It’s Good To Interview The King: Jeffrey Goldberg and Abdullah of Jordan
Washington Post
It’s always tough to get a revealing personal interview with a political figure. It’s even rarer for that political figure to be a sitting head of state. But when you have a revealing interview with an absolute monarch that may be the hardest achievement of all.
In the April edition of Atlantic Monthly, Jeffrey Goldberg landed a major interview with King Abdullah of Jordan. The interview captured Abdullah’s struggle to try to convert his troubled Middle Eastern monarchy into a modern democratic state.
Goldberg does his best to capture the man and the monarch:
He seems in many ways to be a contradiction—an Arab king who happens to be a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, evangelizing for liberal, secular, democratic rule. But Abdullah, now nearly a decade and a half into his reign, is, in his own conception, a political and economic reformer. He says he understands that the Hashemite throne, and perhaps Jordan itself, will not survive the coming decades if he does not move his country briskly toward modernity.
It is a small miracle, of course, that he is still in power at all. He has survived the first wave of the Arab Spring revolutions, which have so far claimed the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, and will almost inevitably claim the Syrian president as well. But he has been roughed up in the process.
The article goes on to capture Abdullah’s personal feelings on topics as wide-ranging as the Muslim Brotherhood to various other heads of states from the region. It offers a window into the mind of one of the most important political figures in the Middle East. But was it really a candid interview where the subject let his guard down or was the Jordanian King simply using Goldberg as a conduit for his own purposes? Readers should be careful to remember that Abdullah isn’t talking to Jeffrey Goldberg simply to better inform subscribers to the Atlantic about Middle Eastern affairs. He has his own agenda.
So honest was Abdullah’s take and how much of it was simply a smokescreen? Only the King of Jordan knows the answer to this and he isn’t talking anymore.
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