balancing what? threat perception and alliance choice in the gulf

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BALANCING WHAT? THREATPERCEPTION AND ALLIANCECHOICE IN THE GULFF. GAUSE III aa University of VermontPublished online: 10 Aug 2010.

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BALANCING WHAT?THREAT PERCEPTION AND ALLIANCE CHOICE IN THE GULF

F. GREGORY GAUSE III

HOW DO STATES IDENTIFY threats when choosing alliance partners? Inother words, how do states choose against whom to balance? Thisquestion is at the core of the research agenda on alliances. Robert

Jervis calls it “often the central question for statesmen: which state, if any,poses a threat so severe that all other considerations must be subordinatedto it?”1 The realist emphasis on balancing behavior presumes that identifyingthreats is the starting point of decision-making on alliances.2 Yet the questionof how states identify threats, as opposed to their behavior once the threatis identified, has received little systematic attention in the alliance literature.3

Even in Stephen Walt’s The Origins of Alliances, which introduces the balance-of-threat modification to realist alliance theory, the process by which statesidentify threats is underdetermined. There seems to be an assumption that thesource of greatest threat is obvious to decision-makers (and to analysts).4

This article tests how states prioritize among the potential threats they facein making alliance decisions.5 It examines the alliance choices made by SaudiArabia, Jordan and Syria regarding conflicts in the Persian/Arabian Gulf area

F. Gregory Gause III is associate professor of Political Science, University of Vermont.

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the annual conventions of the American Po-litical Science Association (1995) and the Middle East Studies Association (1997). The authorgratefully acknowledges the comments of Michael Barnett, Richard Betts, Barbara Farnham,Robert Kaufman, Martin Malin, David Priess, Jack Snyder, David Spiro, David Waldner, SuePeterson, and two anonymous Security Studies reviewers.

1. Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1997), 227.

2. Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Walt,“Testing Theories of Alliance Formation: The Case of Southwest Asia,” International Organization42, no. 2 (spring 1988): 275–316.

3. In Glenn Snyder’s 400 page book Alliance Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997),there is only one reference to “threat” in the index.

4. What little literature that exists on the topic emphasizes the opposite point—that theidentification of threats is a contingent and frequently controversial decision-making process,and not obvious at all. See David Baldwin, “Thinking about Threats,” Journal of Conflict Resolution15, no. 1 (March 1971): 71–78; Klauss Knorr, “Threat Perception,” in Historical Dimensions ofNational Security Problems, ed. Klauss Knorr (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1976): 78–119; and Raymond Cohen, Threat Perception in International Crisis (Madison, Wisconsin: Universityof Wisconsin Press, 1979).

5. I accept Walt’s definition of alliance as “a formal or informal relationship of securitycooperation between two or more sovereign states” (Origins of Alliance, 1). I will use the term

SECURITY STUDIES 13, no. 2 (winter 2003/4): 273–305Copyright C© Taylor & Francis Inc.DOI: 10.1080/09636410490521271

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274 SECURITY STUDIES 13, no. 2

during the period 1971–91. I find that these states overwhelmingly identifiedideological and political threats emanating from abroad to the domestic sta-bility of their ruling regimes as more salient than threats based upon aggregatepower, geographic proximity and offensive capabilities.6 This finding is par-ticularly significant given the pervasiveness of inter-state war in the region.If there is one area of the world where fears that a neighbor’s military powercould be turned against a state should be high, it is the Middle East. Yet,stated baldly, words—if it is feared that they will find resonance among astate’s citizens—were seen as more immediately threatening than guns in thecalculations of the leaders of Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia.7

I am not contending that guns are unimportant in threat perception. Men-acing military moves are a good indication of threat. Kuwait’s efforts to seekallies anywhere and everywhere in August 1990 were, to put it mildly, overde-termined. Such unambiguous threats are rare, however. More often, in theMiddle East, leaders confront simultaneously neighbors developing powerresources that could be very threatening but not evidencing any immediateanimus toward them, and other neighbors whose power resources are not assubstantial but who are using rhetorical and subversive weapons against theirregimes. In such an environment states truly have to balance threats, decidingwhether the potential threat of military attack from one neighbor in the futureis more or less serious than the immediate threat to domestic regime securitypresented by another, weaker opponent seeking to delegitimize and destabi-lize the ruling elite. Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia faced just such dilemmas atvarious times regarding Gulf security issues. Overwhelmingly, they balancedagainst states that were militarily weaker but hostile to their ruling regimes, andallied (sometimes to their later regret) with states that presented potentiallygreater threats from a conventional military standpoint.

My finding that the states under study overwhelming balance against thepredominant threat they perceive places this argument squarely in the realisttradition, reconfirming the central realist hypothesis about alliance behavior.

alignment to indicate a more informal security relationship. Whether formal or informal, thekey to determining whether an alliance has been contracted is the willingness of at least one ofthe parties to pay a cost in some tangible way to support the other.

6. This finding is similar to that of Mark L. Haas, whose examination of alliance behaviorin 1930s Europe led him to conclude that “the nature of the ideological relationships amongstates’ leaders is likely to affect their perceptions of threats to their domestic interests,” evenin a threatening security environment. See Mark L. Haas, “Ideology and Alliances: British andFrench External Balancing Decisions in the 1930s,” Security Studies 12, no. 4 (summer 2003): 35.

7. The argument advanced here that state leaders’ definitions of threat cannot be assumeda priori and are contingent upon the particular domestic and regional contexts in which theyoperate is similar to Rodney Bruce Hall’s contention about the contingency of state interestconstruction, “Territorial and National Sovereigns,” Security Studies 8, no. 2/3 (winter 1998/99–spring 1999): 145–97.

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Threat Perception and Alliance Choice in the Gulf 275

Because the argument emphasizes domestic and transnational political iden-tity factors to explain threat perceptions, some might argue that it is outsidethe realist tradition, or even disconfirming of it.8 In its focus on how theseidentity factors affect threat perception and alliance behavior, the argumentdoes follow upon recent work that seeks to bring culture back into the study ofinternational relations.9 It does not, however, challenge basic realist premisesabout the reality of anarchy, the centrality of states, and the primacy of se-curity concerns in understanding state behavior in the international system.Rather, it looks to cultural factors to help explain state choices in an indeter-minate structural environment.10 In its emphasis on domestic regime securityto explain alliance decisions, it follows the recent trend among scholars inthe realist tradition to introduce unit-level and perceptual variables into the-oretical accounts of state behavior in the security realm.11 In its effort to useinsights from various theoretical traditions to solve an empirical puzzle, it fol-lows a course encouraged by the doyens and defenders of all the competingtheoretical approaches (at least they say that is what they encourage).

8. Jeffrey W. Legro and Andrew Moravcsik, “Is Anybody Still a Realist?” International Security24, no. 2 (fall 1999): 5–55.

9. Peter Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Glenn Chafetz, Michael Spirtas, and BenjaminFrankel, eds., “The Origins of National Interests,” special issue of Security Studies 8, no. 2/3(winter 1998/99–spring 1999). On Middle East applications of the constructivist approach, seeMichael Barnett, “Institutions, Roles and Disorder: The Case of the Arab States System,” Interna-tional Studies Quarterly, 37, no. 3 (September 1993): 271–96; Barnett, “Nationalism, Sovereigntyand Regional Order in the Arab States System,” International Organization 49, no. 3 (summer1995): 479–510; Barnett, “Alliances and Identity in the Middle East,” in Katzenstein, The Cul-ture of National Security, 400–47, and Barnett, Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

10. Michael C. Desch, in his critique of cultural and ideational arguments in the securityfield, argues that “[i]n indeterminate structural environments, where states have many optimalchoices, realist theories ought to have little trouble according culture, or any other domesticvariable, a greater independent role in explaining state behavior. . . . When a state faces eitherexternal or internal threats, structure is determinative; when it faces both, or neither, structureis indeterminate. In such an indeterminate threat environment, it is necessary to look to othervariables to explain various types of strategic behavior” (“Culture Clash: Assessing the Impor-tance of Ideas in Security Studies,” International Security 23, no. 1 [summer 1998], 169). I arguethat the multipolar regional environment of the Middle East, where different kinds of threatsemanate from different states, is just such an “indeterminate threat environment.”

11. A sample of such work includes Steven R. David, “Explaining Third World Alignment,”World Politics 43, no. 2 (January 1991): 233–56; Thomas J. Christensen and Jack Snyder, “ChainGangs and Passed Bucks: Predicting Alliance Patterns in Multipolarity,” International Organization44, no. 2 (spring 1990): 137–68; Thomas J. Christensen, “Perceptions and Alliances in Europe,1865–1940,” International Organization 51, no. 1 (winter 1997): 65–97; Randall L. Schweller,“Domestic Structure and Preventive War,” World Politics 44, no. 2 (January 1992): 235–69;Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy,” World Politics 51, no. 1(October 1998): 44–72; Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, “Security Seeking under Anarchy: DefensiveRealism Revisited,” International Security 25, no. 3 (winter 2000/2001): 128–61. For a discussionof the role such variables appropriately play in realist analysis, see “Correspondence: Brother,Can You Spare a Paradigm? (Or Was Anybody Ever a Realist?), International Security 25, no. 1(summer 2000): 165–93.

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CASE SELECTION AND SCOPE CONDITIONS

EXAMINING THE REGIONAL alliance choices of Saudi Arabia, Syria andJordan between 1971 and 1991 is a good test of how states prioritize

among the threats they face. There were two major wars in the Gulf duringthis period, which would presumably increase the importance of aggregatepower considerations in alliance decision-making, making it a harder test ofthe importance of aggressive intentions to these decisions. There is consider-able variation on the dependent variable of alliance choice, as the three coun-tries made very different choices at different times. There is also variation oncompeting independent variables, as both power hierarchies and threateningpostures changed a number of times during this period. The Iranian Revo-lution both altered the military balance between Iran and Iraq (or, at least itappeared to at the time), and dramatically altered the disposition of the gov-ernment in Teheran toward its neighbors. The Ba’thist government in Iraqalso altered its position toward its Arab neighbors a number of times overthe period. The fortunes of war between Iran and Iraq shifted during theireight-year conflict, providing more variation on the power variable, as did theentrance of the United States as a direct military player into the region in thelate 1980s.

