Jordan Reassures Instead of Hedging: Stability Today, Risk Tomorrow
As of April 2026, Jordan’s stability-first messaging remains crystal clear. In the midst of the US–Israeli military campaign against Iran that began on 28 February and the subsequent wave of Iranian missile, drone, and allied retaliation across the region — including direct strikes on Gulf targets and Jordanian airspace intercepts — Amman has consistently defined the primary threats as Iranian aggression and the actions of Tehran-linked militias.
This includes its prompt condemnation, alongside Kuwait, of the reported Hezbollah-linked plot targeting Bahrain’s Interior Ministry and associated security services, announced by Bahraini authorities at the end of March. Jordan joined the six GCC states in a joint statement on 25 March explicitly condemning Iranian attacks (direct and via Iranian-aligned Iraqi militias), affirming the right to self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, and calling on Baghdad to rein in the militias.
What is conspicuously absent from these statements is any public acknowledgment that the current escalation was triggered by US–Israeli strikes and Iran’s own right to self-defense. That omission is the public face of a state that cannot afford to name the actors that underwrite its solvency.
Yet this messaging begins to look less like coherence and more like overextension when set against the diversity of actual Gulf responses. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have hardened their rhetoric against Tehran after taking direct hits but continue to signal interest in eventual de-escalation and economic reopening. Qatar maintains its mediator role while condemning strikes on its territory. Kuwait and Bahrain emphasize sovereignty defense without overcommitting to an open-ended alignment with any single bloc. Even now, amid shared exposure, Gulf states hedge — because they can absorb the cost of miscalculation. Jordan cannot. The difference is not strategic sophistication; it is the presence or absence of buffers.
Hedging is a luxury of the resource-rich
Jordan has no oil, no sovereign wealth fund, and an economy tethered to external rents. Its foreign reserves stand at approximately $28.2 billion as of the end of February 2026 — enough to cover nearly 10 months of imports of goods and services, a respectable buffer by international standards.
By the end of 2025, Jordan’s public debt reached about 82.8 percent of its economic output — a heavy burden. It is projected to hit around 92 percent by the end of 2026, which is dangerously high. The IMF is currently supporting Jordan with loan programs, but those come with tough conditions: Jordan must control spending, raise revenue, and avoid new debts. Saudi, Emirati, and European support arrives with expectations too — public alignment with their foreign policy, silence on sensitive regional issues, and continued cooperation with Israel’s security framework. In plain terms, the country is not collapsing, but it is on a downward trend with very little room to maneuver.
To speak of Jordan “hedging” toward China or Russia ignores structural reality. Neither offers a security guarantee, annual budget support, or a reliable market for Jordanian exports or labor. Chinese “Panda bonds” are no lifeline for a middle-income state with limited credit diversification. Jordan is playing the only hand it has.
The domestic dimension: alignment as regime stabilization
Jordan’s alignment is about both external threats and internal survival. The monarchy relies on U.S. aid, Gulf rents, and European grants to manage a delicate domestic coalition: East Banker tribal constituencies (the backbone of the security services), a Palestinian-origin majority estimated at over half the population — many still aspiring to return to lands forcibly seized by Israel — the professional security apparatus, and a contained Islamist opposition.
Opening doors to Iranian influence would alarm East Banker nationalists — the monarchy’s most reliable constituency. Iran is not simply another regional actor; it embodies a political model they view as corrosive to the Hashemite state, as it is to the Gulf monarchies — a world relieved of Western hegemony and Israeli domination, which threatens monarchies with little public legitimacy by offering an alternative source of political authority. Tehran’s support for Hamas and other Palestinian factions is read, fairly or not, as external empowerment of internal rivals. The memory of Black September still structures political reflexes; any foreign patron perceived as emboldening non-state actors triggers existential anxiety. East Banker identity remains tied to the Sunni Arab state order — and to Jordan’s alignment with the United States and Gulf monarchies. Even symbolic gestures toward Tehran would be interpreted as jeopardizing the very alliances that fund and protect the kingdom. In this domestic calculus, “Iranian influence” is a threat to the hierarchy that keeps the regime intact.
Voices like Jordanian commentator Abdelhamid al-Majali capture a growing strand of regional discourse that reframes the conflict as a clash of competing projects rather than as resistance versus occupation. In his formulation, Iran is a “political project cloaked in religious language,” no less dangerous than the Israeli one, with both intersecting in their impact on the region.
This framing reveals how sections of the Arab political and media field are reorganizing their threat hierarchy. By doing so, they ignore the asymmetry at the core of the conflict: one project is a settler-colonial state exercising ongoing military domination, while the other operates through networks of deterrence and alignment of non-state actors largely in response to that very expansionist order.
Collapsing the two into equivalence may reflect real Jordanian anxieties about Iranian influence, but it also reproduces a narrative that shifts attention away from the conditions that produced the so-called “axis” in the first place. A convergence of incentives motivates this rhetoric: dependence on U.S. security guarantees, Gulf financial support, and European aid flows discourages naming Israeli primacy; internal security logics that prioritize control over Islamist movements, armed factions, and politically mobilized networks within Jordan reinforce suspicion of non-state actors; and a media field calibrated through a mix of state oversight, licensing regimes, editorial red lines, and ownership structures — by government regulators, security institutions, and state-aligned proprietors — reproduces that framing.
In other words, the same alignment that creates Jordan’s long-term strategic vulnerability also underwrites short-to-medium-term regime stability. That is a deliberate trade-off, not a miscalculation.
