The abject failure of the Obama administration's Middle East policy

The below 3 articles demonstrate the price we are paying for a president who has no experience in foreign affairs, and whose goal is to become a citizen of the world rather than assure our safety and that of our allies. Aggie

Elliott Abrams
11/16/2009, Volume 015, Issue 09

Can anything else possibly go wrong for the Obama administration's Middle East policy? In the past ten days, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has twice reversed herself publicly on her attitude toward the Israeli settlements. Palestinians have refused her direct request to rejoin peace talks with Israel, and Palestinian Authority president Abbas has said he will not run for reelection. U.S.-Israel relations are in a state of frozen mistrust. The New York Times and Washington Post, among others, are calling Obama's policy a complete failure--in news stories as well as editorials. The only thing missing is a plague of locusts.

The policy is indeed a complete failure. In ten months the administration has managed to offend and demoralize Israelis and Palestinians, lose the support of Arab governments, and reduce previously excellent relations with the government of Israel to levels unmatched since the James Baker days. Meanwhile, George Mitchell's trips to the region are increasingly reminiscent of the Colin Powell visits in 2002 and 2003--producing little but embarrassment. The Israeli "100 percent settlement freeze" and the Arab outreach to Israel, early goals of the Obama team, are now forgotten, as is an early resumption of serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

These disasters are mostly the product of an ignorant and belligerent attitude toward Israel and especially its prime minister. The ignorance was most evident in the administration's view that a total construction freeze could be imposed not only in every settlement but in Jerusalem itself. But the U.S. policy was worse: We demanded a freeze that would apply to construction by Jews, but not by Arabs; could any Israeli leader be expected to support such a position? One does not need to be a member of the Knesset to understand that such a freeze was impossible for Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition as it would have been for any Israeli prime minister--but apparently this fact was beyond the understanding of Mitchell, Rahm Emanuel, and all the other "experts" on the Obama team.

The belligerence toward Netanyahu has been evident all along, but is best shown by the refusal to tell Israel's prime minister whether or not the president will see him this coming week when Netanyahu (like the president) addresses the United Jewish Communities annual general assembly in Washington. The Israelis gave the White House weeks of notice that Netanyahu had agreed to speak, would be in town, and hoped to see Obama. The White House reaction has been to keep him twisting in the wind, with news stories several days before his arrival saying the president had not decided yet whether to see Netanyahu.

Think of it: Our closest ally in the region, critical issues at stake (from Iran's nuclear program and the recent Israeli seizure of an Iranian arms shipment meant for Hezbollah to Abbas's announcement), yet the Israelis get no answer. Obama and his "experts" may think they are reminding Netanyahu who is boss, but they are in fact reminding all of us why Israelis no longer trust Obama--and making closer cooperation between the two governments that much harder.

The problems Netanyahu has with Obama pale in comparison with those of the Palestinians, and Abbas's announcement reflects their frustrations. The best example: Obama and Clinton lured Abbas out on the settlements-freeze limb and then sawed it off. When they said a total freeze including Jerusalem was necessary, he of course happily agreed. But when they abandoned that doomed policy and instead began talking of "restraint," he could not climb down.

Abbas has threatened to leave many times before, and it's worth -noting that he did not resign. He said he would not seek reelection next year, in elections scheduled for January 24 but highly unlikely to take place then--if ever. So he will be around for months more, in fact indefinitely if elections keep getting postponed. His statement must be regarded, then, not as a Shermanesque personal denial but as a protest against an American policy that has weakened him and left him high and dry.

Israelis and Palestinians when I visited in October had two main questions: Who is making this Middle East policy, and do they not realize by now that it is a disaster? At least in this, one can say the administration has produced Israeli-Palestinian unity. They are also united in watching warily as the president seems unable to make a decision about Afghanistan. For the Palestinians, this suggests he'll never really take on the Israelis for them, as they thought he might back in January. For the Israelis, it means he'll never take on Iran, and that they may in the end face the Iranian nuclear threat on their own.

They all wonder whether to blame Mitchell or Clinton or Dennis Ross or National Security Adviser Jim Jones or the State Department's Near East bureau, and each individual Israeli and Palestinian has a favorite target. But the answers to their questions seem obvious: It is the president's policy, and no, he does not seem to be aware that it has already failed. While he has backed off from the early targets, he has not changed his attitude toward -Israel's government, nor altered his basic approach: to push for negotiations over "core issues" as soon as possible.