There is also substantial evidence that alliance choices by regional partieswere not dictated by their relations with the superpowers, thus eliminating theproblem of spurious correlation between the independent variables studiedhere and alliance outcomes. Pro-Soviet Syria and Iraq were rarely allied. Syriasupported revolutionary Iran despite the Soviet Union’s Friendship Treaty withIraq, and despite a clear Soviet tilt toward Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war from 1983.12

Jordan and Saudi Arabia aligned with Iraq immediately upon the outset ofthe Iran-Iraq war, before Washington’s “tilt” toward Baghdad.13 Pro-WesternJordan aligned with Iraq in the Gulf War of 1990–91, while Soviet-allied Syriajoined the American-led coalition. There is no evidence that the regionalstates believed that they were free to concentrate on the less central issues of“aggressive intentions,” safe in the knowledge that the United States or theSoviet Union would bail them out if attacked. Their enormous purchases ofmilitary hardware testify to their lack of confidence in great power guarantees

12. On Soviet policy toward Iraq, see Oles M. Smolansky, with Bettie M. Smolansky, The USSR

and Iraq: The Soviet Quest for Influence (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 234–42; ShahramChubin and Charles Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War (Boulder: Westview, 1988), chap. 10.

13. “The opening to Iraq can be dated to February 26, 1982, when the Reagan administrationtook Iraq off the list of state sponsors of terrorism” (Bruce W. Jentleson, With Friends Like These:Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982–1990 [New York: Norton, 1994], chap. 1, quote at 33).

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of their security. The fact that the great powers did not step in to stop theIran-Iraq war, which continued for eight years, is evidence that there was nosuch thing as an iron-clad outside power guarantee of regional stability. Thereis also no evidence that the regional powers perceived themselves to be in arelatively benign and risk-free environment, where their alliance choices werenot central to their security. They pursued regional alignments and balancingpolicies with great seriousness and the expenditure of considerable politicaland financial resources, and some military resources.

Nor were the alliance choices of these three countries in the Gulf dictatedby their fear of and hostility toward Israel, eliminating another potential causeof spurious correlation. Israel was seen by all three as a potential threat, mostseriously by Syria but also, to a lesser extent, by Jordan and Saudi Arabia. It wasnot their only threat, however. These states had to respond to Gulf events,and did so, allocating scarce resources to those decisions with little or anyimmediate return (from either Iraq or Iran) in terms of their security posturetoward Israel. If Israel were the dominant threat concern for the leaderships,we would be hard pressed to explain the different alignment choices they madeon Gulf security issues. Rational actors would have sought alignment with thestrongest military power to balance Israel’s strengths. We would expect themto act in tandem if Israel were the major threat they perceived. Their decisionsfrequently diverged from that expectation, however, and from each other. Itis particularly noteworthy that Syria and Jordan, two front-line states in theArab confrontation with Israel, almost always made different alliance choicesin the Gulf.

The choice of Middle Eastern cases to test theoretical propositions raisesthe question of the scope of the subsequent findings. Might the conclusionsdrawn be applicable only in the region, generated by its particularities, with littlerelevance beyond it? That is always a risk, as every region has its particularities(even Europe). A number of international relations scholars, however, haveused Middle East cases to develop, test and refine theoretical arguments.14 Thethree authors whose works on alliances will be discussed in detail below allused the Middle East to develop their theoretical insights.15 The region should

14. For example, see John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1983), chap. 6; Benjamin Miller, When Opponents Cooperate: Great Power Conflict and Cooperationin World Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Shibley Telhami, Power andLeadership in International Bargaining: The Path to the Camp David Accords (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1990); Stephen M. Walt, Revolution and War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1996).

15. Walt, Origins of Alliances; David, “Explaining Third World Alignment;” Steven R. David,Choosing Sides: Alignment and Realignment in the Third World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1991); Barnett, Dialogues in Arab Politics; and Barnett’s articles cited in n. 8.

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not be rejected a priori as a theoretical testing ground, particularly as its recenthistory of conflict offers numerous examples of alliance choice.

My findings that the states I studied prioritize aggressive intentions overaggregate power in assessing security threats, result in part from factors par-ticular to the Middle East—the importance of transnational ideologies basedupon pan-Arabism and Islam. Transnational political identities have been verystrong in the Middle East, challenging the efforts of states and governmentsto become the ultimate locus of their citizens’ loyalties. Both Arab nationalismand Islam cut across borders in the Middle East, and provide powerful andemotive alternative models to the fragmented political geography bequeathedto the region by the colonial powers after the First World War. Appeals tothose memories and emotions are important power resources in Middle East-ern rivalries.

Ambitious leaders have consistently raised the banners of Arabism andIslam in efforts to expand their influence and at times their territory, appealingto citizens of other states for support against their own governments. TheIraqi and Jordanian Hashemite unity plans of the 1940s and 1950s, directedlargely at republican Syrian, based their appeal on pan-Arabism. The pan-Arabbanner was then taken up by Nasir’s Egypt and the Ba’th party in the later1950s and 1960s, the time of the United Arab Republic and the “Arab coldwar” between unionist “progressives” and their “reactionary” opponents.16

Ayatallah Khumayni in the 1980s focused his appeal on Islam, calling onMuslims in Iraq and the Gulf monarchies to overthrow their governments.During the Gulf War, Saddam Husayn used a mixture of Arab nationalist andIslamic rhetoric to rally regional public opinion to his side and pressure pro-coalition Arab governments. Trans-national ideological and subversive threatshave shaken, and occasionally helped bring down, regimes in the Arab world.

These ideological factors, however, are important in Middle Eastern politicsbecause of the difficulties states there have had in developing affective linkageswith and administrative control over their societies. This suggests that myfindings are not limited in scope simply to the Middle East. They can helpexplain alliance choices in other parts of the world where state consolidation isstill unfinished business, and where political identities cross existing borders.Scholars who have written on Third World security issues emphasize thatstate formation and state-society relations there differ substantially from theexperience of advanced industrialized countries, and those differences lead todifferent security agendas. The inheritance of colonial border drawing has been

16. The term is from Malcolm Kerr, The Arab Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press,1971).

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weakly integrated polities, with multiple centers of opposition challenging theauthority of the state or the validity of its borders. The states themselves, veryoften no more than a few decades past independence, are administrativelyweak (in comparison to advanced industrial countries) and internally divided.The most salient challenge facing most Third World states is that of politicalintegration and administrative coherence.17

Given these facts, security challenges to Third World states are as likely, ifnot more likely, to originate within their borders, even if these internal threatsare supported and encouraged by other states or international actors. Forthat reason, internal threats to regime, as opposed to state, security becomemuch more salient to decision-makers as they calculate their security policy,including alliance decisions. Balancing against immediate or potential internalthreats, particularly if those internal threats are believed to be linked to partiesoutside the state’s borders, is as likely to dictate international alliance decisionsas are more conventional factors like regional distributions of power. Thus, thenature of state-society relations in the Third World more generally suggeststhat the findings here are not merely artifacts of the particularities of theMiddle East.

IDENTIFYING AND RESPONDING TO THREATS

THE PRACTICAL EQUIVALENCE of power and threat is at the core of bothclassical realist and neo-realist balance of power theories.18 Thucydides fa-

mously attributed the true cause of the Peloponnesian War to “the growth ofAthenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”19 Hans Morgenthausummarized the operations of balance of power systems thusly: “The balancingprocess can be carried on either by diminishing the weight of the heavier scaleor by increasing the weight of the lighter one.”20 Kenneth Waltz accepted this

17. On the general topic of Third World security issues, see Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-states:Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (New York: Cambridge University Press,1990); Edward Azar and Chung-in Moon, eds., National Security in the Third World (New York:Edward Elgar, 1988); Mohammed Ayoob, “The Third World in the System of States: AcuteSchizophrenia or Growing Pains?” International Studies Quarterly 33, no. 1 (March 1989): 67–79;Ayoob, The Third World Security Predicament (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995); Barry Buzan, People,States and Fear (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1991); Brian Job, ed., The Insecurity Dilemma: NationalSecurity of Third World States (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 1992); Stephanie G. Neuman,ed., International Relations Theory and the Third World (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998).

18. See John A. Vasquez, “The Realist Paradigm and Degenerative versus Progressive Re-search Programs: An Appraisal of Neotraditional Research on Waltz’s Balancing Proposition,”American Political Science Review 91, no. 4 (December 1997), 904.

19. Thucycides, The Peloponnesian War (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 49.20. Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations 5th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1978), 185.

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equivalence when he formalized the insights of the realist tradition, emphasiz-ing the propensity of balances to form based on the international distributionof power.21

Three important works, two in the realist tradition and one in the con-structivist tradition, have called into question this assumed link betweenpower and threat, and suggested more nuanced notions of how states per-ceive threats.These efforts, however, fall short of proposing clear and testablehypotheses about how states prioritize among and react to different kinds ofthreats.

Stephen Walt’s contention that states balance against threats rather thansimply against power was a major theoretical advance in the realist researchprogram on alliances. While not abandoning aggregate power capabilities as anelement of threat construction, he identifies three other factors—geographicproximity, offensive power, and aggressive intentions—that affect states’ per-ceptions of threat, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of balanc-ing motivations. Serious problems remain, however. While Walt emphasizesthreat rather than power in alliance decision-making, he subsumes measuresof power unrelated to intentions (aggregate power, offensive power and geo-graphic proximity) under his definition of threat. He does not provide clearguidelines for how to operationalize aggressive intentions, saying only that“perceptions of intent are likely to play an especially crucial role in alliancechoices.”22 Walt also provides no guidance to how states prioritize among thefour elements of threat: “One cannot determine a priori . . . which sources ofthreat will be most important in any given case; one can say only that all ofthem are likely to play a role.”23

Walt’s lack of guidance on how states determine which kind of threat ismost threatening is particularly troubling in a multipolar environment, wheredifferent kinds of threats can emanate from different states.24 It can lead topost-hoc coding that calls into question the validity of tests of balancing be-havior. For example, if state A faces an environment where state B has a decidededge in aggregate power and offensive power, but state C exhibits more ag-gressive intentions toward state A, how should state A’s alliance decisions becoded? If it aligns with state B, is that an act of balancing state C’s aggressive

21. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979),chaps. 6, 8.

22. Walt, Origins of Alliance, 25.23. Ibid., 26.24. This point was also raised by David Priess, “Balance of Threat Theory and the Genesis

of the Gulf Cooperation Council: An Interpretive Case Study,” Security Studies 5, no. 4 (summer1996): 143–71.

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intentions or bandwagoning with state B’s aggregate power? Without sometheoretical justification for saying that aggressive intentions are more threat-ening than aggregate power, state A’s choice could be coded as either balancingor bandwagoning, or both.

