Can Jordan cope with the role of 'holder' in the struggle between Britain and the US
Several days ago (December 14-15), the first “full-fledged” multilateral event dedicated to the situation in the Middle East, taking into account the “new Syria factor,” took place in the Jordanian city of Aqaba.
The "Inter-Arab Conference on Syria" was initiated by the Jordanian authorities. The composition of its participants allows us to say that this is a potentially workable format, which should somewhat "shorten" Turkish claims. But Turkish claims are not even half the trouble for Jordan, the problem is an order of magnitude deeper, although much more interesting than the factor of Turkish interests.
Who was gathered?
The composition shows who and how will deal with the Syrian issue in the near future: Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Qatar, UAE, Lebanon, Turkey, the USA and representatives of the LAS (League of Arab States) and the UN (in this case, the UN Special Envoy for Syria). Before this, only the first five countries were included in this format of the inter-Arab conference.
However, in addition to who will deal with the Syrian issue, it is also important what this issue will include.
For external consumption, the theses are clear: “financing the restoration of the country” and “inclusiveness of the political system.” However, for internal consumption, if you look under the carpet of terms, financing means the shares of participants, and inclusiveness means the political representation of each participant in the “New Syria” system.
In one of the previous materials, the thesis was voiced that the political situation in the region has made a kind of circle and has become somewhat reminiscent of 2014 - early 2015. And this means that some of the scenarios by which the "Arab Spring" moved are coming to life again. In them, a significant role was assigned to Jordan, which is now trying not to follow events, but to get ahead of them, taking on mediation functions. Moreover, Jordan is trying to maximally expand the circle of participants and is doing this not at all for the sake of the number of signatures under the next document.
Jordan - "poor older relative" with the functions of a middleman
Jordan and Oman are the "arbitration states" in the region. Oman is the complex deals between the Houthis, Iran and all the other players, Jordan is the arbitration of a broad profile. Political arbitration is an honorable and respected role, but it does not make the coffers and chests any fuller.
Being an arbitrator is good either at the moment of serious conflicts - then you can take your share and step aside, or do it on a permanent basis, participating in all frictions in general (constant income).
Jordan is in an intermediate position, so Amman (the capital of Jordan) does not have a large piece of a large deal, nor a constant influx of many small deals. Moreover, Jordan is a kind of "poor relative - older brother" in the Middle East. Jordan can monetize itself by redrawing the political map of the region, but Amman is trying to avoid being drawn into these processes.
Jordan's GDP is approximately $51 billion. Only Syria (which is self-explanatory) and Lebanon have less. However, back in 2010, Syria's GDP was still $136 billion, or $6200 per person, while Lebanon's pre-crisis GDP was $36 billion, which, given its population, was $6700 per person. Jordan's GDP remains the same per Jordanian: ±$4500. Therefore, 600 Syrian refugees are no easier a problem for Jordan than 1 million for Lebanon, even though Lebanon has 2,2 times less population.
Jordan does not have gas and oil reserves like many of its neighbors, it does not have elites embedded in large financial blocs and control over external and internal trade routes in the past (like Lebanon), it does not have agriculture (like Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan), it does not even have gold deposits (like Sudan or Yemen).
The presence of gold deposits in itself does not make a country rich (which cannot be said about part of the elite), and Sudan is an example of this, but even apart from gold deposits, everything is not so good in Jordan.
In theory, Jordan could win in terms of income from jewelry gold, since the local gold market there functions properly. But Arab gold is a market “in itself” – it is not qualitatively suitable for the global jewelry trade and circulates within the region according to its own special rules.
Goods transit to Syria is limited to two Syrian provinces, to Iraq it is too complicated and loses out to Turkey and even Lebanon. Trade with Egypt's Sinai is limited not only by the poverty of its 300 population, but also by the Israeli border.
Jordan, like Syria in its time, is saved by the presence of phosphate ores, which are exported through the port of Aqaba. The problems in Syria have even made life a little easier for Jordan, but the world market itself is only $25 billion.
