Palestinian” identity – to before World War I – which was purposefully designed to embody any regional radical idea to challenge the presence of Western powers, undermine the Jordanian monarchy’s continuation, and destroy Israel. This, however, is the enterprise of generations, not years and even decades.

Until then, that political body will continue to be plagued by the domination of the latest regional radical challenges. And the PLO – whose weakness does not make it more moderate, just weaker – hasn’t the substance and following any more to compete in that marketplace of radical brutality. Its success in destroying the old elites, however, has also meant that there is no structure to which one can turn back easily to re-anchor Palestinian polity. That would have to be encouraged and resurrected from the bottom up, or with the help of the traditional elites in Jordan which the Jordanian Crown is abandoning at the moment.

The record of co-opting underlying grievances (root causes)

But could one perhaps at least address the underlying grievance that lent appeal to the radical sentiment so effectively captured by the Germans, the Soviets, Gamal Nasser, Rouholla Khomeini and Ghassan Soleimani, Tayyip Erdogan, and so forth? It is a question not only about policy toward Jordan, but the region more broadly. What fuels the rage, and what can be done to douse it?

There is a history of Western powers attempting to preempt radical challenges to the traditional order of things in the region by either co-opting their grievances directly or by including supposedly “moderate” forces which share with radicals their claim to grievance. Sadly, this history has a long, unbroken historical record of failure reaching back to the end of World War I. Indeed, not only did it fail, but it consistently increased, rather than decreased, the violence, intensity and currency of the radical challenge. And this is true in Palestine and Egypt, and in Syria and Iraq:

The efforts of Lord Samuel begot Haj-Amin al-Husseini, the Arab Revolt of 1929 and 1936 and the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood aligned with Hitler – and eventually the PLO.

The efforts of Lord Baring, the 1^st Earl of Cromer, and Lord Milner in Egypt begot Saad Zaghlul, the Wafd Party and his campaign of Egyptian unrest and assassination in the 1920s, followed by the rise of other radical pro-Nazi movements, and then Nasser and the pro-Soviet camp after World War II.
After the French conspired to oust Faisal, the son of the Hashemite Emir of Mecca in 1920, from Syria (the Hashemites briefly were given reign over Syria immediately after its capture by British troops in 1919), Paris courted radical Syrian nationalists by creating a unitary Syrian state, which was the underlying factor triggering the Syrian Revolt, starting with the revolt of the Druze.
The British White Paper of 1939 radicalized and stimulated rather than calmed Arab nationalism in Palestine.
Western attempts to appease Nasserite Arab nationalism in the mid-1950s led to the threat to Lebanon and Jordan by the end of the 1950s.
Jordanian King Hussein’s attempt to indulge the PLO led to Black September in September 1970.

In short, the historical record of attempts to appease radical sentiments by trying to co-opt their underlying grievances has an unbroken record of validating the grievance, inciting further rage, and more rapidly and thoroughly undermining the more conservative, calm traditional indigenous Arab leadership. And this record holds true for both Westerners and Arabs who have tried to employ this policy of co-opting radicalism.

Palestinian nationalism thus is not led by those who chose the wrong side of history; it was a creation of those forces. It was always a means to assault the underlying power structures which even before World War I were seen as threats needing harnessing or erasing by the Ottoman Khaliph, and as a result naturally gravitated toward the British and then Americans.

In other words, although the framers of Oslo had erroneously hoped that Palestinian nationalism was a bounded quest by local inhabitants for political enfranchisement and increasing autonomy, the record shows it was far from that either modest or introverted essence. Palestinian nationalism in fact is a movement inherently existing only as a vehicle for revolutionary struggle and radicalizing upheaval. Which is why every genuine attempt at granting the inhabitants of Judea and Samaria any “national” authority of any sort or any level of sovereignty descends instantly into a brutal assault on the Palestinian population (and traditional Jordanian-aligned or tribal elites) – since that is the essence of the movement – and a perpetuation of conflict with Israel – that is the validating cover of this eternal revolutionary upheaval. And it also why no matter what Jordan, Israel or the West try to do, Palestinian nationalism will inherently gravitate toward any regional ideology advocating upheaval, revolution and the overturning of the traditional order of Arab society. And it is also why any great external power will see in the structure of Palestinian nationalism a ready and valuable asset. Taming Palestinian nationalism, or its Arab nationalist umbrella, is thus a fool’s errand carrying dangerous consequences.

The king’s col de sac

For these two reasons – the toxic essence of Palestinian/Arab nationalism and the historical record of failed attempts to appease radicalizing trends by co-opting underlying grievances (root causes) – it is highly likely that King Abdullah II will eventually find himself at a dangerous impasse. His efforts to tame, harness and ultimately integrate Palestinian nationalism will not only fail catastrophically, but they will accelerate the mortal threat they pose to his realm.

As if that is bad and threatening enough, the real problem is that King Abdallah II has done so at the expense of the cultivating the solid foundation of Hejazi tribes upon which his reign ultimately rests and which might help him survive the tempest, as the evidence of the episode of the Huweitat tribe of 2017 (discussed in part IV) and the letter of criticism sent by tribal leaders in 2011 both demonstrate.

King Abdallah has not helped himself in this regard. Indeed, this is the one area he has demonstrated a bewildering cluelessness in is his insensitivity to the tribes – bewildering since its mastery was so crucial to the way his father had reigned and survived. As a preeminent historian of Jordanian history and politics, Asher Susser, noted in comparing the ways of King Hussein, the father, with King Abdallah II, the son:

“Hussein, since his youth, learnt the ways of the tribes through his intensive exposure to their values and traditions under the watchful eye of King Abdallah I, his dear grandfather and political mentor. Conversely, King Abdallah II’s upbringing did not include intimacy with tribal mores and politics, which were second nature to Hussein. Abdallah was even disrespectful at times towards tribal elders, whom he once dismissed impatiently as ‘dinosaurs.’“⁵

Dinosaurs are big. Offending them is dangerous. The depth of crisis in the monarchy between the King, the Hejazi tribes and the elements of the Hashemite family who remain popular among the tribes — and who fear for the survival of the state as currently constituted – has led by 2021 to something never before seen within Hashemite circles: the public criticism of the King by another close-in member of the royal family, Prince Hamza.

In April 21, 2021, Prince Hamza, whom King Hussein had on his death bed instructed become Crown Prince under King Abdallah II when he ascended the throne, was suddenly placed under house arrest. Some of his advisors and confidents were arrested, and one — Bassem Awadallah, who was also close to the Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MbS) — was arrested essentially for treason and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Upon his house arrest, Prince Hamza released a dramatic tape to social media with ominous undertones, suggesting he would likely disappear from visibility upon arrest. But he justified his actions as the voice of despair over the precipice over which he felt King Abdallah II was throwing the Kingdom. He echoed the tribes’ letter of 2011 by claiming he could no longer remain silent over the corruption and the Kingdom’s demise to which this would lead.

