King’s Death Rips a Hole in Clinton’s Mideast Policy

The death of Jordan’s King Hussein has rent a sizable hole in President Clinton’s foreign policy. His passing will end one of Clinton’s most productive relationships with a personally compatible head of state who could be relied on in times of crisis.

In October, for instance, with the Middle East peace talks at Maryland’s Wye Plantation deadlocked, Clinton summoned Hussein from his sickbed to deliver a pep talk that pushed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat toward an eventual agreement.

Throughout his six years in the White House, Clinton has relied on Hussein’s stature as the Middle East’s elder statesman to ease U.S. foreign policy over a number of rough spots. U.S. officials admit that it is difficult to tell where the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be if not for Hussein’s benign influence.

Officials also credit Hussein with keeping Jordan stable and friendly, fulfilling its historic role as a buffer state separating Israel from Iraq and Syria from the Arabian Peninsula.

Publicly, at least, Clinton administration officials say they expect Hussein’s successor, King Abdullah II, to continue his father’s policy. One senior official described Abdullah as “a chip off the old block,” a charming and charismatic leader with the potential to captivate Americans the same way Hussein did during much of his 47-year reign.

The 37-year-old new king, however, is untested politically. Just weeks ago, Abdullah, a career army officer and commander of the kingdom’s special forces, appeared to have no reasonable hope of ever ascending to the throne. But after King Hussein had groomed his own brother Hassan as his successor for three decades, he abruptly switched the line of succession last month, ousting Hassan and naming his eldest son crown prince.

“Jordan moves from the column of countries whose policy is clear and predictable to the column of countries which need care and husbanding on almost a daily basis,” said Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of a book on Jordan’s history. “That is an extra burden for U.S. diplomacy.

“In terms of peacemaking, Abdullah is a wild card,” Satloff said. Even if the new monarch has the same policy as his father, it is far from clear if he will have “the same level of cunning and guile and dexterity” in pursuing that policy.

Hussein and then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed a formal peace treaty in July 1994, making Jordan the second Arab country to take that step. But unlike Egypt, which has maintained a “cold peace” verging on hostility for more than 20 years, Hussein defied the consensus of Jordanian public opinion to offer a genuine hand of friendship to the Israelis.

“He made a warm peace with Israel and supported it over serious objections at home,” said former Rep. Wayne Owens (D-Utah), president of the Washington-based Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation. “The peace could not be less popular with the Jordanian Palestinians” who make up more than half the country’s population.

And public opinion counts in Jordan. Not as much as it does in a full-fledged democracy, of course, but far more than it does in many other authoritarian regimes. In recent years, Hussein sought to foster a political system extending beyond the palace, although he retained ultimate authority.

“There is a political establishment beyond the king which has made the country work,” said William B. Quandt, a former National Security Council Middle East expert. “Very few other Middle East countries have a similarly developed political class. There are political players who will keep the system going even if Abdullah turns out to be a lightweight.”

For U.S. policy, that is both good news and bad.

The upside is that Jordan is unlikely to collapse, meaning it will continue to survive as a moderate regime in a turbulent region. Moreover, Abdullah, whose special forces have fought almost nightly border skirmishes with the Iraqi army in recent months, is expected to be a staunch supporter of Washington’s policy of isolating Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The bad news is that Jordan under Abdullah could become far less effective as a U.S. ally in the Middle East peace process.

Hussein, who became Jordan’s ruler in 1952 at age 16, has always cut a dashing figure in the United States. But he was not always as popular in the White House as he was during the Clinton administration.

President Carter tried in vain to persuade Hussein to participate in the 1977 Camp David talks, which produced the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. If the Hashemite monarch had joined the process then, that might have started the ball rolling toward the sort of comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace that is still an unmet goal for U.S. policymakers.

But Hussein held back and joined the Arab leaders who ostracized Egypt for years.

President Reagan unveiled a peace plan in 1984 that envisioned a confederation between Jordan and the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Reagan’s plan relied on Jordan to finesse Israel’s adamant objection at the time to direct negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization. But Hussein refused to go along.

And President Bush broke with Hussein over the Persian Gulf War when the monarch opposed Washington’s use of force to drive Iraqi troops out of Kuwait.

“Hussein . . . made some mistakes in his day,” said Quandt, now a professor of government at the University of Virginia. “He lost the West Bank by joining the Arab war against Israel in 1967. He practically lost his kingdom in a civil war with the Palestinians in 1970. There have been moments when some of those decisions caused irritation in the West. But he was forgiven much more quickly than others would have been.”