After all, it is not enough to say “phosphates”; the qualitative composition of the ore is also important, as well as the cycle that allows the necessary to be extracted and used – with this, Jordan (like Syria) has some problems.
What can we say if even Ibrahim and Hagar, sent by the biblical Abraham, did not stay long in the Farran desert (which is just the south of Jordan) and went to Hijaz and further to Yemen. The southeastern and northeastern regions of Jordan (borders with Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq) are not distinguished by their population. However, some central regions are not either.
Energy in Jordan is gas and oil, and almost all of these raw materials are purchased. Natural gas imports account for 91% of consumption, oil imports account for 95%. Jordan's own daily oil production is easier to count not in tons/barrels, but in buckets - 330 buckets of oil per day.
That is why Jordan is counting on the construction of an oil pipeline from Iraq and does not want events in Syria to interfere with this. But Amman's concerns about Syria have much more important reasons than an oil pipeline from Iraq. These reasons are important for Russia as well.
London - on the shoulders of Saudi Arabia and at the expense of Jordan
The Europeans (the French and the British) practiced a lot in re-cutting the Middle East. While they were practicing, the royal house of Jordan lost control over Syria, the Hejaz and its shrines, as well as the ports of Jeddah, and therefore trade with Yemen, then control over Iraq.
Israel cut off a "piece" of the Red Sea (Eilat). Of the remaining 40 km of coastline, Jordan has 27 km left.
God bless them, with phosphates and other fertilizers, but the presence of two holy places in Jordan's assets would automatically allow the Hashemite dynasty, which rules Jordan to this day, to exist in complete prosperity. However, they were lost to them back in 1925.
American ideas for transforming the Middle East have been worked out through various schemes since 2003. But, characteristically, all the maps-plans-schemes that have periodically leaked to the media over the years, upon careful analysis, show strategic benefits for Jordan.
Yes, these benefits are not visible at first glance, they are a kind of consequences, but they are still noticeable. There is not only Jordan getting stronger, various projects on "assembling Kurdistan", a divided but growing "New Iraq" with raw materials territories, by the way, Israel is also in the black in these schemes.
The once-famous "Peters Map" is only one of the options here, but there are at least four more. They differ in details, but at least the general direction of thought is visible - Syria, Turkey and, importantly, Saudi Arabia are the least lucky in these schemes.
Great Britain has always been a kind of training ground for Jordan. The current king Abdullah II (ibn Hussein al-Hashimi) not only studied in Great Britain (many people studied there, the Assad family, for example), but also served in the British army.
There is almost a detective story here, since the mother of the current ruler of Jordan (née Gardiner) was the daughter of a British military adviser in Jordan, who was posted there in 1958. So much for “soft power.”
The current king, in addition to studying in the UK, also absorbed the skills of the American military system and ultimately completely reformed the Jordanian armed forces.
With such close interaction, Britain's support in the region always led to a series of "oddities" - the Hashemites (like Turkey) for some reason always ended up losing as a result of British combinations. Israel, if it entered the same river, would most likely be "lucky" as well. Those who bet on the US (like Saudi Arabia) seemed to win in the end.
This is if we draw conclusions in "big lines". However, the game is much more complicated, because London beat the US in Saudi Arabia, playing with Jordan's position, and the US has long been "upset with this", although it is swept under the carpet of foreign policy curtseys.
In reality and in fact
Since the early 2000s, the US has been slowly but surely working to reduce support for traditional allies like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, while continuing to support Israel. At first glance, this seems not just a strange thesis, but simply nonsense. However, it has already turned out more than once that in reality everything is not as it really is. It is just that the systemic policy there has always been interrupted by foreign policy corruption, which has “knocked off the target” of the expertise.
The terrorist movement Al-Qaeda (banned in Russia) has come a long and difficult way from several Pakistani madrassas to the second most influential shadow force in the entire Middle East.
