The U.S.-Iran MOU and the Future of King Abdullah
Caught between Washington's exit and Prince Hamza's rise, the ultimate fate of the Hashemite monarch.
Several days ago, the world witnessed an event that would have been dismissed by most Western analysts, particularly those who pushed for the war with Iran, as a strategic impossibility: an unprecedented, direct bilateral memorandum between the United States and Iran. It was a temporary transactional agreement designed to reopen maritime shipping lanes and relieve the immediate economic pressures mounting on both Washington and Tehran.
Yet, this unprecedented memorandum immediately faced fierce bipartisan criticism. From the halls of Congress to the capitals of its regional allies, critics condemned the deal as an official abandonment of American security architecture. A concession that prioritized a short-term survival strategy over a regional order that was, until several days ago, considered non-negotiable.
Yet, for Washington, the decision to formalize the agreement was not a matter of choice, but rather a response to a strategic reality that made it clear that its regional policy was no longer sustainable: Washington simply lacked the economic or military capabilities to sustain an ongoing conflict.
Economically, the war was costing a billion and a half dollars a day at a time when the government was actively gutting public resources, including funds for education, health, and essential social needs. Furthermore, the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz had triggered a sharp rise in inflation at a time when the U.S. economy was being compounded by a $39 trillion national debt.
Militarily, the outcome was equally definitive, as the regional bases that once allowed the United States to project power were significantly compromised within the first three weeks of the conflict. By successfully penetrating regional air defense grids and destroying high-value assets, including more than three dozen various aircraft and one-third of the American THAAD systems globally, the Iranians had been able to eliminate the very architecture that guaranteed American hegemony in the region.
Politically, the damage was even more profound as the United States found itself, for the first time, virtually isolated on the global stage. Decades of military intervention, paired with a glaring double standard in its policy toward Israel, had stripped away American international support and exposed its behavior to global scrutiny.
Yet, this was not merely a loss of diplomatic capital but the total evaporation of the American triad of influence. By failing to secure the regional architecture militarily and proving unable to maintain the economic flow that fueled the status quo, Washington was effectively forced to forfeit its responsibility of defending the very regimes it had long pretended to protect. For the regimes in the region, which had staked their entire existence on the permanence of the American umbrella, finding themselves abandoned to a new, non-Arab-American-Israeli reality, left them exposed to forces they could no longer manage.
Nowhere was this more precarious than in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and its King, King Abdullah. For decades, the Kingdom functioned as a pro-Western anchor, held together by a sacred, unwritten covenant between the throne and the East Bank tribes, notably the Bani Hassan. A sacred covenant in which the tribes provided the military and domestic muscle to secure the Kingdom, while the monarchy guaranteed their economic protection and tribal status.
The U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, however, shattered this contract by destroying the two pillars that sustained the relationship between the monarchy and the tribes. By initiating a conflict that drew a massive Iranian response, the king effectively voided his primary responsibility to protect the soil from foreign-provoked chaos. Furthermore, with the Persian Gulf closed and the total halt of financial inflows, the monarchy also broke the economic pillar that sustained its commitment to the tribes. With both security and economic guarantees nullified, the covenant between the King and the tribes was effectively dead.
Seeing the state’s failure to maintain the covenant that had defined the tribes for more than a millennium, major tribal confederations, specifically the Bani Hassan, Bani Sakher, Howeitat, and Bani Ahmad, took direct, systematic actions designed to enforce the agreement.
They began by controlling the borders, which halted the transit of goods to Saudi Arabia and Israel, restricted access to electricity, water, and other vital utilities, and acted as the eyes and ears for Iranian interests along the Jordanian-Iraqi border. Effectively demonstrating to the King that the Palace’s authority was no longer absolute or accepted.
Consequently, the palace was unable to suppress tribal actions because the state’s security apparatus was not a monolith. Rather, two distinctive entities under the same system. One being, the Special Royal Guard, an elite force of 25,000 traditionally drawn from non-Arab minorities like the Circassians to ensure loyalty to the throne. The other, the Jordan Arab Army, made up of 115,000 soldiers who are the very sons of the tribes challenging the palace.
With the conventional military and state structure largely neutralized by its own tribal composition, the confederation began to galvanize around Prince Hamzah, King Abdullah’s half-brother and former Crown Prince. Bearing a remarkable resemblance to his father, the adored King Hussain, the tribes saw in Hamza a return to the soil and a restoration of the tribal pact that King Abdullah had squandered.
This pivot toward a legitimate successor, a direct challenge to the Palace’s fading authority, was strengthened and codified by the recent U.S.-Iran Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). For the tribes, who had long viewed the American military footprint as a foreign intrusion and a threat to their cultural and political status, the MOU ironically was not necessarily a setback but rather a profound vindication. It proved that King Abdullah had traded internal security for a Western security architecture that Washington had now actively abandoned.