This was a serious moment, exposing the deepest roots of the structure undergirding the monarchy’s survival and essence. It was not just a sibling affair; that was only a vehicle for far more alarming forces at play. As described by Susser:

“The ‘Hamzah Affair’ was not just another spat in the family. It was an unprecedented clash of personalities and politics that might not be easily resolved. It represented a coalescence of forces between Jordan’s disaffected East Banker opposition and a spokesperson for their cause from the inner core of the royal family.”⁶

Moreover, the serious accusations against Bassem Awadallah – essentially suggesting he worked with a foreign country (which everyone assumed was Saudi Arabia given that Awadallah was seen as the closest Jordanian to the Saudi Kingdom) – raised the idea that this was the beginning, or perhaps initial planning, of an aborted coup attempt by the Saudis to change the direction of Jordan’s succession and alter the developing, new nature of the Hashemite monarchy. It had been long rumored that CP Muhammad bin Salman of Arabia held King Abdallah II of Jordan in low esteem.⁷ King Abdallah II’s dismissal of the importance of the Hejazi tribes was not only baffling in terms of Jordanian stability, but also represented an internal concern for the Saudis. The political stability of the Hejazi tribes – which King Abdallah II was cutting loose and adrift by re-anchoring his Kingdom – rattled Riyadh’s complicated control over the Hejazi areas of the Saudi Kingdom and presented a critically dangerous challenge that if left unaddressed, could even bring the Saud’s own stability into question.

Whether the Saudis were involved or not, and whether it was a coup attempt or not, it was clear that King Abdallah II saw Crown Prince Hamza as challenging his authority. He also understood that Prince Hamza governed the loyalty of the tribes with whom the King never had a common language and over whom the King was losing whatever residual loyalty he still held. In contrast, Prince Hamza, as his father King Hussein had been, was successfully among the tribes which King Abdallah II distinctly was not. As described by the regional correspondent of the Financial Times:

“[Prince Hamza’s] alleged pursuit of the tribes’ backing — two Jordanian officials describe it as the first stage of seeking their formal allegiance — struck at the very core of the legitimacy of King Abdullah’s reign. The tribal leaders who spoke to the Financial Times describe the king as distant, surrounded by a coterie of city-dwelling advisers and deaf to the suffering of his people.”⁸

In contrast, according to the Financial Times correspondent:

“Prince Hamzah, 41, has pursued a different track — making deep inroads into the far-flung and disaffected tribes that a century ago helped create what grew into the modern state of Jordan. Now a minority in their own country, some tribal leaders complain of being left behind, with their young people unemployed. In the prince, they found a sympathetic ear.”⁹

Susser was even more specific:

“Hamzah was popular, especially in the tribal hinterland of the south. In many respects, Hamzah was exactly what Abdallah was not. There was a striking physical resemblance between Hamzah and the revered late King Hussein. They looked alike and their voices and diction were almost identical. Hamzah was brought up in Jordan and interacted intimately with the tribes since his youth. He knew their ways and spoke the language as they did, in stark contrast to Abdallah’s foreign upbringing, his imperfect language, his cultural and mental distance and apparent disdain, at times, for tribal norms. As much as Abdallah was as an outsider, Hamzah was one of them and he had spent years building up a loyal base of support among the tribes.”¹⁰

The tensions between the tribes upon which the entire edifice of Jordanian survival is rooted and the Crown is showing no signs of improving. First of all, fate was not kind to King Abdallah. Internationally, a leak of 11.9 million documents of offshore accounts, knows as the Pandora Papers, implicated many leaders and elites of nations in maintaining secret wealth out of sight and reach to their countries’ people. King Abdallah appears glaringly in these:

“Last year, a massive leak of more than 11.9m confidential files revealed that between 2003 and 2017, the Jordanian king had amassed an international luxury property empire that includes 14 homes across the US and UK, from California to central London.”¹¹ 

The public perception of corruption thus continued to swell.

Then, or perhaps in part because of this, King Abdallah’s attempt to remove the thorn of Crown Prince Hamza by placing him under house arrest last year seems to have put little, if anything, to rest. Indeed, the King once again over the last months had to act against Crown Prince Hamza since the problem with him seems to only have grown. In March 2022, King Abdallah forced Prince Hamza to issue a rare public apology, in which the Crown Prince was forced to say:

“I have erred, Your Majesty, and to err is human. I, therefore, bear responsibility for the stances I have taken and the offences I have committed against Your Majesty and our country over the past years … I apologise to Your Majesty, to the people of Jordan, and to our family, for my actions which, God willing, will not be repeated,”¹² 

Apologies go only so far. Suppressing the unwanted hardly goes farther than even that since Prince Hamza himself is not really the problem. Prince Hamza’s apology might have been genuine or not, but it was irrelevant. The underlying reasons that lead to Hamza’s behavior and lends him currency are the font of the real problem bedeviling King Abdallah. Thus, these underlying trends will with certainty return to haunt the King.

Indeed, they have returned to haunt the King already scantly a month later. In a terse statement on April 3, Hamza renounced his title as crown prince – the first voluntary move as such in Jordanian history although it is reasonable to assume it was not as voluntary as publicly suggested. As if this sign of unresolved royal tensions was not bad enough, Prince Hamza left the stage with a parting, caustic slap at King Abdullah II and his policies:

“I have come to a conclusion that my personal conviction and principles my father (the late King Hussein) instilled in me are not in line with the path, directives and modern methods of our institutions…”¹³ 

In other words, former CP Hamza accused King Abdallah of betraying the legacy of his father and the foundations of State.