Walt’s coding of Middle Eastern alliances falls prey to this problem. Forexample, he codes the Jordanian–U.S. relationship from the late 1950s to the1980s as an example of Jordan balancing Egypt and other Arab threats. Set-ting aside the issue of whether Jordanian motivation is better understood as aneffort to extract rents from the international system,25 the relationship couldalso be coded as Jordanian bandwagoning with the most powerful externalactor in the region, and by extension with America’s ally Israel, the mostpowerful regional military force. Walt codes the Egyptian-Jordanian align-ment of 1967–70 as an effort to balance Israel and the PLO. It could also beplausibly coded as a Jordanian choice to bandwagon with the most powerfulArab state, which had threatened the Jordanian regime on numerous occa-sions in the 1950s and 1960s. Walt codes the Saudi–Jordanian–Iraqi alignmentof 1979 through the 1980s as an effort to balance Iran and Syria. If onegave priority in assessing threat to aggregate military and economic power,the Saudi and Jordanian decisions could be coded as bandwagoning withIraq.26

When analyzing an environment of multiple potential threats to a state, itis essential to unpack the bundle of independent variables Walt designatesas encompassing threat. Walt himself subsequently recognized this. In hisresponse to Robert Kaufman’s critique of balance of threat theory in inter-war Europe, he argues that “balancing against Germany was also impairedby the fact that Germany was not the only threat” facing Britain, Franceand countries of Eastern Europe in the 1930s. “This failure was due in partto the difficulty of determining which of the various threats was the mostserious.”27Later in the same article, Walt questions the coding by Eric Labs ofsome alliance decisions of the smaller German states in the 1850s and 1860son much the same basis that I questioned some of his coding decisions above.28

One effort to provide a theoretical basis for prioritizing among threats toThird World states is Steven David’s reformulation of balance of threat theory,

25. The case made about Jordanian foreign policy more generally by Laurie Brand, Jordan’sInter-Arab Relations: The Political Economy of Alliance Decision-Making (New York: Columbia Uni-versity Press, 1994).

26. See Table 10, “Middle East Alliances against Regional Threats,” in Walt, Origins of Alliance,159.

27. Stephen M. Walt, “Alliances, Threats and U.S. Grand Strategy: A Reply to Kaufman andLabs,” Security Studies 1, no. 3 (spring 1992), 456.

28. Ibid., 471.

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omnibalancing.29 David recognizes that Third World states usually live in anatmosphere of multiple threats, and that the leaders of those states prioritizeamong those threats, at times “appeas[ing]-that is, align[ing] with-secondaryadversaries so that they can focus their resources on prime adversaries.” Thebasis for that prioritizing, what David terms “the most powerful determinantof Third World alignment behavior,” is “the rational calculation of Third Worldleaders as to which outside power is most likely to do what is necessary tokeep them in power.” Thus, Third World leaders will identify what is the mostsalient threat to their regimes, be it domestic or foreign in origin, and chooseallies to confront that threat.30

Omnibalancing provides an empirically plausible and theoretically justifiedargument for how Third World leaders prioritize among the values foreign pol-icy is meant to protect. The nature of state-building and state-society relationsin many Third World states make regimes extremely vulnerable to challengesto their hold on power. Even adopting David’s corollaries to Walt’s balance ofthreat model, it is still difficult to identify a priori what kind of threats ThirdWorld leaders will react to, because David provides no theoretical assumptionsabout what kinds of threats those leaders will see as most dangerous to theirregimes’ stability. Is the threat of conventional military attack more likely tobring about a regime change than foreign support for domestic subversion?Like Walt, David seems to assume that the most serious threat to regime sta-bility is self-evident to leaders and analysts. Moreover, David also is unclear onhow Third World leaders will react to such threats in their alliance behavior.In one of his cases, a threatened regime balanced against the internationalsource of support to its domestic opponents (Sadat’s Egypt abandoning theSoviet Union and turning to the United States); in another case a regime band-wagoned with the international patrons of its domestic enemies (Mengistu’sEthiopia aligning with the Soviet Union).31 David helps us to understand themotivations of Third World leaders in assessing threats, but does not offerdefinite hypotheses about how those leaders might prioritize among the typesof threats that Walt proposes or about their alliance behavior in the face ofsuch threats.

Michael Barnett’s contention that disputes over definitions of Arab identitydrove Middle Eastern regional politics points to the importance of what he calls“ideational” rather than material forces in how Middle Eastern states assess thethreats they face. Like David, Barnett assumes that Middle Eastern leaders’ first

29. David, “Explaining Third World Alignment;” David, Choosing Sides.30. Ibid., 235.31. Ibid., 245–51.

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priority is the maintenance of their own domestic political power. Therefore,efforts to destabilize them domestically, through subversion and propagandaorchestrated from abroad, will rank highly in their threat perceptions.32 Barnettrightly points out that Walt, when he actually discusses just what aggressiveintentions mean in the Middle East, relies heavily on examples of just this kindof rhetoric and subversion, particularly that practiced by Egyptian presidentGamal ’Abd al-Nasir (Nasser) toward other Arab states in the 1950s and1960s.33

While Barnett concentrates on the importance of domestic regime securityand of identity politics in explaining Middle Eastern alignments, like Walt hebacks away from a clear statement about how Middle Eastern states prioritizeamong different kinds of threats: “Far from suggesting the primacy of identityand the irrelevance of material forces, I recognize that both are importantexplanatory variables, though with different causal weights at different his-torical moments.”34 Like Walt and David, Barnett does not provide us withhypotheses about under what conditions ideational or more material threatswill take precedence for Arab leaders.

AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH AND A TEST

WALT TELLS US that we have to disaggregate elements of threat; Davidtells us to focus on threats to regime security; Barnett emphasizes the

importance of ideology and ideational threats to regime security. Combiningthese insights, we can develop a test of how leaders prioritize among threatsin the Middle East, the regional area all three use to develop and test theirtheoretical innovations. If military defeat is seen as the most serious threatto regime security, then Middle Eastern leaders should balance against thelocal state which is geographically closest and whose aggregate military powercapabilities are greatest (Hypothesis 1). Even if that state’s intentions are notimmediately hostile, its power presents the most serious threat to regime (andstate) security because intentions can change drastically and rapidly. If, on theother hand, ideational factors are seen as the most serious threat to regimesecurity, then Middle Eastern leaders should balance against the state thatmanifests the most hostility toward their regimes, regardless of that state’saggregate power and geographic proximity (Hypothesis 2). That hostility iseasy to operationalize in the Middle East: public attempts by one state to

32. Barnett, Dialogues in Arab Politics, 7–12.33. Walt, Origins of Alliance, 25–26, 167–71; Barnett, “Alliances and Identity in the Middle

East,” 403–4.34. Barnett, “Alliances and Identity in the Middle East,” 446.

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destabilize another state’s ruling regime through propaganda, or support byone state for domestic or exile political groups opposed to another state’sruling regime.

In the rare cases of a state actually brandishing military force against anotherstate, massing troops on the border and threatening military attack (actions inthe Middle East usually accompanied by propaganda and subversive efforts todelegitimize the regime in the threatened state), it is not difficult for leadersto identify the source of threat to them. Even in less extreme situations, whenthere is no overt military threat against a state, should one of its neighborspossess a clear aggregate power advantage over other regional states andevidence hostile intentions (of the sort described above as ideational) towardthat state’s regime, the source of threat is clear. In such cases, the interestingresult is not how states identify threats, but rather how they react to them:by balancing, bandwagoning or “hiding?”35 Classical realist and neo-realisttheories provide a clear answer: in such circumstances states will balanceagainst the source of threat (Hypothesis 3).

If it can be shown that Hypothesis 3 holds for a group of states—that,when faced with an unambiguous threat, they balance against that threat—then the alliance behavior of those states can be used to test the validity ofHypotheses 1 and 2. Their proclivity to balance against threat established,we can then investigate their actions in more ambiguous circumstances, whenthere is no immediate military threat, one regional state possesses an advantagein aggregate power and another regional state evidences hostility toward theirruling regime. Their alliance choices in such situations would offer a clearindication of how those states’ leaders prioritized among the potential threatsthey faced.

The remainder of this article conducts just such a test on the alliance deci-sions made by Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia regarding security issues in thePersian/Arabian Gulf from 1971 (the termination of formal British protectionfor the smaller states of the lower Gulf) to 1991. During most of the periodthe choice before these three states was to align with Iran or Iraq; in the period1990–91 the choice was to align with the American-led international coalitionor with Iraq. During this period Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia each faceda regional environment of multiple threats. At various times, different typesof threat emanated from different regional powers, allowing us to test whichtype of threat leaders saw as more immediate in formulating their alignmentdecisions.

35. “Hiding” was coined by Paul Schroeder, “Historical Reality vs. Neo-realist Theory,”International Security 19, no. 1 (summer 1994): 108–48.

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CODING ELEMENTS OF THREAT---AGGREGATE POWER

CODING AGGREGATE POWER (including geographic proximity) in the Gulfduring the period 1971–91 is relatively simple. Iran was clearly the dom-

inant Gulf military power from 1971 to 1978. The size of its armed forcesin that period was nearly double that of Iraq; its yearly military spending be-tween 4 and 6 times greater than Iraq’s; its yearly arms imports always greaterthan Iraq’s, usually double the Iraqi amount or more.36 That dominance wasasserted by the Iranians on a number of occasions. Iranian naval and groundforces occupied Abu Musa and the Tunbs islands, disputed between Iran andthe new United Arab Emirates, in 1971 as the British were giving up their pro-tectorate role over the smaller Arab states. In 1975, Iranian military pressureand support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels led Iraq to accept an Iranian diktat onrevisions of the Shatt al-Arab border.37 While Iraq was closer geographically toJordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria, its forces were concentrated on its border withIran and on combating (until 1975) the Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq. Interms of pure power capabilities, Iran was the dominant player in Gulf politicsup to 1978.

The military balance shifted with the Iranian Revolution. The chaos in Iranand its break with its former superpower patron, the United States, depleted itsmilitary strength, while Iraq, with Saddam Hussein now its unchallenged leader,used the oil windfall of 1979–81 to vastly expand its military. Iraq reversed themanpower gap that existed in the 1970s, fielding a larger military force than Iranfrom 1980 through the rest of the decade. The huge gap in military spendingfrom the 1970s also closed, with Iraqi spending coming much closer to thatof Iran and Iraqi arms imports vastly exceeding Iran’s. Iraq also establisheda huge advantage in numbers of tanks and combat aircraft after 1980, areasin which the two states had been roughly equivalent in the late 1970s.38 Thisnew advantage in military power was translated into early Iraqi battlefieldsuccesses in the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq invaded southern Iran in September 1980and quickly advanced to the outskirts of a number of Iranian cities, capturing

36. Armed forces and military spending figures taken from International Institute for Strate-gic Studies, The Military Balance (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, variousyears); arms import figures found in Anthony H. Cordesman, The Gulf and the West: StrategicRelations and Military Realities (Boulder: Westview, 1988), 50–51.

