Israel Matzav: Obama as sorcerer's apprentice

Thursday, July 08, 2010

Obama as sorcerer's apprentice

This certainly explains a lot. President Obama is the sorcerer's apprentice. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan is the broom that has gone off on its own. Israel and the 'Palestinian Authority' are being swept up by the flood.

With the United States seemingly committed to a general strategic withdrawal, the rest of the world has begun a wild scramble for position in a post-U.S.-dominated world. Every wannabe and used-to-be power from Pyongyang to Ankara has seen the opportunity to realize long-simmering ambitions that had been frustrated by decades of Cold War and another two decades of U.S. hegemony. As a matter of self-preservation, their neighbors have had no choice but to join the fray.

Iran hopes to command a “Shi’ite crescent” embracing disaffected Muslims from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hazara in Afghanistan. Turkey wants to assert its old overlordship over the region, while the starry-eyed Islamists of Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP, dream of a new caliphate. Russia wants to weaken the United States.

“America has no influence now, because it’s not doing anything,” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told the Italian daily La Repubblica last month. The United States is not to be engaged, but simply replaced, the Syrian leader said. “It is merely a matter of becoming aware of a fact: that America and Europe have failed to solve the problems of the world,” he said. “This failure leads necessarily to other alternatives: a geo-strategic map that aligns Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Russia, in a community of politics, interests and infrastructure. It takes the form of a single space that unites five seas: the Mediterranean, the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, the Arabian Gulf and the Red Sea.”

Assad’s account isn’t quite accurate: Turkey, Iran, and Russia only agree about the United States. They compete with each other in the Hobbesian post-United States war of each against all. Turkey’s Erdogan sponsored the Gaza blockade-runners in order to make Hamas into a Turkish rather than an Iranian attack dog. Turkey has aligned with Iran, in open defiance of Washington’s desultory efforts to “isolate” the Tehran regime but with a view toward contending with Iran for leadership of the Muslim world.

But Assad is entirely right to sneer at the confusion and weakness at the heart of U.S. foreign policy. As presidential candidate, Obama employed his ample talent for persuasion to convince prospective supporters with incompatible views that he was on their side. Despite extensive reporting of anti-Israel sentiment among his friends and political entourage during the summer of 2008, Obama managed to win the endorsement of the New Republic’s Martin Peretz, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, Elie Weisel, and other American Jewish celebrities who like to advertize their commitment to Israel’s security.

But the methods that served Obama so well as candidate have turned into a cascading series of catastrophes that has left the United States at a diplomatic low point not seen since the Carter Administration. Whatever the failings of the Bush Administration—and there were many—the world accorded U.S. priorities a grudging respect born of fear. In just two years Obama has become a figure of astonishment and contempt. In every field of foreign policy—Middle East peace, nuclear proliferation, dealings with the Russians, the Korean peninsula, relations with Japan, management of Latin America— the once-stable pillars of U.S. foreign policy are melting down.

Obama’s image, meanwhile, has tarnished rapidly overseas. His administration’s popularity among Arabs plunged during the past year. The British and continental media portray him as a bumbler; Der Spiegel, Germany’s arbiter of liberal opinion, dismisses Obama as the “Jimmy Carter of the 21st century.” [For the record, I first referred to Obama on this blog as the black Jimmy Carter in January 2008 - before he was even the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. CiJ].

One problem is that the White House works like a campaign headquarters rather than a presidency. Everything is about spin, and all lines of communication go straight up to the persuader-in-chief. Overlapping and conflicting responsibilities abound. Whether Middle East policy emanates from Dennis Ross or George Mitchell or Hillary Clinton or Rahm Emanuel on a given day depends on press leaks and presidential whim. And above the chaos there is Obama’s preternatural confidence that he can persuade almost anyone to do almost anything.

Israel, which wants to remain a loyal U.S. ally, is in a particularly tough position. Despite his misgivings, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed on to the two basic requirements of the new U.S. paradigm for the Middle East: acceptance of a two-state solution and a settlement freeze. The Obama Administration repaid Netanyahu’s loyalty in March by staging a diplomatic crisis over a minor zoning decision in an East Jerusalem neighborhood where no Arab ever had lived and that every draft peace agreement assigns to Israel. The White House in effect demanded that Israel concede in advance key matters subject to negotiations. Most alarming to Israel, it repudiated the 2004 agreement that President George W. Bush had struck with then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in which Israel unilaterally evacuated Gaza in return for American flexibility on West Bank settlement growth. Sharon’s chief of staff Dov Weisglass put this agreement in writing in letters that have since been made public.

To add insult to injury, in March the White House sent Gen. David Petraeus to tell the Senate that Israel’s failure to make peace with the Palestinians compromised the United States’ position throughout the Middle East. And when Netanyahu came to Washington to meet Obama later that month, he was given the back-door treatment usually accorded disreputable dictators from banana republics, without a final statement or a photo opportunity.

The Obama Administration rewarded its most loyal and cooperative ally by sabotaging Israel’s negotiating position, blaming Israel for U.S. policy failures in the Middle East, and humiliating its leader. Any of these actions would have been sufficient to put Israel in diplomatic isolation; the combination of them has left Israel in the weakest international position in decades. Israel has become a passive observer in the demolition of its international standing, hoping that the remonstrations of its friends in the United States would reverse the administration’s public hostility.