How MBS’ Trip to Washington Highlights a New Regional Order and Jordan’s Vulnerability

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s state visit to Washington was a defining moment in U.S.-Saudi relations and underscores the profound power shifts across the broader Middle East. Two forces are shaping the emerging landscape: Israel’s dominance over the Middle East’s security architecture and Saudi Arabia’s ascendance as the region’s diplomatic and economic center of gravity. Israeli and Saudi influence, the former built by hard power and the latter reflected largely through soft power, are rewriting the region’s political logic.

This dual realignment increases Jordan’s exposure to the domestic crises unfolding in Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank, and makes its security and political relevance increasingly dependent on the decisions Riyadh makes across these collapsing fronts. As Israel militarily neutralizes threats along its borders and Saudi Arabia tries to stabilize a fractured region, Jordan has ever less room to maneuver.

Israel’s Force Projection Strategy

Israel has effectively dismantled Iran’s “ring of fire” strategy, breaking the ability of Tehran’s proxies to operate as a unified regional front. What was once an external encirclement and existential threat to Israel has been transformed into a series of weakened and isolated proxies, each fighting for power within their respective countries. 

The weakened proxies have redirected their disruptive capacity inward, and now constitute a primary challenge to the state-building projects and governance capacities of their own host nations. In Lebanon and Syria, militias undermine national armies, hollow out state institutions, distort political decision-making, and erode the social contract. In Gaza and, increasingly, the West Bank, powerful armed Palestinian factions either run the show or inhibit civil, non-militant governance. In a sense, Israel has pushed the boundaries of the conflict into its neighbors, turning a regional confrontation into a constellation of domestic conflicts inside already-fragile states.

Saudi Arabia’s Stabilization Strategy

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is constructing a diplomatic and economic superstructure that increasingly shapes regional politics and U.S. regional strategic priorities. Vision 2030 cannot advance in a fractured Middle East ruled by militias and weak institutions. For Riyadh, therefore, regional stabilization is not an aspiration but a security and an economic imperative, essential for protecting long-term investment and integration. It is also critical to safeguard the kingdom against Iran and its proxies, who remain a threat despite their current weakened state. 

The stabilization imperative drives the Saudi diplomatic approach in Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza: rebuilding institutions, reviving sovereign authority, and constraining Iran-backed militias. Saudi Arabia is leveraging its diplomatic and economic weight to engineer political conditions necessary for both its domestic transformation and regional security.

The kingdom has also positioned itself as a central mediator in some of the region’s most consequential conflicts, among them Yemen, Sudan, and recent de-escalation efforts with Iran. With this enhanced profile, MBS arrives in Washington not as a leader seeking image rehabilitation, but as a global diplomatic and economic actor whose influence extends into energy markets, critical minerals, and advanced technologies, especially artificial intelligence, where Saudi capital is indispensable for major U.S. firms. This diverse economic power gives the kingdom not only influence in Washington, but newfound strategic confidence at a time when the Trump administration, like its predecessors, wants regional actors to “do the heavy lifting” on Middle East security.

Pressure Points

Israel is now operating at a speed and tempo that often contradict Saudi Arabia’s more gradual, institution-building approach to regional stabilization. The gap between these two strategies, one coercive and immediate, the other structural and long-term, is emerging as a point of friction between Washington’s closest regional allies. Israel’s post-October 7 trauma has produced an extremely low risk tolerance, driving it toward rapid, kinetic military operations rather than the gradual diplomatic processes or institution-building and stabilization efforts Saudi Arabia is encouraging. 

As this divergence in strategic tempo widens, the pressure on Saudi Arabia has only grown. With militias turning inward, regional instability becomes less about geopolitics and more about state failure. That forces Riyadh’s hand: stabilizing weak states becomes the price of protecting its own national security, shielding itself from Iran and its proxies, and sustaining its economic transformation. Saudi Arabia must now flex its diplomatic, financial, and potentially even military muscles more than before to shape the region in its favor. 

Jordan’s Shrinking Strategic Space 

This stabilization-destabilization paradigm impacts Jordan in each area where it plays out, and overall, Jordan finds its strategic space diminishing.

The spillover of the conflict is clearest in Lebanon. Amman has suffered for years from Captagon smuggling from Lebanon, and the recent uncovering of a terror cell trained there and preparing attacks on Jordan illustrates the cross-border impacts of Lebanese instability. Whether the cell’s members were trained by Hamas or Hezbollah in Lebanon, both groups coordinate closely with Iran.

Saudi Arabia has renewed its engagement in Lebanon, from high-level diplomatic visits to efforts to revive Gulf-Lebanese economic ties, and remains the only credible Arab actor attempting to rebuild Lebanese state authority. But Riyadh needs the Lebanese government to be more assertive in constraining Hezbollah and Palestinian armed factions, regulating borders, and fighting terror financing and laundering networks. The Lebanese Armed Forces and the government bear significant responsibility for the current erosion; their reluctance to confront Hezbollah has triggered rare public frustration in Washington, leading to canceled meetings and congressional threats to reassess military aid. This paralysis only reinforces Israel’s reliance on military action to deter Hezbollah.