37. For accounts of these two incidents, see F. Gregory Gause III, “Gulf Regional Politics:Revolution, War and Rivalry,” in Dynamics of Regional Politics, ed. W. Howard Wriggins (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1992), 37–38, 46–48.

38. Armed forces, military spending, tank and combat aircraft figures taken from Interna-tional Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance (London: International Institute forStrategic Studies, various years); arms import figures found in Cordesman, The Gulf and the West,50–51.

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one (Khoramshahr) and beseiging others. While the Iraqi offensive was hardlya resounding success (Iranian defenses stiffened quickly and the Iraqis wereunable to take any other cities), Iraqi forces remained in Iranian territorythrough 1981 and into 1982, turning back an Iranian counter-attack in January1981.39 From 1979 (the Iranian Revolution) through mid-1982, Iraq had adecided advantage in aggregate power over Iran.

By the summer of 1982 the tide of battle had turned and Iran carried thewar into Iraqi territory. Until the end of 1986 it was Iran that undertook theoffensives and occasionally scored victories, the last coming in early 1986 withthe capture of the Fao peninsula in Iraq and the failure of desperate Iraqicounter-attacks later that year.40 From 1982 to 1986, despite Iraqi numericalsuperiority and its large advantage in arms imports, Iran had the upper handmilitarily over Iraq. Iranian military success against Iraq during this periodalso brought Iranian forces closer geographically to Saudi Arabia, Jordan andSyria, and raised the possibility, if Iran could defeat Iraq, of a new Iraqi regime,closely allied with the Islamic Republic, on their borders. On both aggregatepower and geographic proximity scores, Iran’s potential threat to all threestates increased in the mid-1980s.

The tide of battle turned again in 1987–88. A major Iranian offensive againstBasra, the largest southern Iraqi city, in early 1987 failed.41 Iraq went on theoffensive in early 1988, recapturing Fao and probing into Iranian territory. Iraqalso launched a devastating round of missile attacks against Teheran, againstwhich Iran was unable to retaliate in kind, and used poison gas on the Iraqitown of Halabja, which Iranian forces had captured.42 In the summer of 1988Iran accepted a cease-fire, after having refused Iraqi cease-fire offers since thebeginning of the war. Though Iranian forces were hardly routed, and Iraq madeno significant territorial gains in Iranian territory, regional and internationalperceptions were that Iraq had rebounded and came out, at least relatively, the“winner” in the war. With the death of Ayatallah Khumayni in 1989, Iranianattentions turned inward and there was not the same emphasis as there was inIraq in acquiring military hardware and asserting military power. From 1988to August 1990, Iraq’s aggregate power was increasing at a far faster ratethan Iran’s. Iran demobilized a good portion of its ground forces, while Iraq

39. Anthony H. Cordesman, The Gulf and the Search for Strategic Stability (Boulder: Westview,1984), 666–69.

40. Chubin and Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War, 57–67; Stephen Pelletiere, The Iran-Iraq War (NewYork: Praeger, 1992), 93–112.

41. Cordesman, The Gulf and the West, 317–18.42. Pelletiere, Iran-Iraq War, 136–37; Dilip Hiro, The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict

(New York: Routledge, 1991), 200–201.

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maintained its “million-man army.” The Iraqi advantage over Iran in tanks,combat aircraft and artillery was maintained.43 Particularly when factoring ingeographic proximity, Iraq was the greater potential military threat to the threestates under study from 1987 through mid-1990.

From the commitment of American combat forces to Saudi Arabia afterthe Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the confrontation axis shiftedfrom Iran-Iraq to Iraq-coalition. Coding aggregate power here presents diffi-culties. Iraq’s power certainly increased from its annexation of Kuwait. Were itable to absorb that conquest, its relative power advantage over Saudi Arabia,Syria and Jordan would have grown substantially. Once it became clear thatthe United States was committed to a serious military venture in the Gulf,however, basically from the middle of August 1990, there was no questionthat the coalition forces would be superior to Iraq’s. The only unknowns inthe military equation were American political will and coalition cohesion, notmilitary power. While an increase in U.S. power in the region presented noimmediate problems for Saudi Arabia (the domestic discontent that led to thebombings of American facilities in the Kingdom in 1995 and 1996 emergedonly later), both Jordan and Syria could have had qualms about it. A strongerUnited States in the region would mean a stronger Israel, creating potentialproblems for both. Syria was still allied with the Soviet Union, so had reasonto worry about U.S. intentions toward it. For Saudi Arabia, the aggregate powerthreat in the Gulf crisis was clearly Iraq. For Syria and Jordan, the potentialaggregate power threat was much more ambiguous.

CODING ELEMENTS OF THREAT---AGGRESSIVE INTENTIONS

DIRECT MILITARY engagements between either Iran or Iraq and the statesunder study were few. Saudi jets downed an Iranian air force plane in

Saudi airspace over the Gulf in 1984, and Iranian Revolutionary Guards andair force attacked a number of oil tankers doing business with Saudi Arabiain 1984–88. The only direct military attack by Iraq on any of the three stateswas the incursion of Iraqi forces into Khafji, Saudi Arabia in January 1991,long after Saudi alliance decisions in the Kuwait crisis were made. Using thedefinition of aggressive intentions set out above, however, and emphasizingsignals of hostility toward the ruling regime, it is possible to identify the sourceof greater threat.

43. Figures in Anthony H. Cordesman, Iran and Iraq: The Threat from the Northern Gulf (Boulder:Westview, 1994), 15.

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Saudi Arabia. Iraq’s Ba’thist regime was openly hostile to what it termed the“reactionary” Saudi regime, and the other Peninsula monarchies, during theperiod 1971–74. It supported opposition groups like the Popular Front forthe Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf and the Dhufar rebellion againstthe Sultan of Oman. In 1973 Iraqi forces occupied a border post in Kuwait,leading to the despatch of Saudi troops to Kuwait. It regularly criticized Riyadfor betraying Arab nationalist principles for cooperating with Iran over Gulfsecurity arrangements after the British withdrawal.44 Meanwhile the Shah’sIran shared with Riyad both a strong American connection and a monarchicalform of government. While the Al Sa’ud worried about the Shah’s regionalambitions, they did not fear that he would work against their regime. Withthe Algiers Accord of 1975, Iraq reconsidered its policy of hostility towardthe Arab monarchies of the Gulf, and courted them on the basis of commonArab interests against the hegemonic aspirations of the Shah. Baghdad endedpropaganda efforts critical of the Saudi rulers and suspended covert activitiesin the kingdom.45 For Saudi Arabia, the period 1975–78 was blissfully devoidof serious ideological challenges to regime stability.

From 1979 to mid-1990, it was the Islamic revolutionary government inIran that directly challenged the legitimacy of the Saudi monarchy, throughpropaganda and support for Saudi Islamist dissidents. Ayatallah Khumayniwas extremely explicit about the incompatibility of Islam and monarchy.46

Once in power he and the new Islamic Republican government presented anopen challenge to the legitimacy and stability of the Saudi regime, both as anexample of Islamic revolution and as a promoter of discontent within SaudiArabia and the other monarchical states of the Gulf.47 By the beginning of1980 Iranian propaganda organs were explicitly calling for the overthrow of

44. Laurie Mylroie, “Regional Security after Empire: Saudi Arabia and theGulf ” (PH.D. diss.,Harvard University, 1985), chaps. 2–3; Gause, “Gulf Regional Politics,” 39–40; Tim Niblock,“Iraqi Policies Towards the Arab States of the Gulf, 1958–1981,” in Iraq: The Contemporary State,ed. Tim Niblock (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982), 139–145.

45. Sa’ad al-Bazzaz, harb tulid ’ukhra: al-tarikh al-sirri li-harb al-khalij [One war leads to another:The secret history of the Gulf War] (Amman: al-Ahliyya Publishing and Distribution, 1993),207; Mylroie, “Regional Security after Empire,” 140–49; Marion Farouk-Sluglett and PeterSluglett, Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990), 200–202;Nadav Safran, Saudi Arabia: The Ceaseless Quest for Security (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1985), 265–66; Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq (Boulder: Westview, 1985), 244.

46. “Islam proclaims monarchy and hereditary succession wrong and invalid” (RuhollahKhomeini, “Islamic Government,” in Khomeini, Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations,trans. and ann. Hamid Algar [London: KPI, 1985], 31).

47. The ideological and domestic political challenge to Saudi Arabia presented by the IranianRevolution is emphasized by numerous authors, including R. K. Ramazani, Revolutionary Iran:Challenge and Response in the Middle East (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press), 23–32;Chubin and Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War, 159–79; Priess, “Balance of Threat Theory and theGenesis of the Gulf Cooperation Council.”

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Gulf governments.48 Driving home the threat posed by the new revolutionaryregime, a wave of unrest, concentrated mostly in Shi’i communities, sweptKuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia from 1978 through 1980.49 While the inten-sity of Iranian pressure on Saudi Arabia declined during the 1980s, the revolu-tionaries in Tehran continued to challenge the Al Sa’ud’s Islamic credentials.Central to this challenge was Iranian behavior during the annual pilgrimmage toMecca. Iranian pilgrims held political demonstrations, expressly forbidden bythe Saudi authorities, during the 1982 and 1983 pilgrimmages. A high-rankingIranian cleric revealed that Iranian Revolutionary Guards brought explosivesinto Saudi Arabia during the 1986 pilgrimage. In 1987 Saudi security forcesclashed with Iranian pilgrims, resulting in over 400 deaths.50 In 1989 Saudi Ara-bia executed sixteen Kuwaiti Shi’is of Iranian origin for bombings and “otherterrorism” during the pilgrimmage that year.51 In contrast, during the 1980sIraq courted the Saudis, emphasizing their common interest in checking Iran.

With the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the immediate ideological/domesticthreat to the Saudi regime emanated from Baghdad. Iraq had overthrown afellow monarchy and moved troops up to the border of the oil-rich EasternProvince of Saudi Arabia. While he sent signals in the early days of the cri-sis that he did not intend to invade Saudi Arabia, the Saudi leadership hadno confidence in Saddam Hussein’s good intentions and agreed to acceptAmerican protection.52 They also joined in the denunciation of the Iraqi in-vasion that emerged from the chaotic Arab League meeting of August 10,1990. From that time Iraq openly called, on both Islamic and Arab nationalistbases, for citizens in Saudi Arabia to revolt against their government.53 OneIraqi source reported that Saddam was confident that this propaganda barragewould destabilize the Saudi domestic scene so thoroughly that Riyad wouldhave no choice but to reverse its course and accept the new realities.54 Iran,with the death of Ayatallah Khumayni in 1989, had toned down its rhetoricalsupport for the export of revolution and kept very quiet during the Gulf crisis.