And this is the fundamental problem with Obama's policy: Like too many of his predecessors he believes that a solution is at hand if only he can force the parties to the table. There, presumably under American tutelage, they will reach American-style compromises (pragmatic, sensible, realistic) and resolve the dispute, with Nobel Peace Prizes for all. The only question is where the table is: Camp David, Taba, Annapolis, Oslo, perhaps this time Chicago.

This approach undermines the one real hope in the region, which is the practical advances being made in the West Bank. There, the economy is improving, law and order are maintained, the Palestinian Authority is fighting Hamas, Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation is growing, and mobility for the population is increasing. In recent months Israel removed more checkpoints and expanded the hours of the Allenby Bridge to Jordan. It isn't paradise, but it isn't Gaza either, and life is better each year. It could be far better if the Obama administration would abandon its doomed efforts to force an Israeli construction freeze in Jerusalem and an Arab embrace of Israel, and instead ask them all to think of real-world ways to keep improving life in the West Bank. There are many ways this could be done, from further steps to remove Israeli barriers to movement, to reliable and generous Arab financial support.

The way forward does not lie through fancy international conferences, and one idea still mentioned as an Obama option--proposing a final status plan--would be disastrous and unsuccessful. The way for the Palestinians to get a state is to go ahead and build it. If and when the institutions are there and functioning, from police and courts to a parliament, negotiations will reflect that fact. But the argument that settling the borders and removing the Israeli troops must come first is a path to failure. For one thing, Israel will not and should not leave until it is clear that the West Bank can be policed by Palestinians and that the region will not be a source of terrorism against Israel, as Gaza and South Lebanon became when Israel left there. No conference and no treaty can provide such a guarantee; only functioning Palestinian police forces that are already fighting and defeating terror can do so.

Such a practical approach would bring other benefits. It would enhance the status and power of Palestinian moderates who are working to improve life in the West Bank, rather than enhancing the status and power of old PLO officials who thrive on endless, useless negotiating sessions. It would put a premium on practical Israeli-Palestinian cooperation, rather than elevating precisely the final status questions (like Jerusalem or Palestinian refugees) that most bitterly divide them. It would increase the gap between the West Bank and Gaza, thereby showing Palestinians that Hamas rule brings only despair and poverty. It would press the Arab states to help real live Palestinians in the West Bank, rather than the imaginary Palestinians--all either bold jihadists or desperate widows and orphans--whom they see on Al Jazeera. In fact, except for occasional visits by Jordanians and Egyptians (who have peace treaties with Israel already), top Arab officials haven't a clue what's going on in the West Bank, for they've never been there. Not one head of state or government or foreign minister, not once. If George Mitchell wants to do something useful, he could organize a tour; take a few princes and foreign ministers to Ramallah and Jericho and Jenin, where they would find that they are neither in Somalia nor some heroic battle scene against Zionist oppressors.

But thus far, the anniversary of Obama's election appears to have passed with no rethinking of policy. Instead the administration slogs forward, judging itself by its elevated intentions rather than its performance. Clinton's pronouncements--demand a total construction freeze one day, accept Netanyahu's more modest offer the next, then back to the wider demands two days later in Morocco--are increasingly reminiscent of World War I trench warfare: gain a few yards, lose a few more, while the casualties pile up. There will be no progress this way, and the practical efforts that should be at the heart of U.S. policy will instead be undermined as we poison Israeli-Palestinian relations and degrade the trust both parties have in us.

Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp

Imprimis

October 2009

John Bolton

Former U.S. Ambassador
to the United Nations

John Bolton

PRINTABLE PDF

President Obama's Foreign Policy: An Assessment

JOHN BOLTON is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. From August 2005 to December 2006, he served as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, and for four years prior to that he was Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. Ambassador Bolton has a B.A. from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was editor of the Yale Law Journal. He has written for numerous publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Weekly Standard, and is the author of Surrender is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered in Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2009, in the "First Principles on First Fridays" lecture series sponsored by Hillsdale College's Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship.

