Jordan’s Missing Plan for the Post-War Middle East

In late November 2023, seven weeks after Hamas’s 7 October terrorist attacks, I attended a private roundtable at the Jordanian Embassy in London. There, Ambassador Manar Dabbas discussed the unfolding regional catastrophe with the composure of someone reviewing the previous night’s football scores. Some 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, had been murdered; around 250 had been taken hostage into Gaza; and pro-terror rhetoric was spreading across the world. But at this juncture, Dabbas emphasised the importance of de-escalation and the need for Israeli restraint. With respect to Jordan’s position, he remarked: “We sometimes joke among ourselves that we are located between Iraq and a hard place.”

Nearly three years later, the truth of that phrase is becoming difficult to ignore. War has resumed between the United States and Iran following the collapse of their short-lived memorandum of understanding, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) conducts strikes across the Gulf. Israel and Lebanon, meanwhile, have made unprecedented diplomatic headway and agreed a framework for Hezbollah’s disarmament and IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Syria and Iraq are proactively taking steps to combat pro-Iran militias and cultivate closer ties with Washington. In Gaza, the US-backed Board of Peace is pressing for Hamas’s complete disarmament as the group dismantles its administrative apparatus. In Ramallah, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has scheduled legislative elections for 28 November. It is the first such vote planned in two decades. Amid the regional scramble to shape the “day after”, Jordan appears to be the only country without a plan of its own.

Jordan doesn’t have great borders. Over the past two decades, it has confronted a narcoterrorist threat along its northern frontier, driven in large part by Hezbollah-linked networks operating through Syria—a route finally disrupted by the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024. To the east, Jordan has repeatedly faced attacks from Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, including Kataib Hezbollah, and more recently from Iran itself. To the west lies the PA-controlled West Bank, where clandestine networks involved in arms smuggling and human trafficking via Jordan remain deeply entrenched. To the south, Saudi Arabia is Jordan’s only relatively stable neighbour, despite a history of rivalry between the two Arab kingdoms. At the 1974 Arab League summit in Rabat, Riyadh helped force King Hussein to recognise the PLO as the “sole representative of the Palestinian people”, effectively ending Jordan’s hopes of re-administering the West Bank following its crushing defeat by Israeli forces in 1967. Relations between the two kingdoms have grown stronger in recent years, and their strategic interests are now broadly aligned. But as I have argued in these pages, Saudi Arabia is confronting persistent fiscal strains and a general population shaped by decades of Islamist religious instruction.