48. See examples in Gause, “Gulf Regional Politics,” 52.49. Jospeh Kostiner, “Shi’i Unrest in the Gulf,” in Shi’ism, Resistance and Revolution, ed. Martin

Kramer (Boulder: Westview, 1987), 179; Ramazani, Revolutionary Iran, 39–40.50. Ramazani, Revolutionary Iran, 93–96; Majid Khadduri, The Gulf War: The Origins and Impli-

cations of the Iraq-Iran Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 129; New York Times,22 May 1989, 1, 8.

51. New York Times, 22 September 1989, A8.52. Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 1990–91 (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1993), chap. 5.53. See, for example, Saddam’s statement of 5 September 1990: “We call upon them [citizens

of Arab states aligned against Iraq] to revolt against these traitors, their rulers, and to fight theforeign presence in the holy lands” (New York Times, 6 September 1990, A19).

54. Sa’ad al-Bazzaz, al-ganaralat ’akhir man ya’lim [The generals are the last to know] (Amman:al-Ahliyya Publishing and Distribution, 1996), 112.

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Syria. The Syrian regime of Hafiz al-‘Asad saw Iraq as the primary Arabsupporter of its domestic opponents throughout the period under study. TheBa’thist regimes in Damascus and Baghdad each claimed to be the right-ful leader of the Arab nationalist movement. The bitterness of their mutualpolemics was exacerbated by personal animosities between the two ruling elitesdating back to a split in the party in the mid-1960s. In August 1971 99 Syrians,including the exiled founder of the Ba’th Party, Michel Aflaq, were convictedof trying to overthrow the Syrian regime with Iraqi aid.55 Syria meanwhile lentsupport to Iraqi opponents of the Baghdad regime.56 For a few years, afterIraqi assistance to Syria in the 1973 war, relations between the two regimesimproved. In March 1975, however, Syria alleged that Iraq was behind anothereffort to destabilize the Asad regime, amidst arrests that included senior Ba’thParty members. Other accusations of Iraqi interference in Syrian domesticpolitics followed. Syria and Iraq mobilized troops on their common border in1975 and 1976, over disputes about oil, water and Syrian policy in Lebanon.57

A brief Iraqi-Syrian rapprochement in 1978–79, driven by the Camp Davidaccords (to be discussed below), broke up with Saddam Hussein’s consolida-tion of control in Iraq and his accusations of Syrian meddling in Iraqi domesticpolitics.58 The return to mutual recriminations in the relationship occurred asthe Asad regime was facing its most serious internal challenge: armed oppo-sition on the part of Islamist forces. Asad’s biographer Patrick Seale reportsthat from mid-1979 through mid-1980 “the underground held the initiativeand Asad seemed in greatest danger,” and that the battle between regime andopposition that leveled large parts of the city of Hama in 1982 was “a last-ditchbattle which one side or the other had to win and which, one way or the other,would decide the fate of the country.”59 The report of the Ba’th party congressof 1985 termed this a period of “conspiracy and confrontation imposed onour region and our revolution . . . one of the most difficult and dangerousperiods.”60

55. Eberhard Kienle, Ba’th vs. Ba’th: The Conflict between Syria and Iraq, 1968–1989 (London: I. B.Taurus, 1990), 47, 55. Asad’s biographer, Patrick Seale, wrote: “Incestuously involved with oneanother, the Iraqi and Syrian Ba’th parties were riven by mutual distrust as each was convincedthat the other had planted a Trojan horse in its ranks” (Patrick Seale, Asad: The Struggle for theMiddle East [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 354).

56. Kienle, Ba’th vs. Ba’th, 85–86.57. Ibid. 101–17.58. Seale contends that there might be some truth in the Iraqi accusations, though he paints

Asad as an unwitting participant in Iraqi factional politics; Asad, 355.59. Seale, Asad, 324, 332–33.60. hizb al-ba’th al-’arabi al-’ishtiraki - al-qiyada al-qutriyya al-suriyya [Arab Socialist Ba’th

Party—Syrian regional leadership], taqarir al-mu’tamar al-qutri al-thamin wa muqarrarat [Reportsand decisions of the 8th regional congress] (Damascus: matba’at al-qiyada al-qutriyya, 1985),3, 5.

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The Iranian Revolution occurred in the midst of the Islamist challenge tothe Asad regime. For Damascus, however, it was Iraqi support for its do-mestic opponents, not the demonstration effect of what was happening inTehran, that was seen as more threatening to regime stability. From 1980Syrian opposition groups made Baghdad, not Teheran, their headquarters.61

Syrian leaders publicly accused Iraq of support for the Islamist opposition.Asad in 1982, after the Hama uprising, accused Saddam Hussein of directingthe Islamist campaign in Syria: “He came to Syria to carry out further his fa-vorite hobbies: killing, asassination and sabotage.”62 ‘Abd al-Halim Khaddam,vice-president and former foreign minister, during the Gulf War presented areview of Syrian-Iraqi relations to Ba’th Party cadres in which he detailedSyria’s grievances against Saddam. After the break-up of the Syrian-Iraqiunity plan in 1979, he said “in less than a year relations were destroyed. Aconspiracy was happening against Syria, and priceless Syrian blood was be-ing shed.” He left no doubt as to the foreign hand involved: “Those whotalk now about how an Arab soldier could face another Arab soldier inthe Gulf, should remember the amount of blood shed in Syria as a resultof the support our friends in Baghdad gave to the Muslim Brotherhoodgang.”63

There is no evidence that Teheran provided moral or material support tothe Syrian Islamic opposition; on the contrary, the Iranian leadership wasstudiously quiet about Asad’s physical elimination of his Islamic opponents.The risks of alienating another Arab state, at a time when it was increasinglyisolated in the region, dampened Iranian enthusiasm to export its revolutionto Syria. Damascus welcomed the Iranian Revolution as a blow to Israel anda new strategic ally for the Arab and Palestinian causes. As early as April 1979Asad told an interviewer: “We consider the victory of the Iranian Revolution,with the slogans it raises, a victory for us, the Arabs.” Immediately after theIran-Iraq war began, Asad said: “Isn’t it a great gain that Iran changed to ourside after it had been on Israel’s side? . . . Isn’t it our duty to preserve this greatgain? To work to advance it and develop it rather than lose it and work atcreating an eternal enemy?”64

With the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Syria was forced to choose betweenthreats. It had regularly accused the United States of frustrating Arab aims and

61. Kienle, Ba’th vs. Ba’th, 154–62.62. Quoted in Kienle, Ba’th vs. Ba’th, 160. “Evidence of Iraqi complicity was also overwhelm-

ing” (Seale, Asad, 336).63. Ahmad ’Ajaj, ’As’ad ’Ubur and Sa’d al-Qasim, al-’i’lam al-suri wa ’azmat al-khalij [The

Syrian media and the Gulf Crisis] (Damascus: Al-Thawra Newspaper, 1992), 297–98.64. Mustafa Tlas, ed., kathalik qal al-’asad [Thus said Asad] (Damascus: Tlas Publishing,

1991), 476.

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even implied that Washington was involved in Syrian domestic problems.65

The American threat, however, was seen largely in geopolitical terms—itssupport for Israel. A stronger Saddam Hussein was not only a rival for regionalinfluence, but also a proven threat to the domestic stability of the Asad regime.The support and sympathy that Saddam engendered even in Syria after theinvasion of Kuwait can be indirectly inferred from the lengths the regimewent to in justifying its policy of alignment with the United States, such as thespeech by Khaddam referenced above.66

Jordan. For the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the most serious domesticthreat and military threat in the 1970s and into the 1980s originated fromSyria (despite a brief rapprochement in the mid-1970s). In 1970 Syrian troopsintervened in Jordan to support Palestinian forces in the Jordanian civil war.In July 1980 Syrian commandos raided a suspected Muslim Brotherhood basein Jordan, and later that year Syrian forces were mobilized on the Jordanianborder.67 Syria asserted the right to control Jordanian policy toward the peaceprocess. Jordan responded by giving shelter to Asad’s Muslim Brotherhoodenemies in the late 1970s and early 1980s.68 While Jordanian policy was dom-inated by the need to deal with threats from both Israel and Syria, it couldnot and did not ignore its eastern border. Its relations with Gulf states werenot only part of its strategy for dealing with these threats, but also reflectedJordanian perceptions of potential threats emanating from that part of theMiddle East.

Iraq was not particularly friendly to Jordan in the early 1970s, but its hostilitywas not very intense. Unlike Syria, Iraq did not intervene in the 1970 Jordaniancivil war. By the mid-1970s, as part of its general reassessment of its inter-Arabpolicy, Iraq began to deal with Jordan more as a potential partner than as anideological pariah.69 Jordan shared with the Shah’s Iran a monarchical systemof government and an American orientation, and had cooperated with Iran

65. See hizb al-ba’th, taqarir al-mu’tamar al-qutri al-thamin wa muqarrarat, 3–5.66. The author’s personal interviews with current and former Syrian government officials

confirmed that Syrian public opinion was sympathetic to the Iraqi cause in the Gulf War.Interviews conducted in Damascus, March 1998.

67. See Brand, Jordan’s Inter-Arab Relations, 168–70, Valerie Yorke, Domestic Politics and RegionalSecurity: Jordan, Syria and Israel (Aldershot, U.K.: Gower Publishing for the International Instituteof Strategic Studies, 1988), 245–47, Alasdair Drysdale and Raymond A. Hinnebusch, Syria andthe Middle East Peace Process (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1991), 68–72. TheSyrian raid of July 1980 is reported by Seale, Asad, 329. The sense of threat from Syria wasconfirmed during interviews with current and former Jordanian officials, Amman July 1988and May 1991.

68. A fact that King Hussein was forced to admit in 1985, as a price for improved relationswith Syria. Yorke, Domestic Politics and Regional Security, 52.

69. Amatzia Baram, “Baathi Iraq and Hashimite Jordan: From Hostility to Alignment,”Middle East Journal 45, no. 1 (winter 1991): 52–56.

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on a number of regional issues. Iraq until the late 1970s was a limited domesticthreat; Iran to some extent a supporter of the Jordanian regime.

