In late July, Iran struck a U.S. military base in Jordan, killing three American service members. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps followed up with an unusual series of messages to the Jordanian people: “You know well that we have no hostility toward your country,” the IRGC declared in a statement published on Iran’s Fars News Agency. “Rather, we love you, noble people who understand the suffering and injustice endured by the Palestinian people more than any other nation.”Another message cheekily thanked unnamed Jordanians for providing targeting information for the Iranian strikes. A third appeared to address Jordanian critics of the operation, saying that the United States, not Iran, had “violated your territorial integrity and sovereignty.”The appeals to Jordanians speak to a concerted effort, fueled by Iran’s growing confidence in its regional position since the start of the war with the United States and Israel, to convince the Arab public that an alliance with the United States is not worth the cost. The Islamic Republic has tried to drive such a wedge ever since its founding in 1979. But today’s push reflects Tehran’s perception of what Iranian officials call a “new equation of power” in the Middle East—one that includes Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz.[Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan Lemire: This may be Trump’s biggest error in the Iran war]Iran has demonstrated its willingness to defend this position through missile strikes on seven different Arab countries that host U.S. bases. At least three were aimed at Jordan, including a surprise attack on July 28. Now the IRGC is reaching out to Jordanians with professions of solidarity and love.The switch from bombardment to flattery may seem sudden, and Jordan may seem an unlikely place for the IRGC to go looking for friends. Unlike Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, Jordan has no significant Shiite minority to form a social base for the spread of Iranian influence. But Tehran has both a military rationale and an ideological one.Iran’s military purpose is clear: Jordan houses radar and anti-missile systems that help Israel detect and deter incoming Iranian fire, and it lacks the military capacity to retaliate against Iranian strikes. Jordan also lacks the economic clout that seems to have helped the United Arab Emirates—an essential export hub for Iranian goods—cut a tacit nonaggression pact with Tehran, at least for the moment.Tehran also hopes to exploit a fissure between Jordan’s people and their government, which depends on the protection and patronage of the United States. Some Jordanians have recently called for the expulsion of the U.S. military, a movement fueled in part by deep sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Some 60 percent of Jordan’s population is of Palestinian origin.Ever since the start of the Gaza war in 2023, street protests have regularly erupted in Jordan. These have been supported by the country’s king and queen and by prominent government officials, whether out of conviction or a belief that the public needs to let off steam. Queen Rania gave an interview to Christiane Amanpour two weeks after the Hamas massacre on October 7 in which she spoke of Israeli actions as a “genocide”—a gesture that was widely seen in Jordan (and Israel) as setting a new tone of fury regarding Israel’s behavior in Gaza.Jordanian demonstrators did more than let off steam: They pledged support for Hamas. Islamist networks in Jordan began gaining strength, leading the government to ban the local chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood last year. In late 2024, Jordanians, two of whom were members of the Brotherhood, carried out two cross-border terrorist attacks in Israel.Violence in Gaza has ebbed since a cease-fire took hold late last year, but Israel’s gradual, de facto annexation of the West Bank, which has accelerated in the past few years under Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, is of deep concern to Jordan. The specter of a fuller or even formal annexation—however unlikely at the moment—raises profound fears in Jordan of a flood of Palestinian refugees, which might upset the country’s fragile demographic balance and amplify anger at Israel.“The Iranians believe they know what’s going on in Jordan,” Amer al-Sabaileh, a Jordanian security expert and columnist, told me. “This could be a multilayered strategy—missiles, then propaganda, then maybe activating cells.”But Iran’s bets may well prove wrong. For all their sympathy with the Palestinian cause, Jordanians have long been profoundly distrustful of Iran’s revolutionary Shiite project, partly for sectarian reasons, given that Jordan’s people are almost all Sunni Muslims. Tehran’s latest missile blitz aimed at its neighbors is also taking a toll. Recent polling in Arab countries suggests that any sympathy Iran gained during the initial phase of the war this spring, when it was seen as a victim of Israeli aggression, evaporated with Tehran’s recent bout of air strikes on Arab countries, says Michael Robbins, the director of the Arab Barometer, a public-opinion-research organization.[Tom Nichols: Trump owes Americans a better explanation about Iran]Jordanian officials, who spoke obliquely of defending Jordanian sovereignty during the first phase of the Israeli-U.S. war earlier this year, have taken a firm line against “Iranian aggression” in recent public statements. So have some of the country’s government-aligned journalists.“Jordan is subjected to Iranian aggression, full stop,” wrote the columnist Hussein al-Rawasdeh, in an article in the newspaper al-Dustour that criticized those calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops as disloyal. “Do you stand with your country?” Other columnists went further, suggesting that the Iranian strikes might even stiffen Arab resolve and help form a more united front.But Arab countries confront limited options. “Ultimately, they all face the same strategic calculation that adopting a harder line against Iran, especially as ultra-hard-liners gain influence in Tehran, will place them more firmly in the crosshairs,” Ahmad Sharawi, a senior analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told me. Their primary weapon, he said, will remain “diplomatic condemnations.”