“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” Shakespeare wrote in Henry IV. And indeed, King Abdallah II appears to have purchased little respite. His troubles only mounted since last spring as the tribal opposition boils further over. In early July, the heads of all the major tribes gathered in Amman. Many of the large, key tribes upon which the Crown’s structure rests were all there: the Huweitat, Majali, Abadi, and Bani Hassan tribal heads. Angry over the increasing wave of arrests of their members, they criticized the King and ominously warned:

“There are many sons of officials who get jobs and are paid thousands of Jordanian dinars per month without any accountability. What they do is monitor political opponents, make their lives difficult, put pressure on their work, and prevent the right of assembly which is guaranteed by the constitution … Where is justice in the reign of the renaissance of King Abdullah II?”¹⁴

Bad enough indeed, but the crises over Prince Hamza and over the tribes are ever more converging into one and the same, meaning that the tribes were not only directing their anger at the King, but focusing their energy increasingly toward an alternative. As one tribal member near Amman described the image of Hamza among the tribal communities:

“It’s his way of talking, his modesty … [When Hamzah visited us] he came without guards or anything, he was just driving a truck … This is how the people of Jordan love their leaders.”¹⁵

Another tribesman from Madaba added:

“I like all of the Hashemite family [the Jordanian monarchy], but what I like about him [Hamzah] is that he’s very humble and he’s closer than the other princes and princesses to the citizens.”¹⁶

Troubles do indeed come in battalions, so in a very unusual and novel development, these voices of frustration managed to find media outlets. The press in Jordan has always been very tightly controlled, but it is precisely because of this that it is paradoxically not surprising that sentiments of frustration are finding their paths into the public. In order that journalists bend to the interests of the Hashemite state, it was inevitable that most of the journalist elites over the decades in Jordan are creatures of that very Hashemite state. But this means that they reflect and come from the very same traditional structures undergirding it – namely the tribes – that King Abdallah II is seeking to supplant. Dissing those who narrate your reign leads to bad press.

In response, the King now tries to suppress rather than address the problem. As Mohammad Ersan, the editor of two major Jordanian media outlets, said recently:

“The Jordanian authorities want to silence opposition voices and this is terrifying … Especially if you are an independent journalist – you worry every day that someone will knock on your door to arrest you.”¹⁷

And his colleague, Khalid Qudah, who is on the board of Jordan’s Press Association, chimed in:

“Our silence proved again that we are controlled, we work within a certain agenda, that we are not independent nor partial,”¹⁸

But like with his brother Prince Hamza and the tribes, the press in this case are mere vehicles to expose the problem. They were not the problem itself so their suppression only produces the lulling but misleading silence before eruption.

The King’s gambit goes bust

The real problem is that we are now seeing that all these forces – some of which are entirely of his own making, none of which King Abdallah is able to control, and many of which he cannot address by asking for help from traditional external because of the policies he has chosen – are converging to devour his crown:

The Iraqi tribes remain unsettled and a hotbed of Islamic radicalism.

The Palestinians, are radicalizing yet further despite, or indeed to some extent because of, King Abdallah’s misguided focus on undermining Israel’s control over Jerusalem and attempted replacement by the politically deceased PLO – a deadly combination which only creates a vacuum for Hamas and others, not for Jordan or the PLO, to fill.
The Hejazi tribes are drifting away – jilted, orphaned and increasingly vocal, and potentially threatening even to the Saudis if the drift continues; and
Parts of his own family are acting increasingly in despair over the precipice they feel the King is taking them.
He is increasingly offending even his own “controlled” press.

Unlike his father, King Abdallah has burned his bridges with the one sure-fire structure upon which his reign is built. Neither the US nor the PLO, nor even Israel, can replace the importance to his survival of the tribes he has discarded. And unlike the bitter lesson his father learned about Arab and Palestinian nationalism – there is no path to integration of it. Individuals can be integrated, but the Arab nationalist movement and its particular Palestinian manifestation cannot since its very purpose always was to overthrow the traditional order of things, beginning with challenging the tribes.

Moreover, the determination to continue down the shibboleth on which King Abdallah has strayed is amplified rather than discouraged by its key partners, Israel and the United States both in their own attempts to satiate Palestinian nationalism as well as in their efforts to try to help Amman co-opt and champion the Palestinian cause to avert the specter of its further radicalization.

For entirely understandable reasons, therefore, the Hashemite King has with the best of intentions embarked on a deadly path. And yet indulging him, either out of personal empathy or out of a strategic outlook, will only encourage him to travel further down this path. And that would only hasten his reign’s reckoning and make less likely its eventual survival through this reckoning.

Indulgence dooms the Crown

Is that it, then? Is the Jordanian Kingdom then doomed?

Perhaps, but Jordan’s weakness and instability is not pre-ordained. The real threat is in fact the self-inflicted wound, but that also means a change of course is within King Abdallah’s – or at least the Hashemite family’s — power, and if taken can perhaps still heal that wound.

But make no mistake; although out of good intentions, the Hashemite Kingdom has mis-stepped so gravely in the last five years that it threatens its own demise, the advanced signs of which we are seeing now in this crisis. And though also largely out of good intentions, the policies of the West and Israel, which alternate between encouraging that misstep and indulging Amman in patience, have only exacerbated the malaise.

In short, indulgence is not helping, but hurting. It hurts not only Jordan’s neighbors, but ultimately the Hashemites themselves.

To be sure, Jordan is a sovereign country that cannot be saved despite itself; the only path to Jordan’s survival lies in Amman – not Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Manama, Jerusalem or Washington. And yet, because this will have significant implications for the United States, Israel and the Gulf Arabs, it would be prudent for them to enter into quiet strategic discussions to stand ready to help Jordan change course, or if Amman is unwilling and disaster becomes inescapable, to contain the effects of its collapse.

Conclusions

The point of this series of essays was neither to denigrate Jordan nor to cast it and the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty away glibly. The peace has served both Israel and Jordan well for three decades, and there is little point in intentionally discarding it. The point is to warn that Jordan’s recent behaviors are symptoms born of a dangerous strategic miscalculation, which is partly of Jordan’s own making. And answering Jordan’s increasingly desperate situation by deepening its descent into the failed strategy which led to the despair is not only unwise but will help plunge Jordan even further into its crisis.

Already in 2016-7, the Jordanian Crown decided the foundation of Jordanian foreign policy lies in his championing of Arab, and particularly Palestinian, nationalism and integrating the Palestinian majority’s role into the core of Jordan’s identity more than in continuing to cultivate and protect the Jordanian state’s tribal Hejazi moorings. Jordan will fail in its efforts to indulge, co-opt and ride ideological challenges. And it will undermine Israeli and Saudi efforts to control the collateral damages caused by these policies as well because it has created two dangerous conditions:

It replaced the strong and focused Hejazi tribal foundations upon which the survival of his realm is based with an unsustainable and ultimately threatening Palestinian one.
It ceded Jordan’s vital role as strategic partner with Israel in managing the Palestinian issue and instead demoted Amman to being a mere vessel for Abu Mazen and his failed, irrelevant and illusory authority.

Since Abu Mazen hardly even commands the Mukatah compound, Jordan’s tethering to him created a vacuum of power over a role which Amman had previously filled but is now the subject of a scramble between Hamas, Turkey, and Iran to fill – especially the more Israel pulls back in deference to Jordan’s demands to further reduce the Jewish states’ profile.