The Iranian Revolution presented much the same kind of ideological/domestic challenge to King Husayn that it did to the Saudis. Ayatallah Khu-mayni did not mince words: monarchies were un-Islamic and close relationswith the American Satan compounded the offense. From 1979 to 1990 it wasTeheran that called the legitimacy of the Hashemite monarchy into question.The perception that Iran’s export of revolution could destabilize the entireregion, and perhaps even Jordan itself, was strongly felt in official circles inAmman in 1979 and the early 1980s.70 The fact that Syria quickly formedan alliance with the new revolutionary regime exacerbated the Jordaniansense of threat from Iran. Meanwhile, Iraq spent the 1980s bolstering itsties with Jordan, largely through economic relations at both the government-to-government and society-to-society levels.71

With the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the swift American response to it,the Jordanian regime was faced with a dilemma. While castigating the Gulfmonarchs, Saddam maintained the very close relationship with King Husaynthat had developed in the 1980s. The United States, for decades the majoroutside patron of the regime, presented no inherent threat to the stabilityand security of the regime. Public opinion in Jordan, however—nationalistand Islamist, Palestinian and East Bank—was running very strongly in Iraq’sfavor during the crisis. To side with the U.S.-led international coalition would,at minimum, have put at risk the cautious democratic opening in Jordanianpolitics that began with the parliamentary elections of 1989, and might haveserved to bring together disparate opposition elements into a threateninganti-regime coalition. For King Husayn, the domestic/ideological threat in1990–91 came from being seen as too close to the coalition.72

70. Author’s interviews, Amman, July 1988 and May 1991. See also Yorke Domestic Politicsand Regional Security, 47.

71. Brand, Jordan’s Inter-Arab Relations, chap. 6; Baram, “Baathi Iraq and Hashemite Jordan.”72. In more than twenty interviews with Jordanian officials, academics and observers con-

ducted in May 1991, the author found the nearly unanimous view that aligning with the coalitionagainst Iraq was a domestic political impossibility for the king if he wanted to maintain the par-ticipatory experiment of 1989. This conclusion is supported by Laurie Brand, “Liberalizationand Changing Political Coalitions: The Bases of Jordan’s 1990–91 Gulf Crisis Policy,” JerusalemJournal of International Relations 13, no. 4 (December 1991): 1–46; Brand, Jordan’s Inter-Arab Re-lations, 284–295; Marc Lynch, “Abandoning Iraq: Jordan’s Alliances and the Politics of StateIdentity,” Security Studies 8, no. 2–3 (winter 1998/99): 347–88 and Marc Lynch, State Interestsand Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1999), chap. 5. Brand contends that budget security rather than threat perception droveJordanian alignment behavior here; Lynch emphasizes discursive processes. Both focus, as Ido, on the domestic arena as the source of the Jordanian regime’s calculations.

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Table 1ORIGINS OF THREATS AND ALLIANCE CHOICES

Aggregate Aggregate AllianceYears power threat intentions threat choice

Saudi Arabia1971–74 Iran Iraq Iran (weak)1975–78 Iran None Equidistance1979–81 Iraq Iran Iraq1982–86 Iran Iran Iraq1987–90 Iraq Iran Iraq (weak)1990–91 Iraq Iraq Coalition

Jordan1971–74 Iraq Iraq (weak) Iran (weak)1975–78 Iraq None Equidistance1979–81 Iraq Iran Iraq1982–86 Iran Iran Iraq1987–90 Iraq Iran Iraq1990–91 Iraq/coalition Coalition∗ Iraq

Syria1971–74 Iraq Iraq None1975–mid 79 Iraq Iraq Iraq (briefly)mid 1979–81 Iraq Iraq/Iran Iran1982–86 Iran Iraq Iran1987–90 Iraq Iraq Iran1990–91 Iraq/coalition Iraq Coalition

∗In the sense that aligning with the coalition would create domestic prob-lems for the Jordanian regime, particularly regarding the liberalization ithad initiated in 1989.

A summary of the preceding discussion on coding of aggregate power andaggressive intentions threats for the three countries during the 1971–91 periodcan be found in table 1.

ALIGNMENT DECISIONS: SAUDI ARABIA, SYRIA AND JORDAN

SAUDI ARABIA

If military power considerations predominated in Saudi alignment behavior,one would expect to see Riyad balancing against the Shah’s Iran in the 1970s

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and against the Islamic Republic in the mid-1980s, and against Iraq at the outsetof the 1980s and at the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Saudi behavior, however,differed markedly from this pattern. Instead, Saudis balanced against the stateexhibiting the greater degree of hostile intentions toward their ruling regime,whether that state had the military power to back that hostility up or not.

With the British withdrawal, Saudi Arabia developed correct and even some-what cooperative relations with the Shah, mediated by the United States andBritain. Iran agreed to drop its claim to Bahrain, in effect recognizing it aswithin a Saudi sphere of influence, while Saudi Arabia grudgingly accepted ju-nior partnership with Iran in the American twin-pillar strategy in the Gulf. Iraq,left out of this relationship, escalated its rhetoric against the Saudis, encouragedArab nationalist opposition groups in the newly independent shaykhdoms,menaced the Kuwait border in 1973, and signed a treaty of friendship andcooperation with the Soviet Union in 1972.73

The Algiers Accord in 1975 marked a change in Iraqi dispositions, and SaudiArabia responded positively to Baghdad’s overtures. High-level Iraqi officials,including then Vice-President Saddam Husayn and President Ahmad Hassanal-Bakr, visited the kingdom, and ranking Saudis, like then Crown PrinceFahd, paid return visits to Baghdad. The two sides negotiated a settlement ofborder questions, eliminating the British-drawn, diamond-shaped neutral zonebetween their territories.74 The Saudis supported Iraqi moves to organize acoordinated Arab response to the Camp David accords at the Baghdad summitof October 1978. This new relationship with Iraq did not come at the expenseof relations with Iran, which continued on the course set in the early 1970s ofwary but real cooperation. By the end of 1978 the three states were discussingincreasing the level of their cooperation on domestic security issues, thoughby then the Shah’s regime was on its last legs.75 The Saudis used their newrelationship with Iraq to assume a geopolitical position equi-distant betweenBaghdad and Tehran, avoiding alignment with either.

With the Iranian revolution, Saudi relations with Iraq became much closer,and those with Iran quickly degenerated into open hostility. The Saudis fol-lowed the Iraqi lead in cutting off ties to Egypt after the signing of the March1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, despite the problems this created in U.S.-Saudi relations. The beginning of the Iran-Iraq war presented the Saudis with aserious dilemma. They were not so comfortable with Iraq that the prospect ofa victorious Iraq did not frighten them. Then Crown Prince Fahd was the only

73. Safran, Saudi Arabia, 135–38.74. Ibid., 266.75. New York Times, 18 June 1978, 1.

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Gulf leader to whom Iraqi president Saddam Hussein disclosed his intentionto attack Iran; Fahd tried to dissuade Saddam from the attack.76 Unlike Jordan,Saudi Arabia did not publicly support the Iraqi attack in September 1980.Forced to choose between the two combatants, however, Saudi Arabia alignedwith Iraq. Immediately upon the beginning of hostilities, Saudi Arabia permit-ted Iraqi planes to use Saudi bases (to hide them from Iranian counter-attack)and Saudi ports were opened for the trans-shipment of goods to Iraq.77 Thequestion of financial aid is less clear. Iraqi sources indicate that Saudi financialaid to Iraq began immediately upon the onset of the Iran-Iraq war.78 In thewake of the Gulf War, many Saudi and Gulf officials denied that Saudi finan-cial aid was extended to Iraq before 1982, when Iranian troops entered Iraqiterritory.79 Contemporary sources, however, report substantial Saudi financialaid to Iraq in 1980 and 1981.80 The Saudis clearly took a number of costlysteps, both in terms of financial costs and in terms of exposure to Iraniancounter-measures, to support Iraq even while Iraqi forces were in Iranianterritory.

Whatever Saudi reluctance there might have been to support Iraq whole-heartedly disappeared once Iranian forces entered Iraqi territory. Billions ofdollars of Saudi financial support helped Iraq fund the war. That supportincluded direct aid, loans, military equipment and the sale of oil from theSaudi-Kuwaiti neutral zone with profits going to Iraq (theoretically as a “loan”of oil).81 After Syria cut the Iraqi pipeline to the Mediterranean, the Saudis per-mitted Iraq to build an oil pipeline into the Kingdom, connecting to an existingSaudi line from the Gulf to the Red Sea. Saudi Arabia also publicly supportedIraq in various Arab and Islamic diplomatic forums. For the remainder of theIran-Iraq war, Saudi Arabia was squarely in Iraq’s camp.

76. Ghazi Algosaibi, The Gulf Crisis: An Attempt to Understand (London: Kegan Paul, 1993),28–29.

77. Safran, Saudi Arabia, 369; New York Times, 3 October 1980, A10. Algosaibi, then a ministerin the Saudi cabinet and now Saudi ambassador to London, wrote: “As soon as the [Iran-Iraq]war started, the Kingdom’s government threw all its weight behind Saddam Hussein” (The GulfCrisis, 29).

78. High-ranking Iraqi official, interview with author, April 1995; Khadduri, The Gulf War,154.

79. Author’s interviews in Riyad (May 1991) and Kuwait (May 1997).80. Gerd Nonneman, Iraq, the Gulf States and the War (London: Ithaca Press, 1986), 96–97.

See also Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, 9 February 1981, 6, which reports that “suggestions that allor part of the Saudi incremental price might be passed on to Iraq again proved impossible toverify or dismiss.”

81. King Fahd, in a public speech during the Gulf War, listed the amounts of aid to Iraq.al-Sharq al-Awsat, 17 January 1991, 4. Saudi sources subsequently confirmed that from the timeof the closure of the Iraqi-Syrian pipeline in April 1982, Saudi oil resources in the Kuwait-SaudiArabia neutral zone were placed “at Iraq’s disposal.” Omar Al-Zobidy, “Iraq owes KingdomSR94b in debt,” Arab News (Jidda), 25 June 2001.

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The only time during the Iran-Iraq war when Saudi Arabia sought out abetter relationship with Iran was in 1985, when Iranian policy shifted fromcondemnation of the Gulf monarchies to attempting to woo them away fromIraq. Iranian rhetoric moderated, the behavior of Iranian pilgrims in Meccaimproved and the Iranian foreign minister made a visit in December 1984 toRiyad. Saudi foreign minister Prince Sa’ud al-Faysal went to Teheran in May1985, the first high-ranking Saudi official to visit Iran since the revolution.82 Itshould be noted that Iranian forces were still in Iraq and showed no intentionsof leaving during the Saudi diplomatic initiative toward Iran; what had changedduring this period was Iranian rhetoric and actions toward the Saudi regimeitself. These tentative approaches, however, ended with the Iranian capture ofthe Fao peninsula in January 1986, and a subsequent re-escalation of rhetoricbetween the countries. Saudi support for the American reflagging effort andthe clash between Iranian pilgrims and Saudi security forces during the 1987pilgrimage, which left over 200 dead, led the relationship to its lowest point.In 1988, Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic relations with Iran and effectivelyprohibited Iranians from making the pilgrimage.83

Despite the end of the war and Iraq’s military resurgence in the year pre-ceding, Saudi Arabia continued its alignment with Iraq against Iran. It signeda non-agression pact with Baghdad in the spring of 1990, and continued toeschew contacts with Teheran, despite the relative increase in Iraqi power com-pared to Iran, even during the Iraqi build-up against Kuwait in the summerof 1990. With the Iraqi invasion Saudi policy abruptly changed. Riyad quicklyinvited American forces in to confront the Iraqis, and set out during the crisisto repair relations with Iran.