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I THINK it is important, on the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, to take a look at our foreign policy and to judge whether or not we're on a path to becoming safer. In doing so, we should not be intimidated by those who say that criticism of foreign policy--criticism that suggests we're less safe as a consequence of certain policies--is somehow disloyal or hyper-partisan. It is the essence of political debate over foreign policy to judge whether the interests of the United States are being protected and advanced. If we believe they are not, it is our responsibility to speak out.

For the last eight months, we've had a different kind of president than we've had in the past. Barack Obama is the first post-American president. And by this I don't mean he's anti-American. What I mean by post-American is suggested by a response the president gave to a reporter's question during a recent trip to Europe. The reporter asked about his unwillingness to discuss American exceptionalism--the notion that the United States has a unique mission, that it's "a shining city on a hill" as Ronald Reagan liked to say (echoing our pilgrim fathers). Mr. Obama responded that he believes in American exceptionalism in the same way that the British believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. Given that there are 192 member countries in the United Nations, I'm sure he could have gone on naming another 189 that believe in their own exceptionalism. But in any case, the idea that all countries believe themselves to be exceptional in the same way leads to the unmistakable conclusion that none are truly exceptional. In other words, the president's response reflects his belief that America is not so different from other countries.

Mr. Obama's supporters in the mainstream media share this view. Newsweek editor Evan Thomas, for example, delivered this revealing comment when previewing the president's speech on the anniversary of D-Day last June:

Reagan was all about America . . . . Obama is 'we are above that now.' We're not just parochial, we're not just chauvinistic, we're not just provincial. We stand for something--I mean in a way Obama's standing above the country, above--above the world. He's sort of God.

This image of President Obama standing above his country and above the world sums up the post-American way of thinking. The practical point it makes is that America's interest is no different or better than any other country's interest. But is that true? Is America's interest not superior to Sudan's or Cuba's or Zimbabwe's?

In line with this way of thinking, the Obama administration is pursuing a policy that can accurately be described as neoisolationist--a policy characterized by an unwillingness to be assertive in the world in defense of America's interests and those of our friends and allies. This policy traces back in the Democratic party to George McGovern's acceptance speech at the 1972 Democratic national convention. McGovern's refrain was "Come Home America"--come home from Vietnam and come home from a lot of other places as well. This is the attitude that has come to dominate liberal foreign policy circles.

Consider our current policy regarding Iraq. The Obama administration is determined to withdraw American forces along the lines of a plan formulated at the end of the Bush administration, but without regard to the actual situation in Iraq. American forces have pulled back from their prominent roles in the major urban areas, and violence has increased. But the administration remains fixed on the withdrawal schedule, because it is withdrawal--rather than the political stability of Iraq--that matters to it most. And this strict adherence to the exit timetable without regard to the political and military consequences could prove to be very harmful to our interests--not only in Iraq, but in the broader region as well.

In Afghanistan, there is legitimate room for discussion about what our strategic objectives should be. I doubt we will transform it into a stable democratic society. It is not going to become Switzerland--or even Honduras. On the other hand, we have a serious strategic interest in making sure that the Taliban and al-Qaeda don't use Afghanistan as a base to launch future terrorist attacks. But today, what was for years portrayed as the good war by liberals--as opposed to the "bad" Iraq War--has become just another war from which they want to get out. This is creating a difficult political problem for President Obama. And the path he chooses to take in Afghanistan is going to be significant, not least because of the consequences it will have in Pakistan.

Our interests in Pakistan are even more acute than in Afghanistan, and the potential risks to the United States and to our allies even graver. The reason is that if radical Islamists are able to create enough chaos inside Pakistan to enable them to take control of the government, they will immediately come into possession of a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons. This would lead to a greater risk of conflict on the Indian subcontinent and also increase the chance that these weapons will fall into the hands of terrorist groups. So our national interest is not simply preventing al-Qaeda and the Taliban from returning to their safe havens in Afghanistan. The cross-border nature of Taliban and al-Qaeda activities requires us to work even harder to ensure that Pakistan's nuclear capabilities don't fall into the wrong hands.