In short, Jordan’s attempt to co-opt Palestinian radicalism will, as it traditionally always has, deepen its crises and most profoundly threaten the survival not of only the monarch, but of the very essence of what the Jordanian state is. Given the immense weakness Jordan faces already which has generated the despair that led to this miscalculation, it is quite possible that Jordan will be unable to survive it unless there is quite soon a dramatic change of policy by Amman and its neighbors…and then without guarantees.

Jordan’s policies not only fuel the violence rather than just being fueled by it, but they lead Jordan to starkly depart from its previously amicable relations with Israel and rattle the foundations of peace. Unfortunately, those policies are a more extensive embrace of a policy whose milder versions in the past have proven nearly fatal for Jordan. And the prospects are quite real that this far more extensive embrace of this strategy could likely lead to even worse results. Thus, prudence demands of its neighbors and allies to plan for such eventualities.

Looking ahead

The King of Jordan has reached a dangerous state of affairs in his realm. His regime is threatened, in large part because of grave mistakes he himself has made over the last years. Faced with an increasingly desperate circumstance, he has flung himself, royal prestige, and his family fully into the Palestinian issue to emerge as its champion and, he hopes, to navigate a path to survival through this.

Maybe he will succeed, and we should all hope for it, but if the past is any guide, he has taken several large steps to his regime’s demise. His plunge into the abyss of Palestinian politics is a darkness from which he more likely will not emerge. His father – who erred onto that path occasionally but certainly not as wholeheartedly (not even a fraction of it, in fact) – needed foreign intervention to survive. But assuming this time it is even something that is feasible, who exactly would come with military intervention to the King’s aid now? Jordan’s neighbors would be well-advised to pull back on their indulgence of his policies in as much as it weakens not only them and damages their own interests, but also undermines the Jordanian Crown.

Jordan needs to be strongly discouraged to engage in peace process fantasies and encouraged instead to return to the essential foundations that define the state structure, and that it understands that its fundamental role now has shifted away not only from championing the Palestinian Arabs but to understand that its primary purpose is to help stabilize the Hejazi tribal universe and isolate it from the threats from Tehran, Ankara and others. Sadly, because of its missteps, for the foreseeable future, Jordan’s role in any capacity to moderate, control or manage the Palestinian issue on behalf of itself or others has reached its end.

It would be irresponsible for Jordan’s neighbors and allies to ignore the very real problem that the current path of the monarchy could lead to its dissolution and create a stage upon which the region’s worst actors can play out their horrific conflicts in one of the most important strategic pieces of regional real estate.

These parameters, thus, suggest two things:

First, the assumptions underlying counseling patience and yielding to the strategic utility of indulging Amman in its increasingly provocative and hostile behavior are flawed. As such, it is not only futile, but also imprudent to indulge Jordan – especially if it weakens Israel and Saudi Arabia, and forfeits an opportunity to bring other states at peace with Israel into the equation — since it will not help, and indeed only enables Amman’s continued plunge into the abyss; and

Second, Jordan’s neighbors and allies should hope the monarchy navigates itself into safe haven, but plan for the worst and lay out a strategy and prepare foundations for stabilizing the Hejaz were that to happen. The area between Amman and Mecca – and the far-reaching implications of its potential instability — are far too important to continue to ignore.

Should Amman refuse or fail to restore its tribal moorings, however, it would be wise for its neighbors and allies to begin self-protectively to plan for the day after he does not pull it off and contemplate a world in which Jordan is either unstable, or worse.

The death of Shinzo Abe is a loss to the U.S. and its allies

July 08, 2022

This article first appeared in the Washington Post on July 8th, 2022. Click here to see the original article.

John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald Trump and is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

Shinzo Abe’s assassination was a brutal and completely unforeseen end to a life of public service to the people of Japan. The shock of his death will not dissipate quickly. He was a visionary leader, someone who believed his country was capable of taking a central, and responsible, role in international affairs. His loss will be deeply felt in part because he had more contributions to make.

Americans should appreciate how important Abe was for our nation. Over the past several decades, Japan had sought a role behind the historic memory of its part in initiating World War II and its conduct during that conflict. Abe agreed that Japan was right to believe, after this discreet but public soul-searching by his fellow citizens, that they lived in a “normal” country. And as with any “normal” country, Japan was legitimately entitled to defend its interests, especially in the hostile geography of Northeast Asia.

This Abe was determined to achieve, and he made giant steps toward reaching that once impossible goal.

Abe knew his country’s history well, but he could also see that it was time for Japan, and the rest of the world, to move beyond 1945. Germany had done so, forming a full military defense capacity (albeit one that has fallen into ill repair), and becoming a NATO member. Why shouldn’t Japan be able to do the same? And why shouldn’t the United States fully support Abe’s aspirations, not for Japan, but for ourselves and our other friends and allies in the Indo-Pacific and around the world?

I first met Abe in the early days of the George W. Bush administration, during a visit to Tokyo. At the suggestion of the U.S. Embassy, I had breakfast with Abe, then the deputy chief cabinet secretary and little known outside Japan. Our diplomats had tagged Abe, scion of a prominent political family, as a rising star, and so I found him to be, over 20 years ago.

He had focused on the threat of the North Korean nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs. As a Diet member, he made uncovering the fates of dozens of Japanese hostages kidnapped by Pyongyang a major campaign theme, demanding their safe return to their families, or at least a full accounting of what had happened to them. He never wavered from that goal. When he was assassinated, he was wearing the blue pin representing solidarity with the hostage families on his left lapel.

Through several U.S. administrations during his two stints as prime minister, and as a private citizen and political leader when not in office, Abe never tired of explaining to U.S. officials why they had to take the North Korea threat seriously. No one needed to convince Japan that Pyongyang was dangerous. Nonetheless, naive, ill-informed and obtuse leaders from more distant lands often needed to have the obvious explained to them.

I never saw Abe lose his sense of humor or his patience, as he tried repeatedly to stress why commitments made by various Kim dynasty leaders from the North shouldn’t be trusted. We could have used more of his wise warnings over the coming years. Now, that is not to be.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting in Nara, many instant commentators have said that Abe’s policies were “divisive” and “controversial.” That tells us more about the ideological biases of the commentators than about Abe himself.

He was prudent in his approach, meticulous in his planning (in politics and foreign policy) and resolutely calm in his demeanor. What distinguished him was the strength of his beliefs, despite adversity — adversity so intense that, in 2007, he resigned prematurely from his first term as prime minister, leaving the cognoscenti certain that his political career was over.

But Abe, who was as resolute as any politician in the contemporary democratic world, fought back. Five years later, he was reelected to lead Japan again and became its longest-serving prime minister. What really irritated his opponents were his successes, not his failures.