SYRIA

Intense hostility between the Syrian and Iraqi regimes characterizes the entireperiod under study, with the brief but important exception of 1978–79. Thetwo wings of the Ba’th Party worked to delegitimize each other rhetoricallyand destabilize each other domestically. The logic of state interest and powerthat should have brought them together—their shared fear of and antipathytoward Israel, Turkey and Islamic fundamentalism—was not strong enoughto overcome the regime security interests of each side. What changes duringthis period is the nature of Syria’s relations with Iran. The Shah’s Iran and

82. For accounts of the Saudi-Iranian “flirtation,” see Chubin and Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War,153–55, 162–79; Ramazani, Revolutionary Iran, 99, 142–43.

83. Gause, “Gulf Regional Politics,” 62.

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Syria had very little to do with one another. The Shah was closely aligned withboth the United States and Israel, and thus not a very attractive partner forSyria. Despite their shared antipathy toward the Ba’thist regime in Iraq, Syriaand the Shah’s Iran did not make common cause against it.

The brief Syrian rapprochement with Iraq, beginning in 1978 and continuinguntil its bitter break in mid-1979, was driven by Arab-Israeli concerns.84 WithEgypt out of the Arab equation, the strategic equation on the Israeli-Syrianfront became substantially worse for Damascus (a fact Israel exploited in the1982 invasion of Lebanon). In those straightened circumstances, Asad turnedto his arch-rivals in Baghdad, signing in October 1978 the “Charter of JointNational Action” that called for eventual unity between the two countries.Syria, however, worried about Iraqi intentions in the unity process from theoutset, refusing to allow Iraqi troops to be stationed in Syria (despite thestrategic rationale behind Syria’s signing of the Charter), opposing merger ofthe two armies and of the two branches of the Ba’th Party. When SaddamHussein came to power in July 1979, he accused Syria of interference in Iraqidomestic politics, and the “union” quickly collapsed.85 By 1980 the Syrianregime was isolated regionally and experiencing a serious domestic challenge,backed by Iraq, from the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is in that context that the Syrian-Iranian relationship of the 1980s—theMiddle Eastern version of the Soviet-German Rapallo Treaty of 1922—mustbe evaluated. The Ba

′thist regime in Damascus and the Islamic revolutionaries

in Teheran had very little in common. Ayatallah Khumayni excoriated secularand nationalist regimes that suppressed local Islamic movements; the Asadregime was a prototype of such a regime.86 The spread of Iranian influence andIranian-style ideological movements in the Arab Middle East would threatenthe Syrian regime. The Syrian turn to Iran can only be understood as aneffort to break out of regional isolation through a link with the only statein the area that shared its antipathy toward both Saddam’s Iraq and Israel.Iran, appreciating the strategic and political advantages of having a majorArab state ally, particularly one at Iraq’s back door, remained silent even whileAsad was brutally supressing the Syrian Islamic opposition in the early 1980s.

84. This was the unanimous view of current and former Syrian government officials inter-viewed by the author in Damascus (March 1998) and Washington, D.C. (April 1998).

85. Kienle, Ba’th vs. Ba’th, 139–42.86. Seale, Asad, chap. 21, speculates that Shi’ism provides a link between the two regimes.

Asad and many of his closest associates, particularly in the military and security services, are’Alawis, an offshoot of Shi’ism. However, while Asad’s regime is sociologically ’Alawi in somesense, it is hardly ideologically Shi’i, or Islamic, at all. See Anoushiravan Ehteshami and RaymondHinnebusch, Syria and Iran: Middle Powers in a Penetrated System (London: Routledge, 1997), 98–99,for a similar refutation of Seale’s argument.

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There is no evidence of any kind of Iranian support for the Syrian Islamicopposition.

Immediately upon the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war, Syria worked tostrengthen its new Iranian ally. Asad personally went to Moscow to lobby forSoviet arms for Iran, and Syria acted as the transit point for Soviet, Libyan andAlgerian arms deliveries to Iran in the early months of the war.87 Syrian intel-ligence services also cooperated with Iran in anti-Iraqi activities, as Damascusbecame the base for a number of anti-Saddam Iraqi opposition groups.88 TheSyrian alignment with Iran at this point was overdetermined: Iraq was both anaggregate power threat and a threat to Syrian regime security. Contrary to stan-dard realist expectations, however, as Iran turned the tide of battle in 1982, theSyrian-Iranian relationship deepened and Damascus took the most damagingstep it could, short of actually entering the war, against Iraq. In April 1982,three months before Iranian troops entered Iraqi territory (and two monthsafter the brutal suppression of the Islamist uprising in Hama), Syria cut thepipeline that brought oil from northern Iraq to the Mediterranean, deprivingIraq of the revenue of 700,000 barrels per day of oil sales, and massed troopson the Iraqi border. Just one month before that, Syria and Iran formalizedtheir developing alliance, with an agreement by Iran to supply Syria with fixedamounts of free and subsidized oil.89 Just when Syria should have been worriedabout increasing Iranian power and been less concerned about the possibilityof a victorious Iraq, it was committing to a formal alliance with Iran and takingstrong action against Iraq.90

The Syrian decision to join the anti-Iraq coalition in 1990 can be under-stood only in terms of the threat a victorious Saddam Husayn could pose tothe domestic and regional positions of the Asad regime. Increased Americaninfluence in the region, over and above that occasioned by the end of the coldwar, could only redound to the advantage of the Israelis. The risks of join-ing the coalition were substantial, including the public opinion costs in Syria,and the benefits for the future uncertain (aside from the immediate financialbenefits, in terms of Gulf state support). A Saddam with even more power,however, could be more directly threatening, to regional and domestic Syrianinterests. For Asad, both the coalition and Iraq could be seen as aggregate

87. Hussein Agha and Ahmad Khalidi, Syria and Iran: Rivalry and Cooperation (London: PinterPublishers for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1995), 104.

88. Seale, Asad, 357–58; Chubin and Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War, 148.89. Agha and Khalidi, Syria and Iran, 12–13, 104–5; Ramazani, Revolutionary Iran, 81–82;

Kienle, Ba’th vs. Ba’th, 165.90. Fred Lawson, Why Syria Goes to War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), argues that

this escalation against Iraq was meant to consolidate internal divisions, beyond the confrontationwith the Islamist opposition, in the Asad regime, chap. 4.

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power threats. A victorious Saddam, however, would pose a direct threat toAsad’s hold on power, both in Lebanon and in Syria itself (in 1989 Saddam hadsupported Michel Awn, a Lebanese general attempting to form an anti-Syriancoalition in that country).91

JORDAN

Given Iraq’s geographic proximity to Jordan and its substantial advantages overJordan in power capabilities, the incentives for Jordan to balance against Iraq onGulf issues are clear. In the 1980s and early 1990s, however, other Gulf actorsemerged whose positions directly challenged King Hussein’s domestic politicalstrategy and position, while the Iraqi government worked from the mid-1970sto cultivate close ties with both the King and with important elements ofJordanian society. It was against the former threats, not against Iraqi power,that Jordan chose to balance.

Jordanian-Iraqi relations at the beginning of the 1970s were formal andcorrect, but hardly close. Iraq was seen not only as strategic depth in theconfrontation with Israel but also as a useful counterweight to Syria. Therewas, however, an undercurrent of apprehension about Baghdad’s intentions,exacerbated by the fact that in the early 1970s units of the Iraqi army werestationed in eastern Jordan (a leftover of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war). Jordan’srelations with the Shah’s Iran were much more cordial, though hardly risingto the level of an alliance. Jordan cooperated with Iran militarily in Oman,where forces of both countries supported the Sultan’s efforts to put down theIraqi-supported Dhufar rebellion in the early 1970s.92

With the change in Iraqi policy in 1975, Jordanian-Iraqi relations improvedconsiderably. Jordan, like Saudi Arabia and Syria, followed the Iraqi lead inresponding to the Camp David accords and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.Up until 1979, improved Jordanian-Iraqi ties did not come at the expense ofAmman’s existing relationship with the Shah. It was only after the Iranian rev-olution, and particularly with the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war, that Jordan’srelationship with Saddam’s Iraq was sufficiently costly to be classified as analliance. King Hussein became Iraq’s most vociferous public ally in its con-frontation with Iran. Jordan took the lead in organizing Arab political support

91. In his extended justification for Syria’s joining the coalition, Khaddam stressed thatIraq’s support for Awn in Lebanon in effect placed Saddam on the same side as Israel in theArab-Israeli conflict. Ajaj et al, al-’i’lam al-suri wa ’azmat al-khalij, 310–11.

92. On the Dhufar rebellion, see J. E. Peterson, Oman in the Twentieth Century (New York:Barnes and Noble, 1978), 180–200.

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for Iraq, even at the risk of alienating both Iran and Syria (for example, theSyrian mobilization on Jordan’s border in December 1980 as King Husseinpresided over an Arab summit meeting called to express support for Iraq).In March 1981 Iraq and Jordan signed a mutual defense agreement, and inMarch 1982 King Hussein sent a brigade of Jordanian “volunteers” to fightwith Iraq. Though more a public relations ploy than a serious military commit-ment, the Yarmouk Brigade publicly implicated Jordan in Iraq’s war effort.93

The economic and strategic importance of the Jordanian route to Iraq wasmore substantive, and when Iraq had problems paying for the goods it wasimporting through Jordan, the Jordanian government extended credits, run-ning up considerable arrears, to maintain the economic link.94 With the endof the Iran-Iraq war, Jordan joined with Iraq (and Egypt and North Yemen)in the Arab Cooperation Council.95

With the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Jordan was placed before an historicdecision. The relationship with Iraq had developed on both the politicaland the economic levels to the point that substantial elements of Jordanianpublic opinion were enthusiastic in their support for Saddam’s move. Onthe other hand, Jordan also received direct (aid, subsidized oil) and indi-rect (market for Jordanian and Palestinian expatriate labor) economic ben-efits from the Gulf monarchies.96 King Husayn had always looked to theWest, at first to Britain and then increasingly to the United States, as hismajor outside power patrons—protectors of Jordan against both Israel andpotentially threatening Arab neighbors. While refusing to support Saddam’sannexation of Kuwait, the King refused to join the coalition, expressed sym-pathy for the Iraqi position, condemned the presence of foreign forces inthe region, allowed goods to continue to cross the Jordanian-Iraqi border,despite the U.N. sanctions, shared intelligence and technology with Iraq duringthe crisis,97 and sought a diplomatic solution to the crisis that would avoidan Iraqi military defeat. Jordan made a costly choice to align with Iraq in1990–91.

