Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
We will not be intimidated into altering our position, Jordan's King Abdullah declared in November 2005 after three suicide bombers loyal to Al Qaeda in Iraq murdered 60 Jordanians in three hotels in Amman. Nor will we abandon our convictions or forfeit our role in the fight against terrorism in all its forms. During Abdullah's 25 year plus reign over his desert kingdom, he and his countrymen have faced numerous threats, both caused and ameliorated by the King's close ties to the West. The strategic importance of Jordan, its dependence on the United States and the unique character of Abdullah represent the through line of the most American king. Journalist Aaron Majid's absorbing and even handed assessment of the Jordanian monarch's tenure, the first full length biography of Abdullah Madjid's book, is the product of more than 100 interviews with ordinary and high ranking Jordanians, international diplomats and the King's confidants. Abdullah was born in 1962 to the beloved King Hussein, purportedly a descendant of Hashem, the great grandfather of the Prophet Muhammad, and an English woman named Antoinette Gardner reports conflict about how Hussein and Gardner met. According to one version of events, they met on the set of Lawrence of Arabia where Gardiner was working as an assistant. Majid reports that they met at an Amman palace party when her father was posted there. The Hashemite dynasty hailed from Hejaz in Arabia and it was awarded control over the landlocked oil free territory then known as Transjordan when the British mandate expired in the late 1940s. Wedged between Israel, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Jordan's population is largely divided between East Bankers, descendants of tribesmen who have lived in the territory for centuries, and West Bankers, Palestinians who fled the Arab wars against the Jewish state. The young prince was fortunate to grow up relatively free of royal obligations, as Hussein had named his own brother Hassan as heir apparent. This liberated Abdullah to study abroad, and at the age of 10, in the wake of the Black September campaign, when his father killed thousands of militants and expelled the Palestine Liberation Organization from the country, he decamped from the Eagle Brook School in western Massachusetts where he became the first Arab student. He graduated high school from nearby Deerfield Academy with an undistinguished academic record, but he had forged ties with American classmates and absorbed the best and worst of Yankee culture. Former U.S. ambassador to Amman Wesley Egan knew the prince as an adolescent and later noted, I don't think the young Abdullah put great stock in academic credentials or achievements. Hollywood executive Jerry Taylor once remarked, take away the title and the trappings and at the core, you have a Star Trek fan. Abdullah would later have a cameo in the series Voyager spin off. Abdullah then began military service, first in Britain and then at a training course for foreign and US Military personnel in Fort Knox, Kentucky. An American army officer who trained with the prince recalled that his colleague enjoyed visiting local watering holes and succumbed at times to other vices. It was fairly obvious that there had been some ladies involved, the officer told Majid. Abdullah also earned a certificate from Georgetown's storied School of Foreign Service, after which he returned home commanding various units in the Jordanian army until, in 1998, he ascended to the rank of major general. Around this time, his father named him crown Prince, spurning Hassan largely on the strength of Abdullah's lengthy military service. When Hussein died of cancer in February 1999, his son ascended the throne, where he was confronted by 25% unemployment and found himself occupying an uncertain perch in a stormy region in what would become perhaps the central motif of his reign. Abdullah immediately turned to the United States for support. The day after he took power, he met with President Clinton and then traveled to Washington a few months later to cement an infusion of US$300 million in aid. He would also become the first Arab leader to meet with Presidents Obama, Trump and Biden, and his personal charisma helped to ensure steadfast American support for his monarchy. In 2018, the Trump administration signed a five year memorandum of understanding providing over a billion US dollars in annual transfer. The Hashemite Kingdom, in turn, has proved to be a reliable and even indispensable partner to the United States, Israel, and the west in the global war on terror. We would be hard pressed to identify a bilateral counterterrorism relationship of high equality and with greater global reach than the one with Jordan, washington's ambassador to oman said in 2005. The Jordanian government has been effective in tracking suspected terrorists, disrupting plots and prosecuting perpetrators. Former CIA director Leon Panetta praised Abdullah for going out of his way to make sure that he maintained a good relationship with the agency. Abdullah's robust counterterrorism approach stems not only from his enduring instinct for survival but but also from a sincere desire to serve Jordanian national interests. For example, he vented justifiable personal and official FURY in early 2015 when ISIS abducted and then executed a Jordanian pilot. His plane crashed near Raqqa. A year later, after an ISIS suicide bomber detonated on the Jordanian Syrian border, killing seven people, the king vowed to respond with an iron fist. He once told an assembly of clerics that accusations of apostasy and the killing of Muslims in the name of Islam do not correspond to the principles and spirit of Islam, and Islam disavows them. The monarch has also fancied himself as something of a political and