Abe’s international view is more important today than it ever was. He understood the long-term, indeed existential, threat posed by China, in all its spreading ramifications.

In the last years of his administration, Abe more than anyone else stressed the possibilities of a new constellation in Asia, the Quad: India, Australia, Japan and the United States. Initiated roughly 15 years ago but never developed effectively, Abe saw its potential, quietly pushing other Quad leaders to see what he did.

Especially as nations came to understand China’s role in the coronavirus pandemic, heads of governments in many Indo-Pacific countries intensified their search for more effective ways to constrain China, and they too see the Quad as an important building block.

We do not yet know the motives of Abe’s assassin. He might simply be a madman. But we should not let Abe’s tragic death obscure the permanent contribution he made to his country’s progress, or his friendship toward the United States.

The Case For American Leadership

June 27, 2022

This article first appeared in the Washington Examiner on June 27th, 2022. Click here to see the original article.

This week, President Joe Biden attends the G-7 summit in Germany and a NATO summit in Spain.

These meetings of the free world’s major economic powers and its paramount political-military alliance are particularly significant. America and its allies, seeking recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, have spent their way into dangerous inflation and the face grim prospect of an imminent recession. NATO is engaged in proxy military hostilities with Russia in Ukraine as Europe’s worst land war since 1945 grinds on, producing death, destruction, and global economic consequences. Looming above all else is China, the existential threat for the West’s foreseeable future.

In Henry Luce’s “American Century” (his 1941 aphorism), these diverse, menacing circumstances evoked calls for U.S. leadership to solve the West’s problems. Such calls still ring out today, but few seem to know what they mean. In the United States, the low-grade infection of isolationism persists, questioning why events in the wider world should concern us so much. Ironically, this skepticism is reinforced by reflexive demands for “leadership” that prize heading the parade without actually knowing where the parade is going. It is, therefore, entirely appropriate to consider what “American leadership” means and why we have it.

We should dispense first with the myth that from independence, America had an almost entirely domestic focus, emerging only reluctantly into international affairs in World War I. Hardly. Transforming 13 weak colonies into a transcontinental giant was no mere domestic affair, marked as it was by foreign conflicts — starting with the undeclared 1798-1800 Quasi-War with France and against Barbary pirates in 1801-1805, as well as huge territorial expansion, culminating in 1900 with U.S. control over distant lands such as Alaska, Hawaii, and the Philippines.

This is not the history of an insular, inward-looking people but the most successful and enduring expansion since ancient Rome. The immeasurable economic capabilities resulting from territorial growth, the flood of immigrants to America, and our determination to maintain free, constitutional, representative government, along with soaring trade, travel, and communications, created the basis on which modern U.S. leadership rests. Three hot wars in Europe in less than a century, starting with the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, followed by the Cold War, did the rest, decimating Europe and ending its global empires.

China’s empire is now the last one standing. Nostalgia for quieter times internationally has been out of date for at least a century. The issue today is whether to continue the way of life we now enjoy by acting in our own interests, together with friends and allies, to protect against common threats. It is a false choice to think we can turn away from the rest of the world and bear no consequences domestically for doing so. We exercise international leadership because we thereby better protect America’s interests, not because we feel charitable toward others. We can choose to abandon U.S. interests, as some advocate, but make no mistake: No one else will protect them for us. The absence of American global leadership produces not greater stability but either growing anarchy or the emergence of hostile powers seeking to advance their interests to our disadvantage.

President Biden should demonstrate this week that America is still capable of providing leadership to confront unprovoked aggression, whether from Russia or China; handle our economies responsibly, undistracted by fanciful economic theories and social ideologies; and strategize on global challenges ahead. Whether Biden is capable of so doing is entirely another question, and his record does not provide much confidence.

NATO is not as allied with Ukraine as the president’s rhetoric suggests; he apparently has no idea that heedless expansion of the money supply has created the inflation now endangering the global economy, and whether he understands the China threat remains to be seen. The real test of U.S. leadership lies not in international diplomatic theatrics, but in hard battles over seemingly mundane, often mind-numbing subjects like the federal budget. One such ongoing struggle is over the size of our defense budget, which has suffered for 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Lulled into spending the “peace dividend” in non-defense areas, the West’s ability to deter and resist growing global threats has not kept pace.

Even as domestic government spending needs drastic reductions to combat inflation, we also need a significant increase in defense capabilities across the full spectrum of military threats. The 2024 presidential contest has already begun. It is not too soon, during 2022’s congressional campaigns, to debate not just budget numbers but America’s place in the world and why our international leadership benefits us and our allies. Our greatest strength is not our political leaders but the people themselves. Treated like adults by politicians, we are fully capable of doing what is required to safeguard our way of life. Let’s see which candidates grasp that reality. There we will find the next president.

John Bolton was national security adviser to President Donald Trump between 2018 and 2019. Between 2005 and 2006, he was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

‘Degrade and Destroy’ Review: Illusions and the War on ISIS

June 13, 2022

A history of the struggle to defeat Islamic State in Iraq casts a cold light on America’s strategic decisions in the region.

This article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal on June 10th 2022. Click here to view the original article.

In what may be the final volume of a tetralogy covering U.S. activity in and around Iraq over the past three decades, Michael Gordon’s “Degrade and Destroy” combines Washington decision-making with battlefield reporting in ways that few other writers can manage. This account of America’s war against the Islamic State is Mr. Gordon’s first without co-author Bernard Trainor, who died in 2018, but it equals its forerunners in quality. While daily press reporting strains to draw overbroad conclusions from insufficient data, Mr. Gordon maximizes history and minimizes judgments. He presents his analysis, of course, but it’s always moored in reality. 

“Degrade and Destroy” is bracketed by two colossal presidential mistakes a decade apart: Barack Obama’s 2011 decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq and Joe Biden’s 2021 decision to do likewise in Afghanistan. They are proof, if proof were needed, of what Winston Churchill called “the confirmed unteachability of mankind.”

The unteachability starts with Mr. Obama, who told Mr. Gordon in 2007 that his personal engagement with Iran and Syria, coupled with America’s withdrawal from the region, would mean that “all these parties have an interest in figuring out: How do we adjust in a way that stabilizes the situation.” Mr. Gordon sees this view as “more of a projection of Washington’s hopes than a reflection of the hard realities in the region.” Mr. Obama’s words expressed his visceral opinion that America’s presence was the real problem—not the region’s long-standing animosities.

