Israel Matzav

Netanyahu isn't Khrushchev

Roger Cohen wrote a column in Tuesday's New York Times in which he compared Barack Obama's humiliation of Binyamin Netanyahu to John Kennedy's meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961. Cohen wrote:

"The former Soviet leader [Khrushchev] 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."

Cohen, who believes that Netanyahu can do no right other than to surrender, and that Obama and Iran can do no wrong, went on to praise Obama for using Netanyahu to establish his bona fides, as Kennedy had used Khrushchev to establish his.

The comparison grated on me, but having been quite young in 1961, I really did not remember the event well enough to answer him. Victor Davis Hanson is a few years older than I am, and came up with five reasons why Cohen's comparison fails. Among them are these:

b) Khrushchev was our enemy trying to destroy freedom from Asia to Eastern Europe; Netanyahu is the head of an allied democracy, one that is a beacon of constitutionalism in a sea of autocracy.

c) The Soviet Union was a massive superpower with thousands of nuclear bombs and missiles and an entire bloc of communist client states; Israel is a tiny country of 7 million and mostly alone; how heroic is it to bully an allied small democracy versus a huge communist dictatorship?

d) Kennedy said later of that summit in Vienna that Khrushchev "beat the hell out of me" — an accurate assessment, since Khrushchev came away determined to press his luck during the Cuban Missile Crisis to come. So we don't know the reaction of the Israelis or Palestinians to all this — only that anytime the U.S. gratuitously seeks to humiliate Israel, we can expect its enemies to see a green light and escalate, whether on the ground in the Middle East, at Arab Summits, or in the UN.

Maybe Obama and Cohen don't believe that Israel is an ally. Read it all.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:06 PM