93. Yorke, Domestic Politics and Regional Security, 264–65.94. Brand, Jordan’s Inter-Arab Relations, 213–14, 222–25.95. Curtis R. Ryan, “Jordan and the Rise and Fall of the Arab Cooperation Council,” Middle

East Journal 52, no. 2 (summer 1998): 386–401.96. “There is no question that . . . Saudi aid has been Jordan’s most secure and extensive

form of support over the years” (Brand, Jordan’s Inter-Arab Relations, 117). Brand also reportsthat Saudi Arabia promised to provide 50 percent of Jordan’s oil needs if Jordan joined thecoalition, 286.

97. According to a report by the U.S. General Accounting Office. New York Times, 17 June1993, A13.

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ALIGNMENT CHOICE IN THE GULF

TABLE 1 PRESENTS in schematic form the narrative presented above. It isclear that the decisions described above are in fact balancing decisions, not

motivated by intentions to bandwagon with the dominant state, confirmingHypothesis 3 set out at the beginning of the article. When threats were unam-biguous, balancing behavior predominated. In the nine cases where one statepresented both a military power and an aggressive intentions threat, sevenresulted in balancing against that country. There was one brief and unhappyepisode of bandwagoning (Syria-Iraq 1978–79), and one no alignment (Syria1971–74). Disaggregating different types of threat, however, it is clear thatthreats emanating from states with aggressive intentions, operationalized asideological and subversive efforts to destabilize other regimes, had promi-nance in the calculations of the Saudi, Syrian and Jordanian regimes overthreats based on military power capabilities.

Most notably, balancing against aggregate military power can account foronly six of the eighteen alliance decisions. There were more instances of band-wagoning with potential capabilities threats than balancing them. Balancingagainst aggressive intentions threats accounted for nearly three-quarters of allthe alignment decisions. In all six cases where the origin of the military powerthreat and the aggressive intentions threat clearly differed, the state in ques-tion balanced against the aggressive intentions threat. In the eight instances ofbandwagoning with a potential military capabilities threat, seven are accountedfor by balancing against aggressive intentions. There is only one clear instanceof bandwagoning with an aggressive intentions threat, the Syrian decision toseek a rapprochement with Iraq in 1978–79, and that episode ended very badlyfor Syria. These findings lend strong support to the idea that Middle Easternleaders worry more about neighbors that exhibit hostility toward their regimes,regardless of whether they have the capabilities to turn that hostility into anopen military threat, than about neighbors who are simply building up theirmilitary power.

The importance of ideological challenges across borders is highlighted in thetwo cases (Saudi 1975–78 and Jordan 1975–78) where no aggressive intentionsthreat was present. In neither case did the states act to balance against the ag-gregate military power threat. Rather, they assumed a position of equidistancebetween Iran and Iraq, maintaining good and carefully equivalent relationswith both. Finally, we should note that ideological differences can also pre-clude what, by balancing logic, are perfectly sensible alignment matches. In1971–74, Syria should have sought an Iranian tie against Iraq, but did notbecause of the Shah’s links to other enemies of Syria. Saudi Arabia should

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have moved toward Iran in 1989 and early 1990, but remained fearful of therevolutionaries in Teheran. Neither Jordan nor Saudi Arabia at any time soughtan open security link with Israel against Iraq or Iran (or Syria), despite the factthat Jordan had a decent (if less than public) working relationship with Israelin the 1970s and that Saudi Arabia faced no direct threat from Israel.

CONCLUSIONS (AND A POST-SCRIPT ON THE 2003 IRAQ WAR)

THE FINDINGS SET out above suggest that in the Middle East leaders viewexternal challenges to their domestic legitimacy and security, based upon

transnational ideological platforms of Islam and pan-Arabism, as being moreserious than threats based simply upon a preponderance of military capabilities.It is significant for international relations theories about alliance behavior that,even in an area where interstate war is common, where classical notions ofbalancing against capabilities should be most robust, leaders do not see militarycapabilities by themselves as threatening. The threat trip-wire for these leaderswas direct assaults on the legitimacy and stability of their ruling regimes. It wasthose rhetorical and subversive signals, not distributions of power, which weresalient in how the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan prioritized amongthe potential threats they faced.

While not undermining realists’ assertion that balancing behavior predom-inates in the region, this conclusion suggests that the idea of threat Waltintroduced into the alliance debate needs to be disaggregated, particularly insituations where states face multiple threats, to ascertain what really drivesalliance decisions. The findings support constructivists’ assertion that identityand ideas are as important as material power in driving international politics.Those ideas, however, need to be instantiated in a tangible and material form,in this case in the form of overt threats to domestic regime stability, for themto play an important role in leaders’ calculations about threats and alliances.

Alliance behavior by Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia in the most recentregional war, the American attack on Iraq in 2003, generally conforms tothe conclusions reached here, though the circumstances of that war weresubstantially different from previous regional conflicts. In 2003 neither SaudiArabia, Jordan nor Syria saw Iraq as an immediate or potential threat to its stateor regime security. Saddam Hussein had been defanged militarily by his defeatin the Gulf War of 1990–91 and subsequent sanctions, and his political appealin the region much reduced. He did not present either an aggressive intentionsthreat or an aggregate power threat in 2003. Riyad, Amman and Damascuswere not balancing threats the way they had to in previous conflicts, where

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there were potential threats from both parties. Rather, they were balancingtheir concerns with American power and their relations with the United Stateson the one hand, and their domestic political environments on the other, inmaking their choices in the 2003 crisis.

Jordan and Saudi Arabia faced a similar situation in 2003. Both had closeties to the United States, which they wanted to preserve, but both also facedpublics who were overwhelmingly hostile to the American war. Both took asimilar position in the war—assisting the United States in ways they couldplausibly deny to their publics, but not participating openly in the conflicton the American side. Both allowed American special forces units to operatefrom their territory into Iraq, and opened their airspace to American aircraft.Saudi Arabia permitted the United States to use an American-built commandand control facility at Prince Sultan Airbase, south of Riyad, to direct the airwar over Iraq. Both publicly opposed the war, however, and argued to theirown people that they were working to avoid the conflict (before it began) andend it quickly through diplomacy once it did begin.98 Rather than balancingthreats, they were balancing their desire for strong ties with the world’s mostpowerful state against the domestic costs of such ties. Both governments betthat they could eat their cake and have it, too, maintaining control domesticallywhile doing enough to keep Washington happy. So far, they have been able towalk that line.

It is particularly interesting that Jordan, which faced similar domestic op-position to an American war against Iraq in 1990–91, made a different choicein 2003. Both choices, however, stemmed from the same roots in Jordaniandomestic politics. As related above, at the time of the Gulf War Jordan had justbegun a difficult period of more open, electoral politics, meant to provide theregime with some societal support during difficult economic times. Aligningwith the coalition would have put that participatory experiment at grave risk.King Abdallah, coming to power upon his father’s death in 1999, had made thestrategic decision to link Jordan’s economy as much as possible to globalizingtrends, which meant linking it with the United States. He was willing to limitJordan’s democratic experiment to do so, postponing parliamentary electionsfor two years, from their scheduled date in 2001 to after the 2003 Iraq war.His domestic economic and security strategy made it impossible for him toadopt a position like that of his father in 1990–91, risking the American tie to

98. On Jordanian policy, see John F. Burns, “Jordan’s King, in Gamble, Lends Hand to theU.S.,” New York Times, 9 March 2003. On Saudi policy, see Craig S. Smith, “Reluctant Saudi ArabiaPrepares Its Quiet Role in the U.S.-Led War on Iraq,” New York Times, 20 March 2003; ChristopherCooper and Greg Jaffe, “U.S. Use of Saudi Airbases Shows Kingdom’s Quiet Commitment,”Wall Street Journal, 12 March 2003.

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appeal to local public opinion. In both cases, the Jordanian government’s do-mestic survival strategy dictated its foreign alignment strategy, but in differentdirections.

Syria, unlike Jordan and Saudi Arabia, had immediate regime security rea-sons to fear an American victory in Iraq. While Damascus was not a memberof the Axis of Evil, Washington had an officially designated it a state supporterof terrorism some years earlier. The easy collapse of one Ba’thist regime mightlead those in Washington intent on remaking the region to think that a similarregime next door could just as easily be brought down. Syria also had estab-lished limited but lucrative economic relations with Iraq a few years previously,most notably importing Iraqi oil in violation of U.N. economic sanctions. WhileSyria could do nothing militarily to prevent an American victory in Iraq, it couldtake small steps to increase the cost to the United States of victory. Before thewar, Damascus scuttled an Arab League plan to approach Saddam Husseinwith a proposal to avert conflict, saying that it would give an Arab cover tothe American war plan. It strongly and publicly criticized Arab regimes coop-erating with the United States According to American officials, it also allowedlimited amounts of military equipment to be shipped to Iraq through its ter-ritory before the fighting, and allowed foreign fighters to enter Iraq throughSyria during and after the war.99 In these small ways, the Syrian regime soughtto balance against the possible threat the United States might pose to its owndomestic stability, if an easy victory in Iraq led an emboldened Washingtonto look for new targets in the region. Still, Syria’s strategy in the 2003 Iraqwar was not a complete alignment with Iraq, which would have done littlegood militarily and would have exposed Damascus to direct American attack.Rather, it tried to do as much as it could to complicate American militaryand diplomatic efforts in Iraq, without drawing a direct American response,to convince Washington of the high price of regime change in the region. Aswas the case in previous Syrian alignment decisions, domestic regime securitydrove the Syrian reaction to the Iraq war.

99. Eyal Zisser, “Syria and the War in Iraq,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 7, no.2 (June 2003), (meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2003/issue2/jv7n2a4.html); Susan Sachs, “Internal RiftDooms Arab League Plan to Help Avert War by Pressing Iraq,” New York Times, 14 March 2003.

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balancing what? threat perception and alliance choice in the gulf

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