Mr. Obama confidently announced the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2011, saying that “the tide of war is receding.” Unhappily, no one told ISIS, which launched its war shortly thereafter, or Iran, which had never given up its war against the U.S. Mr. Obama remained unteachable asserting in 2014 that if Iran would “operate in a responsible fashion”—that is, if the regime would stop funding terrorists, stirring sectarian discontent and developing nuclear weapons—we might begin to “see an equilibrium developing between” Sunni and Shia. That same year he said “it’s time to turn the page” on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, adding arrogantly: “This is how wars end in the 21st century.” In 2017, he called on U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia “to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace” with Iran.

Mr. Obama’s deeply flawed views shaped policy toward the ISIS threat even as he tried to conceal his intentions. Thus in 2011, while advisers urged keeping at least a small U.S. force in Iraq, Mr. Obama insisted that extending the existing status of forces agreement, or SOFA, be approved by Iraq’s parliament—a political impossibility. He then used the inevitable failure to necessitate total withdrawal. Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, thought the White House was just going through the motions. “It was pretty obvious to me that their [troop] number was zero,” Mr. Mullen said of the administration. Retaining U.S. forces in Iraq would have given Washington “an earlier heads-up” on ISIS’s rise, as Mr. Gordon puts it, perhaps averting the subsequent war against the caliphate or at least reducing its scope. When things went wrong after the withdrawal, Mr. Obama fell to “blaming the military for chaos that had unfolded following . . . the decision to exit Iraq.”

When ISIS seized Mosul in 2014, not only did Mr. Obama “have a new crisis on his hands,” Mr. Gordon explains, “but his paradigm for ending the ‘forever wars’ had collapsed.” America was coming back to Iraq. Such was Mr. Obama’s plasticity, however, that returning U.S. troops were protected by a SOFA not approved by Iraq’s parliament—precisely what he had rejected in 2011. His administration hoped that “the media would not ask too many questions.”

Mr. Gordon makes quite clear how much of Mr. Obama’s 2011-14 blindness stemmed from his focus on Iran, specifically negotiating the 2015 nuclear deal. His anti-ISIS strategy was directly tied to Iraqi Shia militia groups under Tehran’s control, resulting in close encounters with the likes of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, now deceased. Mr. Obama repeatedly accepted risks that benefitted Iran, or he probed for closer coordination or joint action with the regime and its surrogates, blissfully unaware that Iran was already fighting the next, post-ISIS war against the U.S. and its allies to establish dominance across the Middle East. Mr. Obama was determined that degrading ISIS would not disturb closer relations with Iran. Mr. Biden follows this illusion today, seeking to revive the Iran nuclear deal.

Mr. Obama focused on public opinion rather than strategy and leadership, “the tail wagging the dog,” as Mr. Gordon and Bernard Trainor previously described it. (Mr. Biden does the same now.) Mr. Gordon writes that the pattern was persistent: “The White House was not trying to wage a war as much as manage one.” Mr. Obama invariably justified his actions “in the narrowest possible terms” or, fearing a negative public reaction, tried to reassure Americans “that the military’s intervention would be virtually cost-free.” The November 2015 terrorist attack on the Bataclan theater in Paris chilled Mr. Obama because it shredded his foundational misperception that ISIS was a “jayvee” terrorist group, not as threatening as core al Qaeda. He worried that further attacks would reaffirm the idea that the threat of terrorism persisted and that it would imperil his domestic agenda. 

Mr. Obama’s reaction was the antithesis of leadership and exhibited disdain for his fellow citizens. When the threat is sufficiently grave, and the leader candid and persuasive, Americans rise to the occasion. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy to say that they are tired of “forever wars” when their leaders never explain the threats and justify the necessary responses in the first place. Mr. Obama achieved the opposite of his stated intentions, not only failing to “end the endless wars” but working overtime to lull voters into the misapprehension that there were no longer real threats in the Middle East. 

Donald Trump elaborated Mr. Obama’s mistake. Mr. Biden compounded the errors of both in Afghanistan, saying that “we’ve turned the page,” even though his appointees later explained that America would soon again be under threat of terrorist attacks launched from Afghan territory.

Whether Mr. Gordon will have a fifth volume to write may depend on whether Mr. Biden revives the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Since 1991, U.S. military interventions in the Middle East have reversed Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait; overthrown Saddam Hussein, thereby terminating his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and attacks on neighbors; eliminated the ISIS territorial caliphate and degraded but did not destroy ISIS itself; protected Israel and our Arab allies; crushed the Taliban in Afghanistan and decimated al Qaeda, until we gratuitously allowed their return to power and Afghan sanctuaries; and had a decidedly mixed and incomplete record on countering Iran’s manifold threats. 

We could have done better, but it’s good to remember U.S. accomplishments—as Mr. Gordon has done here and elsewhere—if for no other reason than to prepare ourselves to deal with a growing list of threats around the world. The lesson of the Obama years, in any case, appears clear: Constantly underestimating both our adversaries and the capacity of the American people to rise to their own defense is a losing proposition. 

Mr. Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, served as national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019.

Beyond Weapons: Time For A New U.S. Strategy On Taiwan

June 05, 2022

This article first appeared in 19FortyFive on June 5th, 2022. Click here to read the original article.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the most recent, but far from only, incident highlighting Taiwan’s vulnerability to Chinese attack. Western assistance to Ukraine, particularly sharing intelligence, has contributed significantly to its defense, but the underlying failure of deterrence was tragic. Prior to Moscow’s attack, Washington and its allies lacked credibility, unity, and adequate appreciation for larger geostrategic issues. The consequences are evident daily.

China and Taiwan are watching closely, and debate has accelerated over the military capabilities Taipei needs to maximize deterrence and defense against Beijing. Unfortunately, as with Ukraine, this debate lacks a broader politico-military foundation, which threatens Taiwan whatever its military arsenal. Biden administration myopia is missing critical opportunities to strengthen not just Taiwan, but the entire Indo-Pacific’s resistance to Chinese belligerence.

For the United States, implementing more effective deterrence for Taiwan is not simply a tactical case study. “Defending” Taiwan (or whether it has the right weaponry) is far too narrow a politico-military framework. Taiwan is not some isolated problem, but a strategically critical component of an Indo-Pacific, indeed global, counter-China strategy. Nonetheless, too many still view Taipei as an irritant to Beijing, an unnecessary burden we are protecting.

This misperception persists despite fundamental changes in Taiwan. It is no longer just the “losing side” in China’s Communist-Nationalist civil war, but a functionally independent country that intends to remain so. Its successful, growing economy is critical to America and the world, and its robust democracy has no appetite for anschluss with China. These are not just fun facts, but are integral to Taipei’s strategic position and its relationship with Washington.

