By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The return of Donald Trump to the White House has thrown the Middle East, already in upheaval since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, into further crisis. Within weeks of taking office, Trump attempted to shutter USAID and to freeze foreign aid to all recipients but Israel and Egypt. In a February meeting with King Abdullah II and Crown Prince Hussein of Jordan, Trump floated his plan to “clear out” Gaza, take U.S. ownership of the strip, and “resettle” the entire Gazan population in neighboring Arab countries. Abdullah, with the backing of Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, immediately and emphatically shot down Trump’s proposal, defying Trump’s January assurance that Jordan was “going to do it” because the United States does “a lot for them.”

Jordan has long weathered external and internal wars, waves of refugees, unstable neighbors, and profound economic downturns, but this latest crisis might be existential. The United States is Jordan’s closest ally, but the Jordanian government, the country’s political opposition, and civil society reacted to Trump’s resettlement plan in a rare and furious unison, decrying any forced transfer of Palestinians to Jordan. Jordan’s relationship with the United States, however, has complicated the situation. Amman is now faced with the impossible task of standing up to Washington even as it continues to depend on it.

The Jordanian government has tended to comply with U.S. policy wishes even when they have been deeply unpopular with the Jordanian public, and unlike most of its Arab neighbors, it has a full peace treaty with Israel. But Jordanians’ concerted outrage makes any effort by the Trump administration to force the country to accept Gazan refugees a nonstarter. The United States should heed its loyal ally’s passionate pleas and avert disaster for Palestinians, Jordan, and the region.

 

Challenging the Alliance?

U.S. presidents and Jordanian kings have historically enjoyed warm relations, beginning with King Hussein’s first meeting in 1959 with U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower and continuing through King Abdullah’s reign today. Undergirding this almost 70-year bilateral alliance is Jordan’s carefully cultivated international reputation as a moderate state in an otherwise volatile region. In 2008, Marwan Muasher, Jordan’s former foreign minister, famously identified the kingdom as part of the “Arab center.” In 2001, Jordan agreed to the first free trade agreement between the United States and an Arab country, and it is one of the largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid. In addition to its relationships with the United States and other Western powers, it has maintained a full and formal peace treaty with Israel since 1994. Jordan and the United States also have an extensive history of cooperation in military and security affairs. In 2014, when a U.S.-led coalition began military operations against ISIS, Jordan hosted U.S. troops and served as a de facto forward operating base for the coalition.

This steady relationship has endured more or less uninterrupted with one partial exception: Trump’s first presidential term. Against Jordan’s wishes, in 2018, Trump cut funding for UNRWA, the main UN agency providing aid to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jordan itself. Although the United States’ official aid to and cooperation with Jordan continued unabated, many Jordanian officials felt that the Trump administration was no longer prioritizing the kingdom, turning instead toward a de facto alignment with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, as the administration pursued its main goal in the region, the Abraham Accords. 

Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election seemed to restore Jordan’s usual standing as a valuable U.S. ally. In 2022, Washington and Amman signed a memorandum of understanding that promised $1.45 billion in U.S. aid to the kingdom over seven years. But in the aftermath of October 7, as the Middle East crept closer toward regional war, Biden suspended UNRWA funding for a year. Trump’s return to the presidency has once again challenged the U.S.-Jordanian relationship, perplexing many Jordanian officials who expected Washington to show more sensitivity toward Amman’s regional interests and its domestic vulnerabilities.

 

The People, United

The Hashemite monarchy has viewed military and economic cooperation with the United States as vital to Jordanian national security. Jordan’s strong condemnation of Israel’s war in Gaza did represent a departure from its typically reserved rhetoric: the kingdom continually denounced Israeli bombing as excessive, highlighted the staggering civilian death toll, and consistently called for an immediate cease-fire. At an emergency Arab summit meeting in Cairo in October 2023, Abdullah condemned the bombings, calling them “a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law” and “a war crime.” At the same time, however, the Jordanian government’s actions remained in line with its commitments to the United States. When Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones against Israel in April 2024, Jordan helped shoot them down. Government officials, facing domestic backlash, argued that it was a matter of security and sovereignty, with Abdullah stating flatly that “Jordan will not be a battlefield for any party.”

But the country’s relationship with the United States is also subject to intense criticism within Jordan. Many in Jordan’s opposition movements have long believed that the kingdom’s connections to Washington undermine Jordanian sovereignty and security and render Jordan vulnerable to foreign coercion. The war in Gaza remobilized opposition movements, and despite the government’s official condemnations of Israel, protestors have continued to pressure it to dramatically change its policies. They demanded that Jordan abrogate its peace treaty and end its controversial gas deal with Israel, expel U.S. and other foreign troops from the kingdom, and cut off any supplies reaching Israel from across Jordanian territory as long as the war continued. The shooting down of the Iranian missiles in early 2024 prompted particular public anger, and pressure on the government only ramped up afterward. In Jordan’s September 2024 national parliamentary elections, centrist, conservative, and pro-regime parties and candidates secured most of the 138 parliamentary seats, but the opposition Islamic Action Front Party also did quite well, gaining 31 seats and a significant voice in the new parliament. As these opposition voices in parliament become louder and a reenergized civilian opposition comprising both secular and Islamist forces takes to the streets to demonstrate, the state will face real pushback against its foreign policy. But even if opposition forces differ with the state on a host of policy issues, a striking consensus has coalesced against the mass relocation of Palestinians from Gaza (and potentially the West Bank, as well).

