ABSTRACT
The importance of Jordan in inter-Arab relations is obvious and far-reaching. The geographic location of the country makes it critically important, as it is able to impinge on various key actors in the Middle East, among them Israel, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The birth of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan at its territorial peak in the late 1940s presents a good demonstration of the fact that Jordan and the various Palestinian nationalist groups will always find themselves in a situation of mutual mistrust. The future of Jordan used to be thought of as unclear, by which most analysts meant that its problems of legitimacy had been much worse than those of the other countries in the Arab world, despite the endemic problems of legitimacy plaguing them all. The state of Kuwait in August 1990 merely demonstrated what may be in store for others if the Iraqi modus operandi is accepted as a norm.