Given its dramatic social, political and economic changes since 1949, Taiwan has little doubt the “one China” concept, like “strategic ambiguity,” is past retirement age. Thirty years of surveys have asked residents how they identify themselves. Those identifying as “Taiwanese” rose from 18% to 62%; “Chinese” fell from 26% to 3%; “both Taiwanese and Chinese” fell from 46% to 32%; and non-responses fell from 11% to 3%. Taiwan’s people have rejected the Shanghai Communique language of “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait” as archaic. Perhaps more than any other reason, this is why “Taiwan” is Asia’s synonym for “Ukraine.”

President Biden has said three times that America would defend Taiwan if it were attacked, and three times his staff has tried to pretend he didn’t. Such confusion has not been limited to Taiwan. So, if Biden intended to reinforce “strategic ambiguity,” he and his administration have done a masterful job. In April, 2021, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines testified that:

“[if] we were to see a U.S. shift from strategic ambiguity…,to clarify our willingness to intervene in a Taiwan contingency, the Chinese would find this deeply destabilizing….It would solidify Chinese perceptions that the U.S. is bent on constraining China’s rise, including through military force, and would probably cause Beijing to aggressively undermine U.S. interests worldwide. That is our assessment.”

If Biden disagrees with Haines’s assessment, which counsels against a “shift from strategic ambiguity,” he needs to say so. Rather than press-question answers followed by cleanup patrols, Biden must speak comprehensively, bury “strategic ambiguity” unambiguously, and establish plainly that Washington sees Taipei as an ally. Being explicit would benefit both countries, and everyone in the Indo-Pacific who assess China’s menace similarly.

Enlarging Taipei’s military cooperation throughout the Indo-Pacific is today potentially the most effective way to break Beijing’s heavy-handed efforts to quarantine Taiwan politically. Deciding what military assets America should provide Taiwan is crucial, but the bigger picture is to interweave Taiwan into the emerging alliances and coalitions forming to deal with the Chinese threat. That would be real “integrated defense.” Taiwan’s critical geographic position in the “first island chain” between China and the broader Pacific alone explains why. Beyond the East China Sea, Taiwan has inherited territorial claims in the South China Sea; its air and naval assets could play vital roles, alongside other navies, ensuring freedom of navigation and refuting Beijing’s unfounded sovereignty claims across that critical space.

Many such duties for Taiwan come readily to mind. The recent Tokyo meeting of Quad heads of state (India, Japan, Australia, and the United States) launched the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA), an excellent initiative in which Taiwan could play a vital part. Intended to “build a faster, wider, and more accurate maritime picture of near-real-time activities in partners’ waters”, the IPMDA contemplates “immediate consultations” with others, which should obviously include Taiwan.

The AUKUS (Australia, UK, US) initiative to produce nuclear-powers submarines for Australia provides another template for mutual cooperation on sophisticated, interoperable defense capabilities in which Taiwan could be seamlessly integrated into larger Indo-Pacific coalitions. There is no imminent need, or potential, to have one comprehensive alliance structure like NATO, which itself grew and evolved over decades. But Taiwan should be a part in whatever steps are being taken in the Indo-Pacific.

It was, therefore, a significant disappointment, and a significant error, not to include Taipei in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), unveiled the same day as IPMDA. Taiwan (under the outdated name “Chinese Taipei”) is, after all a WTO member; it is manifestly insufficient to say the U.S. will continue enhancing bilateral economic relations with Taiwan as if that is a substitute for participation in initiatives like IPEF. If other IPEF members feared Beijing’s reaction to including

Taiwan, it shows they still gravely underestimate China’s threat, and will fear other necessary and appropriate steps in the near future. Such timidity augurs poorly for IPEF’s prospects.

Taiwan’s broader, entirely appropriate regional roles cannot be fulfilled merely with “defensive” weapons against potential Chinese amphibious assaults, whether in traditional or asymmetric capabilities, which Biden’s advisors are pressing. Their focus is too narrow. It undercuts effective U.S. regional strategy, including their own initiatives like IPMDA and IPEF. Properly providing for an expanded, coalition-based military role for Taiwan requires assigning responsibilities to coalition-of-the-willing members and equipping them accordingly. We will then have a realistic context to assess specific weapons systems that will assist not just Taiwan, but the larger regional program to counter Beijing’s belligerence.

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.

 Biden must stop the promiscuous publicizing of U.S. intelligence

May 25, 2022

This article appeared in The Washington Post on May 25th 2022. Click here to view the original article.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the Biden administration released substantial intelligence analyses about Russia’s capabilities and intentions, purportedly to deter the attack by making public the extent of U.S. knowledge about Vladimir Putin’s planning. Similar unprecedented revelations continued after hostilities commenced.

Neither President Biden’s intelligence releases nor his other deterrence efforts stopped the invasion. Nonetheless, his advisers and media acolytes, piling speculation upon speculation without concrete evidence, claimed that publicizing the information — rather than simply sharing it privately with allies — bought time and helped unite NATO. The media did precious little reporting of the costs involved or other possible motivations.

Publicly revealing sensitive intelligence makes sense when a president has clear objectives, a coherent strategy and, ultimately, when the revelations advance U.S. interests. That can be an aspect of intelligence statecraft: the use of data, analysis and advocacy to advance U.S. national-security objectives. But intelligence is a valuable commodity, often acquired at great cost and risk. Publicizing it promiscuously can endanger sources and methods. It can also prove counterproductive and embarrassing when inaccurate, and encourage the bureaucratic propensity to leak.

Does the Biden administration have a strategy, or did these scattershot efforts reflect larger failures in information statecraft?

Divergent bureaucratic, political and policy cultures disagree on publicizing intelligence. The State Department suffers from institutional logorrhea, whereas career intelligence personnel generally make “Silent Cal” Coolidge seem chatty. Some policymakers in the current executive branch, with roots in liberal academia, think tanks or politics, suffer from “mirror imaging”— the idea that “adversaries” are typically reasonable people just like us, ready to find common solutions to common problems. If only they had the same information we had, this view holds, they, too, would behave responsibly.

That doesn’t describe the worlds of Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. As Putin told me on more than one occasion: “You have your logic, we have ours; let’s see who prevails.” And even if Russia or China have superior information-warfare capabilities, releasing classified information shouldn’t be our knee-jerk response.

In this matter, Biden seems to be largely refighting his last war. The catastrophic strategic and operational failure of the United States’ humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan unnerved his administration — and made Biden look clueless. Contrary to Biden’s repeated assertions that Afghanistan’s government and military could withstand Taliban attacks, they swiftly collapsed. The White House response was contradictory and confused, utterly ineffective in stemming the flood of public criticism.

