How does public opinion guide foreign policy decision making in non-democratic contexts? The case of Jordan’s foreign policy towards ISIS (the Islamic State) as part of the American-led coalition to ‘degrade and destroy’ the group provides a useful case study to test competing hypotheses on the influence of public opinion in foreign policy. The Hashemite Kingdom’s actions – especially in the wake of the immolation by ISIS of the captured Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh in February 2015 – seem to be linked to the changing position of public opinion. Did Jordanian participation in what had been up to that point a publically unpopular war change by the swing in public opinion set in motion by the burning of Jordan’s pilot? Research on the influence of public opinion on foreign policy does not assume that politicians respond reflexively to the public mood (or vice versa). Rather, a range of contextual intervening factors (salience, elite divisions, opposition mobilization, and institutional opportunities) influence the likelihood that a consensus in public opinion results in specific foreign policy choices. Based on studies of democracies and non-democracies (like Jordan) this paper hypothesizes that a constellation of these five variables that results in public opinion becoming constitutive of elite foreign policy decisions. Research has shown that governing elites are more likely to be constrained in situations where they face an issue of moderate salience, divisions exist among important political groups on how to react, opposition groups build a consensus within the public sphere about the issue—which consensus is translated into a mobilization of public opinion into the political arena—and institutional structures allow for mobilization and cannot be manipulated enough to limit opposition mobilization. This paper investigates if this chain of events proves constitutive of foreign policy decisions as well by tracing events against measures of public opinion in survey research and in public sphere debates in the media. It then compares this neo-classical realist derived hypothesis against competing hypotheses derived from structural realism (balance of power/bandwagoning; rent-security), and constructivist interpretations (state identity).