Israel Matzav

Sunday, April 03, 2016

Donald Trump announces foreign policy advisers

Hat Tip: Andrew Finkle.

Labels: Donald Trump, foreign policy, humor, US presidential campaign 2016

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Cross Jeb Bush off my list?

I may be able to cross Jeb Bush off the list of potential candidates for whom I would vote. The Wall Street Journal reports that Bush's foreign policy is more likely to be like his father's than his brother's. George W. Bush may not have been perfect (although between 2002-05 he was awfully close to it), but he was far better than his father, George H.W. Bush, whose hostility to Israel has only been exceeded by Barack Hussein Obama and Jimmy Carter since Israel gained its independence in 1948 (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

One early indication suggests he is leaning toward his father’s more pragmatic and restrained philosophy. The former Florida governor is considering naming Meghan O’Sullivan as his top foreign-policy aide; several people familiar with the deliberations describe her as the front-runner for the post.

In many ways, the 45-year-old Ms. O’Sullivan, who now teaches at Harvard, bridges the two Bush worlds. She served as deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan for much of George W. Bush ’s second term and was heavily involved in carrying out his Iraq policies. But she wasn’t among the neoconservative advisers who drove the initial decision to invade Iraq, and she is more closely aligned with—and is being promoted by—the kind of pragmatists who dominated George H.W. Bush ’s presidency.

Daniel Larison doesn't believe it.

If that is supposed to be a sign that Bush’s foreign policy won’t be like his brother’s, what would be evidence that it will? Choosing someone “heavily involved” in carrying out George W. Bush’s policy in Iraq to be a “top foreign policy aide” is practically an endorsement of that policy. It certainly doesn’t suggest that Bush thinks there was very much wrong with how his brother’s administration handled things. O’Sullivan served as an assistant to the staggeringly incompetent Paul Bremer at the CPA in the early days of the occupation. She was an early advocate of the “surge,” which should make it clear that she isn’t as much of a “pragmatist” as this article would lead us to believe. Short of choosing a leading Iraq war booster, Bush could hardly be making his agreement with his brother’s policies more obvious.

No one should be fooled when someone claims that Jeb Bush is following in his father’s footsteps on foreign policy. George W. Bush indulged in some rhetoric about “humility” and realism as a candidate, too, and he relied on his father’s reputation on foreign policy to make up for the fact that he knew nothing about it. It turned out that there was no substance to Bush’s rhetoric, and the country endured the effects of one of the most incompetent administrations on foreign policy in our modern history. We have the benefit of that experience, so there is no excuse for falling for the same con twice.

So Larison is arguing that Jeb Bush is 'as incompetent' on foreign policy as his brother? What could go wrong?

Labels: foreign policy, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Iraq, Jeb Bush, realism, realists' fantasy

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

My country is under fire - do you know what that's like?

You may not understand what it's like to be under rocket fire, but Prime Minister Netanyahu gave the foreign diplomatic corps a taste of it on Monday.

In the middle of the day, Netanyahu invited all the foreign ambassadors in Israel to talk with him in Ashkelon about the Gazan rockets.

They met in a large unprotected auditorium along the seashore that was within rocket range, so he could make the case that the violent barrage against Israel’s citizens was intolerable.

To his left as he spoke, laid out on a table was a small arsenal of rockets and missiles that had been launched into Israel, including a Kassam, a Grad and a Katushya of Iranian or Chinese origin.

From the podium, Netanyahu looked out at the ambassadors who sat on rows of folded chairs.
To underscore their vulnerability, Netanyahu told them, “If an alarm is sounded, all of us have exactly 30 seconds to find shelter.”

He explained that they were not the only ones in danger.

“This is the situation in which one million Israelis find themselves.

That’s families, old people, children, babies,” he said.

They are targeted on a daily basis by those who took over the area that Israel vacated in 2005 when it withdrew from the Gaza Strip, Netanyahu continued, saying that those who launch the rockets hide behind civilians in Gaza so they can target Israeli civilians.

“I don’t know of any of the citizens of your cities, who could find that acceptable and something that could proceed on a normal basis,” he said.

“The whole world understands that this is not acceptable,” Netanyahu said.

He added that neither he nor the people of Israel would continue to tolerate it.

“Any fair-minded person in any fair-minded government in the world would understand that it’s our right to defend our people, and this is what we shall do,” Netanyahu said.

To help the ambassadors understand the situation, the Prime Minister’s Office also showed them video clips of Palestinians launching rockets and of Israeli citizens from the South diving for cover.

On the stage with Netanyahu was Ashkelon Mayor Benny Vaknin and Home Front Defense Minister Avi Dichter.