 

No Other Land

Trump’s foreign policy decisions early in his second term have largely proved these critics right. Jordan was among the countries to whom the administration suspended aid, and Trump’s push for the transfer of more than two million Gazans to Egypt and Jordan has drawn the ire of not just the Jordanian public but the government as well. Just days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, a fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hamas finally took hold, temporarily halting the bombing and allowing humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. But instead of using the pause to bring calm to the region, the new administration immediately halted all foreign aid for 90 days, cut all funding to UNRWA, and attempted to eliminate USAID entirely.

The effect of the freezes was particularly catastrophic for Jordan; no country in the Middle East has relied more on USAID or UNRWA. The gutting of USAID will likely end hundreds of different aid and development projects in Jordan that support such essential services as public health, education, water access, local government, small businesses, and schools. It will also cripple the network of NGOs and U.S.-aid-linked state institutions that employs tens of thousands of Jordanians.

Trump’s casual talk about a “transfer” of the entire Palestinian population from Gaza compounded the initial shock and devastation. Both Egypt and Jordan immediately refused, and other Jordanian allies such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates soon backed their rejection of any forced transfer of Palestinians, which almost all Jordanians would see as ethnic cleansing. The United States’ Arab allies met in Cairo in March, and Egypt offered to lead an alternative postwar plan for Gaza that would involve no mass displacement of Palestinians. But the Trump administration has, at least so far, rejected the proposal out of hand. This capriciousness has confused Jordanian leadership, which has consistently supported a two-state solution in line with the United States’ decades-long position on the conflict, only to see it undercut by Trump’s plan, which, if pursued, would effectively render Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank a single state without Palestinians.

Although Trump may think he can strongarm a dependent ally, conditions in Jordan make the government’s participation in such a scheme impossible. Despite its weak economy and lack of natural resources, Jordan has already taken in waves of Palestinian refugees from 1948 onward, Iraqis fleeing the Gulf wars, and, after 2011, Syrian refugees fleeing civil war. The kingdom does not have the economic capacity to accept millions of Palestinian refugees. Any arrival of refugees would also upset what many Jordanians view as a fragile demographic balance between Palestinian Jordanians, whose roots originate west of the Jordan River, and East Bankers (or Transjordanians), whose roots lie east of the Jordan. Nativist hardliners, some of whom hold parliamentary seats or occupy key positions in Jordan’s intelligence and security services, view with suspicion any plan that could change the demographic status quo.

But even for the many Jordanians that reject this nativist nationalist narrative, the threat of mass relocation of Palestinian refugees to Jordan sounds disturbingly like what they have feared for decades: the so-called “Jordan option” championed on the Israeli far right, in which Israel attempts to “solve” the Palestinian issue at Jordan’s expense by forcing it to become the de facto Palestinian state. In Jordan, this project is known as the “alternative homeland” scenario. Jordanian officials have long considered it a red line. In January, Ahmad Safadi, Jordan’s speaker of the parliament, summarized the legislative body’s position: “No to displacement, no to an alternative homeland. Palestine belongs to Palestinians and Jordan belongs to Jordanians.” Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi further clarified the kingdom’s “unwavering stance … that Palestine belongs to the Palestinians, and their statehood must be realized on their national soil. This is the only way to achieve security and stability in the region.”

Jordan’s King Abdullah at the White House in Washington, D.C., February 2025

 

Distress Signal

No carrots that the United States could offer Jordan are likely to make accepting hundreds of thousands of Gazans economically or politically viable for the Jordanian government. Trump may be trying to get other actors in the Middle East to accept compromises by threatening a radical resettlement plan. Still, the threat itself destabilizes and alienates a key ally and increases pressure on the state to change its own policies and potentially distance itself from the United States—something Jordanian officials do not want to do. That Jordanian government officials, opposition activists, and everyday citizens are united in their opposition to Trump’s plan should make the United States reconsider its approach to both the Gaza plan and the aid freezes. This kind of unanimity is almost unheard of in Jordanian politics, and reflects the existential nature of the crisis.

Jordanians are used to warnings, usually overblown and often originating from outside the kingdom, that the country is on the brink. But the widespread panic and concerted opposition within Jordan suggest that the looming crisis is sui generis in its severity. The Trump administration’s proposals could hobble Jordan economically, socially, and politically, the reverberations of which would be felt throughout the region, including in Israel. It is not too late, however, for the United States to restore its prior aid commitments and, more importantly, cease its calls for the wholesale expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. The United States should listen to its ally. Given the decades of close relations between Washington and Amman, Jordan deserves to be heard.

 

 

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