Today, the Palace, once the impenetrable anchor of American influence in the region, is now tethered to a fading patron while attempting to navigate a relationship with a rising hegemon.
Consequently, King Abdullah finds himself standing at the end of an era where the path forward offers very little room for his survival. With both pillars of his rule, the American security umbrella and unequivocal tribal support, no longer in existence, the ultimate geopolitical question is no longer about the durability of the Hashemite throne, but rather, the fate of King Abdullah II himself.
Very interesting and useful piece.
The US and Israel have suffered a humiliating and catastrophic defeat that will have myriad consequences that will reverberate for months and years to come all around the world.
This was was an attempt to revert the relative decline of US imperialism as the world hegemon, reassert US domination over the Gulf Oil by imposing a pliant regime in Iran, restructure the Middle East under a local franchise dominated by Israel, a subjugated Iran and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf dictatorships. However, the biggest target was China.
Instead all those war aims have spectacularly failed and been turned into their opposites.
US imperialism will now face an accelerating decline, as every ruling class is recalculating its position vis-à-vis the US and everything else from the Middle East to Europe and Asia.
We will begin to see cracks emerge, as you report on Jordan, a loyal servant of US and European imperialism since the British colonialists invented the Hashemite fiction.
The stresses and impotent rage in the Gulf and Saudi dictatorships and societies will grow. We'll see how that develops.
And we see a growing historic crisis in Israel as the bloodthirsty Netanyahu regime has led Israel not to "greater Zionist glory" but to debacle. The level of crazed rage in Israel at Trump and the US is unprecedented.
Moreover, the crimes of Israel have led to widespread repudiation, isolation and hatred of Israel, promoting the greatest wave of antisemitism since the Holocaust. It is Israel that is the greatest threat to Jews everywhere.
Netanyahu has strategically weakened Israel. Unfortunately that does not translate into any advance for the Palestinians, and may in fact put them at greater peril. The Zionists may seek "revenge" in even worse attacks on the Palestinians.
The wounded and humiliated Zionist beast is a great danger right now to the Palestinians and Lebanese.
Your piece is a contribution to understanding this unfolding crisis of the undoing of the post-WWII order under US hegemony, now accelerating further.
I had one question that I omitted in my previous comment.
I understood that the Jordan Royal Guard Brigade was largely composed of soldiers from Jordan's major Transjordanian Bedouin tribes, who form the bedrock of the military's loyalist rank-and-file.
The Circassian population in Jordan is only about 100,000, which would make it impossible for them to make up a force of 25,000.
The Circassians are heavily integrated into the standard Jordanian Armed Forces, with individual Circassian officers for deeply sensitive, high-trust roles, such as serving as the King's personal military advisors, chief of staff, or directors of public security, as well as top leadership positions at the General Intelligence Directorate (GID)—the regime's security and espionage agency.
The symbolic 14-man Circassian Guard serves primarily inside Basman Palace and Raghadan Palace in Amman. They greet visiting heads of state, line the corridors during official ceremonies, and accompany the King or Crown Prince during major palace events.
Certainly as you stated the tribal distribution of the Jordanian armed forces is one of the characteristics of the Hashemite dictatorship. The Bani Hassan and Bani Khalid in the borders, and Bani Sakhr and Howeitat as the the most historically prominent military tribes, who have traditionally staffed the heavy combat units, including the armored brigades and infantry battalions.
All this tribal poison was intentionally engineered as tools of colonialism in the 1930s by the British to weaken the development of Arab societies. British commander John Bagot Glubb restructured the Arab Legion—the predecessor to the modern Jordanian army—by recruiting Bedouins along tribal lines into the "Desert Patrol" to serve as loyalty directly toward the puppet Hashemite "Crown." Everywhere the European colonialists poisoned and divided Arab societies by prolonging the rule of pre-capitalist sheiks, clans and tribes which poison and weaken Arab societies and national identity to this day.
Since these tribal, clan, religious, ethnic factions severely undercut class consciousness of the working class they have been perpetuated by the native capitalist heirs to colonialism with devastating consequences as we see in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Algeria Sudan, and the Gulf and Saudi dictatorships.
The continued reliance on Balkanized tribal rule by the stunted Arab regimes from Libya to Iraq and Jordan, is yet more evidence of the truncated and deformed development of capitalism in the Arab world, and dangerous time bombs.
That is what we saw happen in Libya, where Gaddafi had cultivated tribalism and the reactionary Sheiks for decades as a divide-and-rule policy. But then that clan-tribal tool exploded in his face and brought down the regime.
That was also part of the devastating civil war in Syria against the reactionary Assad dictatorship, dependent on using the divisions of religious, ethnic and tribal to weaken opposition over decades -- until it exploded. Even today these poisonous divisions endlessly tear apart Syrian society.
Perhaps these reactionary tools of rule for the twisted monarchical dictatorships will also explode now in Jordan and elsewhere as the stresses grow.