Ashkelon, Sderot and Netivot residents were also present to tell the ambassadors what it felt like to live under constant threat of attack.

French Ambassador to Israel Christophe Bigot told The Jerusalem Post that the visit did underscore the vulnerability of southern residents to rocket attacks, as did the testimony of the residents.

“It was a way for all of us to get a hint of what these people [southern residents] experience,” he said.

Bigot noted that during his six years in Israel, he has made many solidarity visits to the South, as well as to the North during the Second Lebanon War.

“I stayed for three hours in Haifa. There were three alerts and I had to run to the bomb shelter three times,” Bigot said.

The prime minister, he said, described what had happened, but not what would happen.

I just hope that Netanyahu is as brilliant a military tactician as he is a diplomatic tactician (a quality we've seen in him for over 30 years going back to his stint as UN Ambassador during the Second Lebanon War). With all the whining over what a war mongerer he is, Netanyahu has initiated zero military actions in his two terms as Prime Minister. None. That may be about to change really soon.

Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, foreign policy, Gaza, rockets

Sunday, January 01, 2012

This is America's foreign policy establishment?

Look what Foreign Affairs has named one of the top books of 2011.

I fisked it at great length here.

Labels: foreign policy, Jeremy Ben Ami

Wednesday, September 07, 2011

Characterizing Obama's foreign policy

Former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton has written a lengthy essay characterizing the Obama administration's foreign policy, such as it is. Here are a couple of key paragraphs.

Barack Obama's badly flawed worldview and the incoherent foreign policy flowing from it have now disintegrated. Within the past few months, his media acolytes notwithstanding, the evidence has become conclusive: Obama's presidency is gravely wounding America and its friends. His response to virtually every significant threat or crisis has either complicated or worsened the problem, or, at best, left it essentially no closer to resolution.

Obama has repeatedly highlighted his propensity to apologize for America's past transgressions (as he defines them), and his disinclination to be assertive on our behalf. Indeed, so radically different is Obama from any prior American president that many observers have concluded that he has a comprehensive plan, and that somewhere in all that mess there must be a doctrine. Others look not for a plan, but for a plot; pop psychology and conspiracy theories abound as to why Obama is so comfortable, even enthusiastic, about American decline.

But it is folly to look for rhyme and reason when there is neither. For better or worse, there is no single dispositive flaw in Obama's doctrine, since there is little that resembles a doctrine. His saunter through world affairs is unstructured. Instead, the explanation for his policy's failure, and its well-deserved collapse now unfolding before us, lies in a jumbled mix of philosophy, political priorities, and personal inadequacy. Like Obama's presidency generally, his national-security flaws combine ideology, naïveté, weakness, lack of leadership, intellectual laziness, and a near-religious faith in negotiation for its own sake.

Perhaps most significantly, Obama is simply not interested in foreign and defense policy. To state such a proposition about a U.S. president seems counterintuitive or even shocking, but Obama is different from all of his predecessors, Republican or Democrat, since Franklin Roosevelt. His first thought on awakening each morning is not about threats to America, its global interests, and its friends and allies, but about his efforts to radically restructure our economy and society. That is where his intellect and his heart are focused, and his lack of attention to the rest of the world is palpable. When Obama has no other choice but to concentrate on international affairs--such as during the Afghanistan surge or the killing of Osama bin Laden--he will do so, but only for as long as is necessary to address the immediate problem before him.

In those few national-security areas where Obama does his homework, a second characteristic predominates: He simply does not see much occurring internationally that threatens American interests. Such a benign view of a chaotic world may be even more shocking than his general lack of interest, but it is yet another reflection of his underlying intellectual laziness. He is most politely described as credulous and inexperienced, especially for someone who lived overseas as a child. During both the 2008 campaign and his presidency, for example, Obama has downplayed the very concept of a "global war on terror," treated nuclear proliferation as a side issue, and ignored the enormous strategic threats posed by a rising China and a belligerent Russia. American decline, most recently reflected in S&P's downgrade of America's sovereign debt to France's level, is untroubling and even natural to him.

In days gone by, Americans with such attitudes were classified as isolationists. But the president is no advocate of insularity, instead choosing multilateralism and expressing it in rhetoric that could have come straight from its source, Woodrow Wilson. It was Wilson, after all, and not our first community-organizer president, who insisted that "there must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power, not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace." Here is the ideology of negotiation and global governance in its fullest flower.

Radical as Obama is, his worldview is not dissimilar from those of a long line of liberal presidential candidates, stretching back decades. In 1988, for example, Vice President George H. W. Bush said of his November opponent, Michael Dukakis: "He sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe." Precisely the same could be said about Obama. The only significant difference is that Obama made it to the White House, and Dukakis didn't. This is why, two years ago in Standpoint magazine, I called Obama our first "post-American President," one unburdened by American exceptionalism.