How Saudi Arabia chooses to handle the Lebanese file will directly shape Jordan’s northern security environment: successful stabilization would curb Hezbollah’s autonomy and reduce spillover risks, while failure would leave Jordan exposed to arms flows, fighters, and further escalation.

If Lebanon exposes spillover risks, Syria reveals deeper structural pressures shrinking Jordan’s strategic space. The collapse of the Assad regime in 2024 left Syria fractured, with hollowed institutions and security forces shot through with foreign fighters implicated in massacres from Suwayda to the Mediterranean coast, many of whom could defect and join ISIS. The chaos on Jordan’s northern border poses a persistent, multi-faceted threat: arms flows, cross-border smuggling, and jihadist activity. Behind the chaos, Iran seeks to restore its influence in Syria. 

Here again, Israeli and Saudi Arabian approaches diverge. Israel views Syria’s instability primarily through a military lens, leading it to strike Iranian assets, target state and militia infrastructure, and seek to establish deterrence. Saudi Arabia, by contrast, is attempting to anchor Syria in a political and economic recovery process and has taken the lead in engaging Ahmed al-Sharaa, facilitating his diplomatic outreach, and convincing Washington to lift Caesar Act sanctions.

The stakes could not be higher for Jordan, which shares a 280-kilometer border with Syria and hosts roughly 1.3 million Syrian refugees. A stabilized, economically viable Syria would restore a critical buffer along Jordan’s northern frontier; a failed state risks renewed militia entrenchment, fresh refugee flows, and the reactivation of smuggling networks that Amman has struggled to contain. 

Even positive steps, such as Syria joining the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, carry strategic implications for Jordan. Under al-Sharaa, whose background includes years in jihadist networks, Syria’s inclusion in counterterrorism structures could gradually erode Jordan’s long-held niche as the region’s primary intelligence and counterterrorism partner. That would force Amman to redefine its value in the regional security architecture.

The Palestinian arena presents the most acute threat to Jordan. The West Bank is sliding toward a dangerous “Gazafication:” further decline of the Palestinian Authority, proliferation of armed factions, both Palestinian and Israeli, accelerated economic collapse, and creeping annexation. Together, these dynamics create the conditions for mass gradual emigration, coerced displacement, or even sudden population transfer of Palestinians into Jordan,  scenarios the kingdom has feared for decades and now sees as increasingly plausible.

The security deterioration raises an even more troubling prospect: that Jordan could be pressed to assume security and/or administrative responsibilities in parts of the West Bank as the PA weakens, or to absorb a population containing many radicalized militants after two years of managing the domestic fallout of the Gaza war.

In the West Bank as well, Israel’s post-October 7 doctrine is highly kinetic, focused on dismantling armed groups, expanding operational control, and entrenching new territorial realities with little regard for the governance vacuum this creates. Saudi Arabia, by contrast, seeks to stabilize the West Bank by tying any Saudi-Israel normalization agreement to a clear and credible pathway toward Palestinian statehood, a commitment Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reiterated during his visit to Washington. For Riyadh, normalization is a strategic instrument: the only point of leverage capable of producing an Israeli-Palestinian political horizon and preventing the West Bank from full-scale institutional collapse.

Israel’s informal veto on some U.S.-Saudi issues has clearly weakened, as evidenced by Riyadh’s success in securing long-sought strategic objectives like a designation as a major non-NATO ally and the F-35 sale. Saudi-American negotiations are becoming increasingly bilateral, reducing Israel’s ability to dictate terms or insist on normalization without political concessions on the Palestinian file.

This empowers Riyadh to withhold recognition unless there is tangible progress on Palestinian governance, territorial continuity, and institutional rebuilding. Yet Saudi Arabia is juggling a crowded regional agenda, from Lebanon’s collapse to Syria’s fragile transition, and other issues will likely be more strategically important at times than the Palestinian arena.

For Jordan, the implications are profound. Its stability, demographic balance, and national identity hinge on whether the West Bank stabilizes or fragments further. A Saudi-backed diplomatic track that anchors normalization to a credible path toward Palestinian statehood would restore essential strategic depth for Amman. But if Saudi Arabia’s political commitments on the Palestinian issue dilute or devolve into symbolic gestures, Jordan will face the full weight of West Bank deterioration alone. 

Riyadh’s ability to translate its stabilization goals into concrete political outcomes will determine the magnitude of the challenges Jordan confronts within a regional order increasingly shaped by Saudi Arabia and Israel. For Jordan, the roads to security and chaos both run through the Saudi and Israeli capitals, and at the moment, Amman is not in the driver’s seat.