Seemingly determined to prevent renewed perceptions of incompetence, Biden’s team tried to show that, with Ukraine, unlike in Afghanistan, they were on top of events and knew what Russia was about. Nonetheless, its performance has been spotty and sometimes incautious, including revealing less-than-certain intelligence during the war. Biden had to contradict his advisers’ release of information indicating Putin was poorly briefed by timid subordinates. The administration’s hunger to disclose extended to foreshadowing, inaccurately, North Korean ICBM or nuclear tests before or during Biden’s now-completed Asia trip.

Even after Biden tried reining in “leaks” about the war in Ukraine, which amounted to bureaucratic boasts about agency successes, the deluge continued.

Most damaging were articles on U.S. information-sharing with Ukraine, which by explaining what was impermissible, told Russia exactly what we were sharing with Kyiv. Providing “kill chain” intelligence (information that directly facilitates attacking enemy forces) to a foreign military can place the United States in or very near combatant status. Publicly discussing it is risky business, especially considering Putin’s repeated threats, and Biden’s evident fear of doing anything possibly deemed “escalatory,” such as supplying Ukraine with Polish MiGs. Some “leaks” about such intelligence sharing indeed looked “defensive,” authorized anonymous conversations intended to protect the United States, but which were accidentally quite revealing.

What was inexplicably underreported and under-analyzed by the pro-Biden media is why the United States was so mistaken in its pre-invasion intelligence assessment that Russia would gain swift victory in Ukraine, with Kyiv falling in days and the entire country in weeks. Fearing sudden Russian successes, the administration leaked that it would support guerrilla operations afterward, presumably to deter Moscow from invading. A U.S. offer to provide Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky safe passage from Kyiv showed little confidence in his government’s survivability. You can be sure that China noted these intelligence failures carefully.

It is not just a coincidence that the intelligence and communications strategy mistakes in Ukraine echoed errors in Afghanistan. Now recognizing these failures, two major blunders hardly six months apart, the U.S. intelligence community is, quite rightly, reviewing its performance. They have much to do.

These patterns must change. Revitalizing the now-dilapidated Cold War legacy of effective U.S. international communications has supposedly been a national priority for decades. If Congress is looking for bipartisan reform projects, this one should be top of mind. Repeated congressional battles over organization charts and personnel — all self-inflicted wounds — have to stop. We knew how to do this once; try doing what worked 50 years ago.

John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald Trump and is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

Amb. John Bolton – Tensions with North Korea and Russia-Ukraine war still grinding on

May 22, 2022

This Interview first appeared on Cats Roundtable on May 22nd 2022. Click here to hear the original interview.

Biden must decide what ‘victory’ in Ukraine means — and if he’ll do what it takes to win it

May 05, 2022

This article appeared in The New York Post on May 5th 2022. Click here to view the original article.

President Joe Biden’s responses to Russia’s attack on Ukraine comprise a series of failures.

First, he failed to deter the invasion itself, the devastating consequences of which are unfolding daily. Second, US intelligence grossly overestimated Russia’s military competence, briefing Congress that Kyiv would fall in days and the whole country in weeks.

Third, US and allied assistance has repeatedly been behind the curve, with Ukraine saved primarily by its own soldiers’ grit and Russian military ineptitude.

Congress is nearing approval of $40 billion in new aid. Many now talk not merely of “saving” Ukraine but of “victory.” Of course, it would be helpful to know what we mean by that.

Without defining our objectives (and Ukraine’s) more precisely, we will remain in today’s semi-coherent muddle, even as we enter what Ukraine’s defense minister calls a “new, long phase of the war.”

Moscow’s unprovoked aggression launched a war primarily about territory. President Vladimir Putin and many Russians believe Ukraine and other Soviet territories were illegitimately sundered from the rodina, Mother Russia, and they want them back. Ukrainians, with equal passion and far more justification, want full sovereignty and territorial integrity, as mutually agreed among all Soviet republics when the USSR dissolved on Dec. 31, 1991.

Defining “victory” is becoming more urgent. Last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin asked Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to consider an immediate cease-fire, which Moscow undoubtedly saw as a sign of weakness. At a minimum, before negotiations start, we should know what we are negotiating for, which at the moment we do not.

Importantly, defining “victory,” or at least agreeing upon a common set of Ukrainian-NATO goals, is where allied unity is most likely to fracture irreparably.

Putin knows this for a certainty. The veneer of alliance unity, incessantly touted by the Biden administration and its media scriveners, already conceals enormous differences in the strategy and implementation of both economic sanctions and military assistance.

While acceptably resolving the conflict requires settling many contentious issues — Russian reparations and accountability and Russia’s post-conflict relations with the West to name a few — the major dispute is over territory and sovereignty. We can predict, as can Putin, that many of our “allies” will perform poorly during the negotiations. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, himself revealed that French President Emmanuel Macron pressured him last week to cede Ukrainian territory to Russia so Putin could save face. Zelensky, quite properly, refused.

The combatants’ opening positions are clear. Russia will insist on uti possidetis (roughly, “keep what you hold”), with each side maintaining control of the territories they respectively dominate on the day hostilities stop (whether by unilateral action or mutual cease-fire).

That will be the Kremlin’s position in any short-term cease-fire — and for the long term, in effect permanently. Indeed, this reality underlines why Russia will likely keep grinding away militarily, still hoping to increase the total territory seized since February 24.

Whatever the terms of any cease-fire, Ukraine will surely insist on quickly regaining sovereignty and territorial integrity over its borders as of the USSR’s dissolution, thus requiring Russia to withdraw both from areas seized since February and those taken in 2014, including Crimea. As of now, Zelensky sees no reason to accept anything less.

The United States should endorse Ukraine’s position, which is, indeed, what we have theoretically asserted since 2014. Implementing that position, however, implies that we provide weapons and intelligence assets not simply to stop Russian advances but to retake considerably more lost ground than Ukraine has achieved to date.

Yet it is far from clear that Biden believes in victory or accepts the necessary implications. He personally decided against transferring Polish MiGs to Ukraine, fearing that doing so would be “escalatory.” Ukrainian pilots, though, no longer want MiGs but American F-15s and F-16s and appropriate training. Is Biden prepared for that?

What happens in future negotiations is unknowable, but it would be a significant blow to American credibility globally to come as close as Ukraine has to defeating a superpower only to give away at the negotiating table what has been won at such a high cost on the battlefield. We do not have forever to make up our minds.

John Bolton was national security adviser to President Donald Trump, 2018-’19, and US ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-’06.

Reaganism Podcast: John Bolton on the Crisis in Kyiv

April 01, 2022

On this episode of Reaganism, recorded at our Reagan Institute Strategy meeting on February 24, John Bolton, former National Security Advisor and Ambassador to the United Nations discusses Russia’s military assault on Ukraine, the impact of Trump’s presidency on national security, and what America must do to strengthen our defense.

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