The “Jordan is Palestine” risk: real but not deterministic
Jordan cannot ignore the Israeli far-right discourse — Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and others — that frames Jordan as the “alternative homeland” for Palestinians. February 2026 Israeli cabinet moves — registering vast West Bank land as state property for the first time since 1967 and easing settler purchases — have accelerated de-facto annexation trends. If the West Bank’s political horizon collapses entirely, pressure on Jordan would spike. This remains a genuine medium-term existential threat.
But the risk is not deterministic. Jordan has survived similar pressures before: Black September in 1970, the 1988 disengagement from the West Bank, the 1991 Gulf War, and successive waves of displacement. Its national identity is now far more institutionalized than in the 1970s. Displacement pressures from the West Bank — whether driven by annexation, the collapse of PA governance, intensified settler violence, or economic strangulation — would meet Jordanian societal resistance — not necessarily state-led, but broad and determined. Co-option mechanisms remain in place: parliamentary quotas that guarantee East Banker overrepresentation regardless of demographic reality; security-sector recruitment and promotion pipelines that reserve the most sensitive posts for East Banker tribes; and a dense patronage architecture — public-sector jobs, land allocations, subsidies, and wasta-mediated access to state services — that ties key constituencies materially to the monarchy. An “alternative homeland” scenario would not unfold smoothly; it would be contested, potentially violently. That does not eliminate the risk, but the path is not linear.
The trap, not the error
Jordan is not aligning with the wrong side of history out of stupidity. It is trapped. And the trap is tightening because Israeli policy — with U.S. acquiescence — is accelerating the very outcomes that Jordan’s entire post-1994 security framework was designed to contain: permanent Palestinian statelessness, territorial consolidation, and regional polarization. That framework — anchored in the 1994 treaty — was meant to contain these risks through a set of interlocking mechanisms: by tying normalization and security coordination to a political horizon of Palestinian statehood (via UN-based “land for peace” commitments); by stabilizing borders and preventing forced displacement eastward through recognized sovereignty and security cooperation; and by institutionalizing Jordan’s custodial role in Jerusalem’s holy sites to preserve its political and religious legitimacy. As those mechanisms are progressively hollowed out, the framework remains in place, but the conditions it was designed to manage are no longer being contained — they are being actively produced.
That bargain Jordan struck was simple: In exchange for formal peace, security coordination, and intelligence sharing, Amman secured three things: Israeli commitment (however implicit) to a two-state solution anchored in the West Bank; continued Hashemite custodianship over Jerusalem’s holy sites; and a stable border that prevented mass displacement eastward. The 1994 treaty explicitly reaffirmed Jordan’s “special role” in Jerusalem and committed both parties to negotiating a final settlement based on UN Security Council Resolution 242 — land for peace.
What Israeli policy is now doing, step by step, is voiding that bargain. Settlement expansion, legal moves toward annexation via land registration, routine incursions into Area A, and the systematic weakening of the Palestinian Authority have rendered a contiguous, sovereign Palestinian state functionally impossible. Meanwhile, far-right ministers openly float “Jordan is Palestine.” The United States has not reversed these actions; in many cases, it has normalized them. So Jordan finds itself still coordinating security and airspace with an Israeli government that is dismantling the very political horizon that made coordination legitimate in Amman’s eyes.
The 1994 treaty was always transactional. For Israel, it delivered a quiet eastern border. For Jordan, it bought time, aid, and stability. That logic worked for three decades. What is collapsing now is the utility of the transaction. The costs — strategic exposure, internal legitimacy strain, and eventual demographic pressure — are beginning to outweigh the benefits, even in Jordan’s own cold-eyed calculation.
To be clear, Jordan always knew Israel was not fully committed to Palestinian statehood. But it believed the status quo could be managed indefinitely. That belief is now breaking down under the weight of facts on the ground and the 2026 escalation.
Jordan’s continued integration with Israel — airspace coordination, intelligence sharing, border management, gas imports — delivers short-term benefits but increases its exposure to retaliatory action by Iran and aligned armed movements, to economic and energy disruptions if these linkages are targeted or severed, and to domestic legitimacy erosion as visible coordination with Israel deepens amid ongoing war and Palestinian dispossession.
It risks being seen by Iran and aligned armed movements — actors with their own agency — as a co-belligerent, without gaining meaningful influence over escalation. By consolidating its position within a single, increasingly volatile framework, Jordan limits its room to maneuver at the very moment when even resource-rich Gulf states find their hedging options narrowed by direct Iranian fire.
If the trajectory holds
If current trends converge — tighter external financing, sustained energy shocks from the Strait of Hormuz crisis, weaker Gulf inflows, declining tourism amid regional war, rising domestic strain, and any renewed refugee inflows from the West Bank — Jordan could face a severe systemic crisis. Fiscal stress, social pressure, and strategic exposure would reinforce one another.
In that scenario, alignment without hedging becomes progressively more costly. Jordan risks being locked into an outcome that undermines its own long-term stability. But calling this a “strategic error” misunderstands the structure. Jordan is not choosing poorly. It is choosing survival.
A more honest formulation is this: Jordan is running a calculated risk because it has no alternative. Whether that calculation holds depends on forces entirely outside its control — Israeli behavior, U.S. commitment, Gulf fiscal flows, U.S. restraint, and Iran’s responses. That is why Jordan looks less like a coherent actor and more like a state trying not to drown. In the end, Jordan remains a life raft in a sea it did not choose to sail — paddling with the only oar available.
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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher, and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