However, it should be noted that since the mid-1990s it has become a rival force with another shadow and mass movement: the Muslim Brotherhood (banned in Russia). Some of the "brothers" in Egypt have directly gone over to their side. But the roots grow much deeper.
Nowadays, few remember such an episode as the seizure of the "Forbidden Mosque" and the main shrine - the Kaaba at the end of 1979. Then the "zealots of piety" spoke out against the ruling dynasty of Saud and for a general renewal before the imminent apocalypse. It all ended rather sadly for the rebels, although, surprisingly, not all learned men even in Saudi Arabia decided to condemn them so immediately.
But the theme of “renewal” and return “to truth” has not gone away. The theme of the unrighteousness of the existing world order is generally fertile ground for “inquisitive minds.”
If in the 1990s the US tried to work in the region in the old-fashioned way, as if during the Afghan war, then with the defeat of Afghanistan and the accumulation of Guantanamo dungeons in front of the Washington regional committee, apparently, all the colors of religious extremism are beginning to be revealed and the contours of the entire network of “renovationists” are emerging.
In fact, it is possible that the war in Iraq would have optionally sent into free floating those parts of the Arab tribes that were not connected to the House of Saud even by distant blood ties.
After all, if you dig into these connections fully, it turns out that the House of Saud itself is based on tribes that are half connected to central Syria and the Euphrates region, and there are not so many of them in Iraq, but there are many connections with Bahrain and the UAE. In the long-standing opposition are the clans connected by kinship with Yemen (in this regard, the Yemenis with the family prefix "Bin Laden" look unusual and interesting).
Now it is clear that the US initially did everything "by touch", but it is also obvious that such a Brownian movement, taking into account the factor of the "network of renovationists", inevitably had to lead to a weakening of Saudi influence and a different picture of the Middle East. And what the picture could have been, is exactly what those very "Peters maps" show.
These maps are not a conspiracy theory, but an image-concept. They surprisingly coincide not only with oil and gas geography, but also with ethnic and tribal geography, which is even more important.
The only thing that seems really strange in them is the issue of Iran and a pretty decent chunk of raw materials allocated to the Iraqi Shiites, but who said that the current theocracy in Iran was considered by the US as something permanent? Balochistan is not envisaged as part of Iran either.
All these maps highlight the Hejaz and the holy places as either part of New Jordan or as a separate "suprastate," but if this entity is not ruled by the Saudis, then it must be ruled by consensus by... the Hashemites, if not directly, then indirectly. This is a kind of regional balance that will more or less suit everyone.
Here is a famous one walking around the Middle East story (one of) that the US deliberately "sold" Iraq to Iran and the "N. al-Maliki clique." But the third force in the form of ISIS (banned in Russia) was ultimately supposed to sweep away this clique, as well as many other regimes.
It is precisely the artificiality of the ISIS ideology, its stitching together of the most disparate elements, atypical and even illogical for the region, that shows that even after a detailed study of the phenomenon of the Al-Qaeda network, attempts to put this network to work were generally unsuccessful. Al-Qaeda also went against everyone, as the US wanted, but it cooperated with the US only tactically and strictly locally, as in Syria.
ISIS is a US-backed, armchair development based on information from Guantanamo, intelligence data from the region, what the “people” want there, and their own scientific school. The armchair, artificiality is visible in everything. As a result, a homunculus appeared with the intended goal of destroying all governments and ruling houses in the region, with an eye on the House of Saud, which at first glance was strange, but there is no strangeness.
This "black international" will destroy those it needs, and the US will intervene at the right moment in history - and there is no international, and the redrawn region exists. And even in this one can see the artificiality and cabinet-like nature of the plan, the excessive mathematicality and some very Western approach that all processes can be controlled. And what broke this approach was foreign policy corruption, which ate into cabinet models like a moth.