So what emerges from a president who is basically uninterested in foreign affairs, who doesn't see our manifold threats and challenges as worthy of presidential time and energy, who repeatedly stresses devotion to negotiations that are divorced from their substantive outcome, and who believes that multilateral fora rather than American resolve and power can address foreign problems? The now-indisputable answer is a failing, collapsing U.S. foreign policy.

...

Inexperience, incompetence, and blind faith in negotiation have led to gridlock in the Middle East. Obama has acted as though the gravest threat there to American interests and international peace and security is Israeli housing construction in the suburbs of Jerusalem. Two-and-a-half years of such focus have produced essentially no progress in Israeli-Palestinian talks, just ongoing humiliation for the United States. And Obama's various reactions to the Arab Spring can be described only as contradictory and incoherent. In consequence, Islamist forces are rising in Egypt; the Syrian dictatorship, aided by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, is massacring civilians in Syria; Hezbollah's grasp on Lebanon is tightening; and our closest friends on the Arabian peninsula are rapidly distancing themselves from a United States they regard as weakening, irresolute, and unreliable. In Turkey, July's mass resignation of top generals may be conclusive evidence of the demise of Kemal Atatürk's vision of a secular state.

I shudder to think what four more years of Obama would mean to the World.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, foreign policy, Obama's obsession with engaging Iran, Obama's obsession with Israel, Obama's obsession with Palestinians

Thursday, March 03, 2011

Victor Davis Hanson on US foreign policy

Victor Davis Hanson is a must-read today.

America vows not to “meddle” on behalf of Iranian dissidents, reaches out to Syria, and was initially silent in the face of Libyan atrocities — in a landscape in which we earlier declared Hosni Mubarak a dictator, and not a dictator, who should depart kinda yesterday, if he did not stay on for a transition to a military dictatorship, which might in turn oversee elections some day that might include the Muslim Brotherhood, which is sorta nonviolent and kinda secular.

In the last two years scarcely a week has gone by in which we did not in some way criticize democratic and once allied Israel. Perhaps if the Israeli government had stoned some homosexuals, or assassinated a leading Lebanese reform figure, or bombed its own cities, we might either have kept silent or publicly promised not to meddle in Israeli affairs. Or we might have apologized for something we purportedly did decades ago that offended Israeli sensibilities.

...

Terrorism of the home-grown kind is now a “grave” concern, and that is why we do not use the offensive terms “Islamist” or “jihad,” and have evolved to nomenclature like “overseas contingency operations” for “war on terror” and “man-caused disasters” for “terrorism” — although one may doubt that any serious American security official has ever phoned his European counterpart to discuss joint “overseas contingency operations” against “man-caused disasters.” When jihadists strike, they do so “allegedly” until formally convicted, and the resulting American uproar and threats to diversity programs can be as serious a concern as the actual terrorist operation. Formerly one-dimensional agencies like NASA now have new expanded missions, namely, reaching out to the Muslim world.

In the theoretical sphere, we are unsure that America is any more “exceptional” than, say, Greece, since such perceptions are always relative and merely rest in the eye of the beholder. Britain certainly does not really hold a “special relationship” with the United States in the past Churchillian or Thatcherian sense. And there is a greater need to fly abroad to lobby for a Chicago Olympics than there is to visit Germany to commemorate the downfall of Communism. France, hitherto not known for having greater idealism than the United States, from time to time reminds us that centrifuges are still “spinning” in Iran.

We promised increased billions in foreign aid to our allies, much of which is borrowed from foreign bondholders, along the lines of, “Dear China, could you lend us another $2 billion at 3 percent to help Pakistan, and then please act as if the ensuing grant is really our money?” Apparently, we really must believe that America is exceptional to try to get away with that.

America is terribly worried about the volatility of the oil-exporting Middle East, and that is why we put large regions of the United States and its coasts off limits for new oil, gas, and tar-sands exploration. Apparently other countries can extract and export oil in far more environmentally sound fashion than can America, and, in any case, we have plenty of cash reserves to import at high prices.

What diagnosis might we make on the basis of such symptomology?

Read it all.

Labels: Barack Obama, foreign policy, Victor Davis Hanson

Friday, November 12, 2010

Cantor promises to check Obama on Israel

On Wednesday night, Prime Minister Netanyahu met for an hour with Eric Cantor (R-Va), the incoming House Majority Leader. Ben Smith has all the details here, but the statement issued after the meeting is a doozer and bears highlighting.

"Eric stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington," the readout continued. "He made clear that the Republican majority understands the special relationship between Israel and the United States, and that the security of each nation is reliant upon the other."

