The passage of the U.S. health care bill is a major foreign policy victory for President Barack Obama.
It empowers him by demonstrating his ability to deliver. Nowhere is that more important than in the Middle East.
All the global mutterings about the “Carterization” of Obama, and the talk (widespread in Israel) of kicking the can down the road and so getting through the “garbage time” of a one-term president — that is suddenly yesterday’s chatter.
The reminder was timely: This man is no softie. He’s a politician tough enough to watch his rivals auto-destruct on his cool, and principled enough to set the right long-term objectives, including “comprehensive diplomatic contacts and dialogue” with Iran, as he said in his second Nowruz, or New Year, greeting to Iranians.
It fell to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to play the role Khrushchev once played in toughening a young American president.
The former Soviet leader thought he could browbeat Kennedy only to discover, in Vienna, that the Kennedy charm was not unalloyed to steel (“It will be a long, cold winter.”) Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to think he could steamroll Obama. He earned a frosty comeuppance.
The Israeli leader toyed with Obama’s unequivocal call in Cairo last June for a “stop” to Israeli settlements. He allowed the ill-timed announcement that 1,600 apartments for Jews will be built in East Jerusalem. Then, rather than scrap that, Netanyahu chose cheap cheers from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee with “Jerusalem is not a settlement.”
(I say cheap because everyone knows Jerusalem is not a settlement. That’s not the issue. The issue is that the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem is rejected by the rest of the world and any peace agreement will involve an inventive deal on its status. To build is therefore to provoke.)
Obama was not amused. He airbrushed Netanyahu’s White House visit. The message was clear: The Middle East status quo does not serve the interests of the United States (or Israel). When Obama says “stop,” he does not mean “build a bit.”
Sometimes mistakes are needed. Through the law of unintended consequences they open new avenues.
So it is with the East Jerusalem housing fiasco. Nothing will happen in the Middle East unless the United States is seen as an honest broker able to criticize both sides when needed. Obama’s anger sped a needed clarification and freed debate.
As Andrew Sullivan has observed, a cultural shift is underway with respect to Israel: “The critics have been called ‘self-hating Jews’ if they are Jewish, or anti-Semites if they are not, but these barbs — once sufficient to end someone’s career — have failed to have an effect this time.”
Yes, indeed.
I can’t foretell the consequences of the Obama-Netanyahu spat, but it might speed a new, more centrist Israeli government including Kadima. That would help. It will bolster Obama next time he has to get tough with the Palestinians, who must curb incitement, renounce violence and clarify their end goals.
Obama’s stance has also demonstrated that his focus on Israel-Palestine will not be diverted by Netanyahu’s push to place the Iranian nuclear program front and center. This is critical: Iran cannot be a Palestine-postponing pawn.
Already, there are shifts in Israeli attitudes as a result of the new American clarity. Last year, Netanyahu described Iran’s leaders as “a messianic apocalyptic cult,” which was silly. Of late we’ve had Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, setting things right: “I don’t think the Iranians, even if they got the bomb, are going to drop it in the neighborhood. They fully understand what might follow. They are radical but not total ‘meshuganas.’ They have a quite sophisticated decision-making process.”
Yes, as I’ve argued, the Iranian regime is not nuts, one reason it has survived. It’s intermittently ruthless — consistently since June 12 — but proceeds by calculation, much of it about survival. Moving from nuclear brinkmanship, a habit, to testing a weapon would be a high-risk endeavor involving the reverse-engineering of thousands of centrifuges.
Realism is needed all around. America cannot afford a third Muslim war. Israel cannot afford to open an unprecedented Persian front. The Arab world will always regard Israel as a bigger problem than Iran.
So there are no quick fixes. Deterrence and containment, which must be strengthened by U.S. bolstering of gulf state defenses, can defang Iran over time. They must be complemented by outreach to Tehran and a balanced U.S. push on Israel-Palestine.
Barak also got it right when he said that, absent a two-state solution, Israel would be “either non-Jewish or non-democratic.”
Obama is now insisting Israel act to avert that unhappy outcome. Americans, prodded by a report from Gen. David Petraeus, are beginning to see the link between terror recruitment and a festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Planning in Washington on Iran has shown a “marked shift in thinking away from the war strategy,” as Nicholas Burns, a former top State Department official, put it to me.
These are real shifts. They are prerequisites for the rapprochement with the Muslim world Obama rightly seeks. Lo, even the Middle East moves.
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