Jordan’s King Abdullah is “a kind and gentle man” who listens carefully to what others have to say before offering his own opinion and considers the long-range effects of any decisions he makes.
So say his former instructors at a military institute in Monterey, where the late King Hussein’s eldest son spent a month last summer participating in an international defense management course.
Abdullah was one of 50 or so high-ranking military officers and civilian officials enrolled in a four-week course last summer at the Defense Management Resources Institute run by the U.S. Defense Department on the campus of the Naval Postgraduate School.
The school, which offers postgraduate degrees in military subjects, counts 253 foreign students, including Israelis, among its current enrollment of around 1,400. The institute employs instructors from the Naval Postgraduate School, and also offers short, non-degree courses in systems analysis-based resources management for military and defense personnel.
The class Abdullah took is called the Senior International Defense Management Course, offered once a year. It is designed specifically for the most senior-ranking military and defense personnel of various countries, including generals, admirals and heads of government ministries.
The course involves classroom lectures, followed by small-group discussions where participants apply lessons to real-life and potential situations in their home countries.
Assistant Professor Jim Felli, who teaches decision science and led a discussion group that included Abdullah last summer, said he “found him to be intelligent and thoughtful and very respectful.”
Emphasizing that his comments reflect only his personal feelings and not an academic evaluation of Jordan’s new king, Felli added: “He is very poised, very capable and very confident. He is concerned with the big picture — not only with the here and now, but with the implications of decisions made in the here and now.”
Felli said the course emphasizes the importance of “asking the right questions” in military and defense scenarios.
“My personal belief is that he appreciated that, and really tried to ask the right questions during the course. I was very happy to have him in my discussion group.”
Associate Professor Natalie Webb, who ran anotherdiscussion group in which Abdullah participated, said one thing that impressed her about the new king was he never “pulled rank” in class, never made others feel that his royal status gave him special privileges.
“He was such a kind, gentle, thoughtful person,” Webb recalled. “We’d sit in the group, and he was the only one of royal rank that I know of there. He’d listen to what everybody had to say and then he’d speak his part. He never expected people to treat him differently than anyone else. He’s the kind of person who listens to others’ opinions, rather than exerting his own opinion first.”
When students wrote their name tags to use in class, for example, Jordan’s future king wrote, quite simply, “Abdullah.”
“So we all called him Abdullah,” Webb said.
Actually, she added, that’s not unusual in DMRI classes. While institute courses are filled with senior military officers and their civilian counterparts from more than four dozen countries around the world, instructors and other students are often unaware of any royal titles that may go along with the military rank.
Webb said recent DMRI students include the current or former defense ministers of Honduras, the Philippines, Romania and Slovakia; a chair of NATO’s military committee; and the chief and deputy chief of staff of the Royal Jordanian Air Force.
If other former DMRI students have gone on to become heads of state, Felli is unaware.
“We don’t always know where our participants go when they leave us,” he said.
Abdullah’s wife, Princess Rania, joined him with their children for the final two weeks of the course, although she did not take part in classroom studies.
Palestinian by birth, the princess moved to Jordan during the Gulf War. Of that union, Webb told a local Monterey newspaper, “[Abdullah] said the only good thing that came out of the Kuwaiti conflict was his wife.”