From the archive, 13 August 1979: King Hussein brings stability to Jordan

This report is written by John Andrews of the Guardian staff, and two guest writers from the Jordan Times.

King Hussein is now in his 27th year on Jordan’s throne, a charismatic survivor who at the age of 43 has outlasted every other leader, party and faction in the Arab world.

The fact that the Hashemite dynasty today rules a country of relative prosperity and stability is one of the paradoxes of modern history. Jordan has suffered from four major Arab-Israeli wars; it has been buffeted externally by the rise of Naserism, Arab socialism and Baathism; it has been wracked by a savage internal conflict with the Palestinian guerrillas in September 1970 and again in 1971.

Yet King Hussein, who saw his grandfather King Abdullah assassinated and who has escaped several assassination plots himself, is now transformed from the anachronistic pariah of a revolutionary Arab world to a respected statesman in an Arab world moving from rhetoric to pragmatism.

Part of his achievement, no doubt, is due to the evolution of the region as a whole. But credit is also due to the King’s qualities of personal bravery and political astuteness. Jordan is still basically a “moderate” ally of America and the west; but she can now boast good relations with her “radical neighbours,” Syria and Iraq, and even with the Palestine Liberation Organisation. For perhaps the first time in her short history, Jordan is part of the Arab mainstream.

Ironically, the trigger for this development was the careless assumption by the United States that Jordan would both approve and join the Camp David peace process and the consequent Egypt-Israel peace treaty of March this year. The assumption was disastrously ill founded. While conscious of the American financial and military aid which has secured his throne for much of the previous two decades, the King could see little benefit from arrangements under which Israel made so few concessions over the West Bank and East Jerusalem territory seized from Jordan in the 1967 war.

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