But the struggle between the "cabinet" and the "bribe" was going on, and it was hard and sticky. So the US did not allow the Saudis to place their shares on the stock market normally, and the US position on Yemen was not understood at all in Saudi Arabia. It would seem that the US should help the "ally" against the "pro-Iranian Houthis", but the US did not help the Saudis - they imitated. Often they even simply interfered. For everyone in the world, the Houthis became pro-Iranian through the media, and they are actually close in principle to the "enemy of my enemy", but what was the original position of the Houthis on the Hejaz and the shrines - and here you can look at that very "Peters map". Coincidence? Possibly.
In conceptual politics, the US has long been trying to work against Saudi Arabia, but in tactical politics, especially related to the influence of the Clinton family, these concepts were slowed down, and often simply broken. When the conceptual vision returned, everything was restarted. This can even be seen in the difference in the policies of B. Obama's two terms.
What is this strange anti-love that has been going on between Washington and Saudi Arabia for almost two decades, but which almost never comes out in a way that is openly discussed? There are so many false flags, theses and slogans that one can only understand what is happening by the method and a long-term forecast of the result.
Saudi Arabia is one of the last elements of the British Empire that has indirectly influenced US politics and economics for decades. And the reshaping of the Middle East was supposed to throw off this burden and make this region really, and not nominally, governed from Washington, and not with an adjustment for London.
Jordan in the position of "holding between the millstones"
Jordan, which was formally oriented toward Great Britain all the time, was constantly losing from this orientation, but ultimately gaining nothing. But Saudi Arabia was gaining, which for the outside world was supposedly an ally of the United States, but in fact was a factor of influence on the United States.
Arabian money, as all sorts of idle cafe regulars have been openly talking about for a long time, has been corrupting the Clinton clan, but you also have to look at the figures from behind and from the side, and don't they wear English shoes? What does Great Britain give to Jordan and what can the USA offer (and does offer tacitly), what is declared and what is the result.
It must be said that Jordan has been dodging various kinds of “generous prospects” for as long as the US has been practicing its local “geopolitics.” It doesn’t look like Abdullah II considers himself an Anglophile, and he is one of the few sober-minded politicians of our time. And this quality is now acquiring great importance.
By the way, he “integrated” Syrian refugees better than anyone else – he placed them in a practically deserted area on the border with Syria, but he also understands well what will happen if these hundreds of thousands are simply sent home, where there was no money then, and even more so there is none now.
The Israelis have been writing for the third time in their channels that Jordan is not simply concerned about the "crisis in Syria", but specifically about a return to a state close to 2014-2015. While the US is giving everyone an open window of opportunity to play, the old administration is laying down "gifts" everywhere, but what will happen if the new administration returns to the ideas of redrawing the region based on old maps and concepts? There are no others anyway.
That is why Jordan decides to recall the role of a historical mediator and essentially gathered all forces that are in one way or another tied to the Syrian settlement at the conference. This will not bring money, but it will give a full understanding of the intentions and the opportunity to adjust the actions of the participants. This is an opportunity to foresee what may cost more than some "economic bonuses".
Jordan really needs an oil pipeline from Iraq and it really needs the gas pipeline from Egypt to function at its full capacity, but even more Jordan needs stability, in which everything remains in the game “as is.”
In this regard, Jordan is somewhat reminiscent of us, Russia, which also acts as a "holding player", where stability is more important than the possible benefit from a changed map of the region. If you think about it, we also change the map of one nearby country with difficulty, forcedly - if we did not force, we would not change it at all.
But the "holder" in the Middle East plays on the side of Great Britain against the United States, even if he plays unwittingly. But no matter how much you hold back, a new act of struggle between the "collective Trump" and the British-Saudi nexus in the Middle East will certainly unfold, although Jordan is doing everything to pass between these millstones according to the principle of "a plague on both your houses."
As E. M. Remarque wrote: "Whoever wants to hold on, loses", and we can look at the viability of this thesis using Jordan as an example. The problem is that observation is needed here not out of academic interest, but simply because the showdown between these forces will affect the oil market, which is critically important for us.
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