In July 2021, the primary time that King Abdullah II of Jordan met with President Joseph R. Biden Jr., he was greeted warmly as a dependable American accomplice whose nation is a bulwark for safety within the Center East.
“You reside in a tricky neighborhood,” Mr. Biden said as they sat within the Oval Workplace.
The king, who will meet with President Trump on Tuesday, could discover Washington to be the harder neighborhood this time round.
Mr. Trump has reiterated his intention to expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip as a part of his plan for america to “personal” the territory, and on Monday he suggested he may contemplate slashing help to Jordan and Egypt if their governments refused to soak up an estimated 1.9 million Palestinians from Gaza.
Each Jordan and Egypt flatly rejected the concept when Mr. Trump first raised it final week, placing King Abdullah in a bind as he prepares to fulfill with the president.
Rebuffing Mr. Trump’s calls for may imperil the greater than $1.5 billion in international help that Jordan receives annually from america. A separate, labeled stream of American cash flows to Jordan’s intelligence companies.
On the similar time, greater than half of King Abdullah’s roughly 12 million topics are of Palestinian descent, and Center East consultants say that the survival of his household’s rule is dependent upon him digging in in opposition to Mr. Trump’s plan.
“King Abdullah can’t go together with it,” mentioned Paul Salem, the vp for worldwide engagement on the Center East Institute in Washington. “He can’t survive the concept that he’s colluding on the ethnic cleaning of Palestinians.”
“It’s existential for him and his authorities.”
King Abdullah can be anticipated to make use of his assembly with Mr. Trump to push in opposition to any makes an attempt by Israel to annex half or the entire West Financial institution, which far-right members of Israel’s authorities converse overtly about and a few of Mr. Trump’s appointees have long advocated. The West Financial institution sits immediately on Jordan’s border, and an Israeli transfer to take extra Palestinian land may result in violence and unrest that would spill into Jordan.
Jordan is already house to roughly 700,000 refugees, most of them Syrians who fled from that nation’s civil conflict.
Not like a few of its Center Japanese neighbors which are drowning in oil wealth, Jordan is closely reliant on American help. King Abdullah works exhausting to domesticate shut ties throughout the U.S. authorities, and makes it a degree to be the primary Arab chief to fulfill with each new president.
Jordan permits American troops entry to its navy bases, and for many years has acquired hundreds of thousands of {dollars} from the C.I.A. to help its intelligence companies — secret funds that started in the course of the reign of the present king’s father, King Hussein.
King Abdullah, who assumed the throne in 1999, is the longest at present serving chief within the Center East. Bruce Riedel, a former prime Center East analyst on the C.I.A., mentioned that the king is probably going to make use of his robust relationships with the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and Congress to attempt to advise the president {that a} U.S. takeover of the Gaza Strip and the expulsion of Palestinians is “a foul thought.”
The king met on Sunday with Pete Hegseth, the protection secretary, and Mr. Riedel says that Jordan “has a number of supporters on the Hill, together with a number of Republican supporters.”
Nonetheless, King Abdullah would possibly want to search out new patrons if Mr. Trump decides to chop funding to Jordan over its refusal to go together with his plan for Gaza. If this occurs, he would possibly discover keen donors within the governments of rich gulf international locations like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have additionally strongly opposed Mr. Trump’s plan for an American takeover of Gaza and expulsion of Palestinians from their land.
Mr. Salem believes that Mr. Trump’s greatest purpose within the Center East remains to be a grand deal that may contain Saudi Arabia formally recognizing Israel, one thing it will be extraordinarily unlikely to comply with if Mr. Trump follows by means of on his plans for Gaza.
The Saudi authorities has mentioned that there should be concrete steps towards an impartial Palestinian state earlier than the dominion considers normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel
Because of this, King Abdullah may have a little bit of leverage. He may attempt to persuade a mercurial American president to maintain his eyes on the bigger prize, and persuade him that Jordan is important to serving to him attain it.
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