Veteran observer of U.S.-Israeli relations Ron Kampeas said he found that statement "an eyebrow-raiser."

"I can't remember an opposition leader telling a foreign leader, in a personal meeting, that he would side, as a policy, with that leader against the president," Kampeas wrote at JTA's blog -- an interpretation which Cantor's office later disputed to Kampeas. (For my part, I detected in Cantor's statement on the meeting an effort as well to be a bit more restrained and statesman-like -- the nod to the United Nations -- than the usual partisan campaign fare of a hardcharging politico now moving into a Congressional majority leadership position that may require more diplomatic guidance than he needed as minority whip.)

Kampeas also characterized the one-on-one meeting between the prime minister and the lawmaker as unusual, adding that he has "it on good authority that as late as last week, Bibi's people were at pains to deny that such a meeting would take place."

Heh. Read it all.

Labels: Barack Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, domestic weakness, Eric Cantor, foreign policy

It starts: Obama rebuffed three times this week

Prime Minister Netanyahu wasn't the only ally to rebuff President Obama this week. Ben Smith reports that Iraqi Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader and close American ally, and South Korea also snubbed Obama this week.

Eli Lake reports today that President Obama called Iraqi Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader and close American ally, and asked him to give up his seat in the interest of a the power-sharing deal the U.S. prefers. Talabani, Lake reports, "rebuffed" Obama, and the piece includes a jab at the White House from Talabani's son.

...

Obama also suffered another public rebuff today with the failure to get a trade deal on his trip to South Korea, the third time -- following the failures to get the Olympics and to get much out of Copenhagen -- a high-profile trip hasn't quite concluded as planned.

These allies' willingness to snub Obama may reflect the perception -- among leaders whose habit is to obsess over, and over-read, American politics -- that the American president is on his heels, and among the White House's challenges in the coming months is to remind foreign leaders that Obama's still fully in control of a foreign policy that was hardly mentioned during the election and is not, in fact, expected to change as a result of Republican control of the House.

Unless, of course, he's not fully in control, because he can't back up anything he says. If that sounds like a good thing to most Israelis it may not be. If we can snub him, so can Iran and Syria. Of course, Iran and Syria been snubbing him for the last two years anyway.

Labels: Barack Obama, domestic weakness, foreign policy

Thursday, November 04, 2010

Obama to pressure Israel harder?

Rachel Ehrenfeld makes the case that President Obama will increase pressure on Israel for a 'Palestinian state' now that it is less likely that he will get his domestic agenda passed.

Obama’s defeat also reinforces the already widespread international contempt for this Administration’s lack of resolve. This deterioration could nevertheless spur this ambitious president to leave his mark on world affairs.

Withdrawing from Afghanistan and appeasing the Taliban, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela will not suffice. But perusing the ill-conceived “peace plan” in the Middle East – pressuring Israel to freeze construction in areas claimed by the Palestinians, give up large parts of its territory, and recognize Hamas – seem to fit the bill.

The general opinion in Israel seems to support the notion that the changes in the House will do little to change Obama’s aspiration to create a Palestinian state.

...

One hopes that the Republican House will use its power of the purse to constrain Obama’s ability to spend American taxpayers’ money on foreign aid to the bottomless Palestinian money pit. The Europeans, Saudis and Iran – all funders of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and proponents of an independent Palestinian state, will happily take over the U.S. role. But Obama will do his best to keep his position as the “peace-maker.”

He will continue to ignore the Palestinians repeated declarations in their Arabic language propaganda that Israel doesn’t have the right to exist. He will continue to turn a blind eye to their children television shows which are filled with programs calling for jihad and killing Jews. Instead, Obama will continue to argue that it is possible to reason with people who insist on killing you.

Most Palestinians demands have been met by this, and previous American Administrations. They received billions of dollars in aid and successfully generated pressure on Israel for further harmful concessions. The Palestinians have gotten used to claiming that Israel is the obstacle for peace, and subsequent American Administrations, and in particular this Administration, went along with the charade, blaming the Israelis. Yet, Obama’s plans for peace in the Middle East, and his approach towards Israel, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan did not win him friends or respect in the Arab/Muslim world.

But a weak Obama at home should not be underestimated. He would surely use his office to exert significant power abroad, and perhaps force Israel to make dangerous concessions.

Will this happen? I think it depends on whether Obama still believes he has a chance of being re-elected (in which case he will be more cautious) or whether he believes that it's all over (in which case he is likely to go for broke). Remember the last three weeks of the Clinton administration? Imagine two years of that.

Labels: Barack Obama, domestic weakness, foreign policy, legacy, Palestinian state