Jordan’s New King Wants Role in Peace Negotiations

King Abdullah II, Jordan’s new monarch, told President Clinton on Tuesday that he is determined to step into the role played so effectively by his late father, King Hussein, as catalyst in the troubled Mideast peace process.

Clinton, who hopes to revive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations after the election of Ehud Barak as Israel’s prime minister, welcomed Abdullah’s offer of help, administration officials said. One senior official said the king, on the throne since February, has already shown his mettle as an emerging statesman.

Clinton, whose relationship with outgoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been frosty in the last three years, said Barak, a retired general and Israel’s most decorated soldier, is in a position to engage in give-and-take negotiations with Palestinian leaders because his “devotion to the security of Israel is not in question.”

With Abdullah at his side before a meeting at the White House, Clinton said that if Barak needs help in making peace with the Palestinians, and perhaps also the Syrians, “I think we’re certainly both willing to do it, and we’re hopeful that we’ll have a chance to do so.”

Last year, when Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat deadlocked in U.S.-mediated peace talks at Wye Plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Clinton called on Hussein to leave his sickbed to break the impasse. With a nudge from the monarch, critically ill with cancer, the Israeli and Palestinian leaders signed an agreement calling for Israel to give the Palestinians at least partial control over an additional 13% of the West Bank in exchange for renewed pledges to combat terrorism against Israeli targets.

Implementation of the Wye accords stalled during the Israeli election campaign. U.S. officials called on Barak to complete the Israeli withdrawal as soon as possible and move on to crucial talks about a permanent peace agreement.

Abdullah, who recently visited Damascus, brought Clinton a message from Syrian President Hafez Assad, who indicated that he is ready for peace talks with Barak. Negotiations between the Israelis and the Syrians, which showed some promise when former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres was in office, did not even occur during Netanyahu’s tenure.

Although most Israeli prime ministers have tried to negotiate with their Arab adversaries one at a time, Barak has signaled his intention to pursue both the Palestinian and Syrian tracks if the Arab parties are willing to talk.

A senior U.S. official agreed with that approach. “I don’t think we should look at this as a zero-sum game in which one track moves at the expense of the other,” he said.

Abdullah’s emerging role as Israeli-Arab go-between is a pleasant surprise to U.S. officials. Hussein picked Abdullah as his successor days before his death, upsetting a plan in which Hussein’s brother was king-in-waiting. At the time of his selection in January, Abdullah, 37, was a career army officer with little international experience.

Asked if the new monarch was up to the task of high-stakes diplomacy, a senior administration official said, “I think it is the universal sense on the American side that the king has already grown in office.”