strategic prognosticator for the United States, although his record of predictions has been uneven. Once you go down the road of violence, he presciently told President Bush in the run up to the Iraq War of 2002, it is very, very difficult to control. As such, Abdallah won Plauditz for supporting the US Led war effort, but put himself on record as concerned about its ramifications. Less prophetically, he cautioned President Trump that moving the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would have dangerous repercussions for the stability and security of the region. Since then, numerous countries have followed suit, and the vaunted Arab street has remained quiet. Locally, Abdullah has clashed with hostile regimes and internal protesters alike. When the Arab spring erupted in 2011 in Hosni, Mubarak's authoritarian regime in Egypt was briefly supplanted by the Muslim Brotherhood. Shutters were audible from Oman to Washington. Former veteran diplomat Daniel Shapiro recalled that in 2011 the prospect of the Jordanian regime falling was so awful that nobody wanted to go there. Abdullah sought to walk a middle ground between the brutal crackdown on dissent imposed by the murderous Bashar Assad in neighboring Syria. Majid notes that he was the first Arab leader to publicly call for the tyrant to resign the supine inactivity of Mubarak. The king has also warned of Iranian ambitions to implant a hostile Shia Crescent ringing Jordan, calling Tehran's strategy very destabilizing and denigrating Ali Khamenei as not especially supreme. Statements like these have attracted support from Arab Gulf states, the leaders of which have praised them as very brave. More recently, he has taken to warning of a Muslim Brotherhood crescent developing in Turkey and Egypt, a not so veiled attack on Recep Tayyib Erdogan, the autocrat Islamist president of Turkey who has sheltered Hamas officials for many years. Abdullah's relations with Israel have been bumpy as he sought to vindicate what he regards as just Palestinian territorial claims while relying on Israeli intelligence and support to remain in power. I had the honour of knowing many people in the Israeli Defence Forces, he told ABC News months after assuming the throne, and called then Prime Minister Ehud Barak somebody I felt I could trust. Ehud Olmeir, one of Barak's successors, observed that the Jewish state's security cooperation with Jordan was greater than what Israel had with any country in the world. Maajid astutely notes that decades long quiescence along Israel's eastern border, the country's longest by far, has enabled Jerusalem to transfer troops to other flashpoints in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Lebanon at the same time. Like many inside and outside the Middle East, Abdullah eventually came to distrust and then detest Yasser Arafat. Less happily, Abdullah has remained a stalwart backer of Arafat's successor, Mahmud Abbas, the nonagenarian Palestinian leader currently serving year 21 of the four year term to which he was elected in 2005. Never quite as beloved as his father, Abdullah happily adopted some of his conceits, including occasionally traveling the country in civilian dress, variously disguised as a television producer and a taxicab driver, to solicit opinions from the man on the street about Jordanian economic and diplomatic affairs. He's also sought, with mixed success, to privatise his country's state run corporations and win the approval of international financial bodies. His attempts to liberalize the Jordanian political system, including by tolerating relatively mild popular protest, have mostly founded on the rocks of Islamist terrorism. In 2013 he expressed his hope that when my son becomes king, the system will be stabilized as a Western democracy with a constitutional monarchy. But by 2021, Freedom House still raided, the kingdom not free. Madjid attributes much of Abdullah's success to his west banker wife, Rania, whose Palestinian origins, according to longtime State Department hand Nicholas Burns, makes her a natural political asset and, even more important, has had a leveling influence on her husband. But Rania has occasionally also endangered his rule, as when she touched the third rail of Jordanian social politics by telling an Italian newspaper in 2007 that forcing women to wear the hijab violates the principles of Islam. Here, too, she was likely channeling her husband's sentiments. He would later label the Muslim Brotherhood a Masonic culture and a wolf in sheep's clothing. Majid's book, the Most American King suffers from an odd organizational structure that proceeds topically rather than chronologically, a format that forces the reader to jump around in time and never develops a clear narrative arc. The book could also have used some additional editing, as certain passages are repeated within and across chapters. But these flaws also reflect two persistent themes of Abdullah's somewhat haphazard 25 year tenure as it has lurched from crisis to crisis. Self preservation has required skillful improvisation and stalwart American support, while iterative cycles of internal dissent, diplomatic calamities and economic turmoil are punctuated by periods of serenity and calm. This, alas, seems to be the fate of Abdullah. His stewardship of his strategically critical country is perennially as turbulent as it is consequential. This was a review of the most American King Abdullah of Jordan by Aaron Majid, 243 pages, Universal Publishers, published in October 2025. This review was written by Michael M. Rosen and was published in Quillet on the 4th of February 2026. Michael M. Rosen is an attorney in Israel, a non resident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Like Silicon from Clay what Ancient Jewish Wisdom Teaches Us about AI. It was read by me, Zoe Booth. Thanks for listening.