In July 2021, the first time that King Abdullah II of Jordan met with President Joseph R. Biden Jr., he was greeted warmly as a reliable American partner whose country is a bulwark for security in the Middle East.
“You live in a tough neighborhood,” Mr. Biden said as they sat in the Oval Office.
The king, who will meet with President Trump on Tuesday, may find Washington to be the tougher neighborhood this time around.
Mr. Trump has reiterated his intention to expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip as part of his plan for the United States to “own” the territory, and on Monday he suggested he could consider slashing aid to Jordan and Egypt if their governments refused to take in an estimated 1.9 million Palestinians from Gaza.
Both Jordan and Egypt flatly rejected the idea when Mr. Trump first raised it last week, putting King Abdullah in a bind as he prepares to meet with the president.
Rebuffing Mr. Trump’s demands could imperil the more than $1.5 billion in foreign aid that Jordan receives each year from the United States. A separate, classified stream of American money flows to Jordan’s intelligence services.
At the same time, more than half of King Abdullah’s approximately 12 million subjects are of Palestinian descent, and Middle East experts say that the survival of his family’s rule depends on him digging in against Mr. Trump’s plan.
“King Abdullah cannot go along with it,” said Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “He cannot survive the idea that he’s colluding on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”
“It’s existential for him and his government.”
King Abdullah is also expected to use his meeting with Mr. Trump to push against any attempts by Israel to annex part or all of the West Bank, which far-right members of Israel’s government speak openly about and some of Mr. Trump’s appointees have long advocated. The West Bank sits directly on Jordan’s border, and an Israeli move to take more Palestinian land could lead to violence and unrest that could spill into Jordan.
Jordan is already home to approximately 700,000 refugees, most of them Syrians who fled from that country’s civil war.
Unlike some of its Middle Eastern neighbors that are drowning in oil wealth, Jordan is heavily reliant on American aid. King Abdullah works hard to cultivate close ties across the U.S. government, and makes it a point to be the first Arab leader to meet with every new president.
Jordan allows American troops access to its military bases, and for decades has received millions of dollars from the C.I.A. to support its intelligence services — secret payments that began during the reign of the current king’s father, King Hussein.
King Abdullah, who assumed the throne in 1999, is the longest currently serving leader in the Middle East. Bruce Riedel, a former top Middle East analyst at the C.I.A., said that the king is likely to use his strong relationships with the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and Congress to try to advise the president that a U.S. takeover of the Gaza Strip and the expulsion of Palestinians is “a bad idea.”
The king met on Sunday with Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, and Mr. Riedel says that Jordan “has a lot of supporters on the Hill, including a lot of Republican supporters.”
Still, King Abdullah might need to find new patrons if Mr. Trump decides to cut funding to Jordan over its refusal to go along with his plan for Gaza. If this happens, he might find willing donors in the governments of wealthy gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have also strongly opposed Mr. Trump’s plan for an American takeover of Gaza and expulsion of Palestinians from their land.
Mr. Salem believes that Mr. Trump’s biggest goal in the Middle East is still a grand deal that would involve Saudi Arabia officially recognizing Israel, something it would be extremely unlikely to agree to if Mr. Trump follows through on his plans for Gaza.
The Saudi government has said that there must be concrete steps toward an independent Palestinian state before the kingdom considers normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel
For this reason, King Abdullah could have a bit of leverage. He could try to convince a mercurial American president to keep his eyes on the larger prize, and convince him that Jordan is essential to helping him attain it.