More broadly, the Obama administration believes that its predecessor didn't negotiate enough on issues like the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The president has said repeatedly--starting with his Inaugural Address--that the United States must hold out its hand to countries like North Korea and Iran in the hopes that they will unclench their fist and enter into negotiation. This reflects a curious view of history, since in fact the Bush administration negotiated directly or indirectly with Iran and North Korea for six-and-a-half years. But more importantly, it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of negotiation. Negotiation is not a policy. It is a technique. It is a way of achieving our objectives. It doesn't tell us what the objectives are. The emphasis on negotiation as an end in itself reflects a shallowness in this administration's approach to international affairs, and gives us little confidence that our interests will be well served.

The Obama administration has extended its hand to North Korea, only to see that country conduct another nuclear test, launch more ballistic missiles, and kidnap and incarcerate two American reporters. Kim Jong Il apparently didn't get the message about the "reset button" when President Obama replaced President Bush. And in fact, Kim Jong Il will never be talked out of his nuclear weapons program, which he sees as a trump card against the United States, Japan and South Korea. It's the ultimate protection for his regime, and it's a source of revenue and leverage elsewhere in the world, particularly in the Middle East. On the other hand, the North Koreans have been very successful over the years in using negotiations to leverage economic and political concessions. They've even been happy to pledge to give up nuclear weapons--five times, by my count, over the past 18 years. But of course they never carry through.

Sometime during the next year, North Korea will probably agree to negotiate. And why not? It's to their advantage. It buys them time, it increases the possibility of further economic and political concessions, and it will fundamentally satisfy a U.S. administration whose supreme objective is negotiations. It won't reduce the nuclear threat that North Korea poses to the world, but it will take it out of the media spotlight. And for this administration, that would appear to be as good as solving the problem.

In Iran we see another example of the outstretched hand being slapped away. Indeed, there is now at least anecdotal evidence that the regime in Tehran saw the Obama administration as so eager for negotiations that it would overlook any harsh steps Iran might take internally. So in response to the administration's friendly overtures, the mullahs in Tehran conducted a grossly fraudulent presidential election on June 12 and have spent the subsequent months repressing their opponents. Close observers believe that there is no longer a power struggle in the Iranian government between hard-liners and moderates--if any moderates are left--but rather that power is flowing away from the ayatollahs and toward the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In other words, Iran is being transformed from a theological autocracy into a theological military dictatorship. And given that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps controls both Iran's nuclear weapons program and its funding of international terrorism, this means that Iran will only become more dangerous as time goes on.

As the failure of negotiations with Iran becomes more obvious by the day, the Obama administration's next strategy seems to be a reliance on sanctions. In theory, sanctions will take advantage of the vulnerability stemming from Iran's inability to refine petroleum. But this is the strategy that the Europeans and the Bush administration pursued unsuccessfully for the last seven years. The U.N. Security Council has passed three sanction resolutions, which have had almost no impact whatsoever on Iran's ongoing nuclear weapons program. Another U.N. resolution is not likely, especially given Russia's firm opposition. And if Europe and the United States don't help Iran with oil, Venezuela's President Chavez has pledged his country will do so.

There are really only two scenarios by which Iran can be stopped from possessing nuclear weapons. The first is regime change, which seems less and less likely now that the outrage following the fraudulent presidential election has dissipated. The second is preemptive military force. This is an extraordinarily unattractive option, but the alternative is much less attractive. The Obama administration almost certainly will do nothing militarily, which puts the entire onus on Israel. In the past, Israel has not hesitated to act when faced with an existential threat. It destroyed Saddam Hussein's Osirak reactor outside Baghdad in 1981, and in September 2007 it destroyed a North Korean reactor in Syria. So the spotlight in the near future is very much going to be on Israel.

Toward Israel, the Obama administration's policy to this point has been an essentially European policy. Its underlying assumption is that solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem will lead to a greater peace in the Middle East. But the real root of the problem in the Middle East is Iran's continuing support for terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Nonetheless, the administration has thus far spent more time and energy pressuring Israel to stop building settlements than pressuring Iran to stop funding terrorism.

Here at home, the Obama administration has gravely impaired our capability to gather human intelligence by declassifying hundreds of pages of documents that explain our interrogation techniques--information that is now probably in al-Qaeda training manuals. And at a time of the grossest profligacy in domestic spending in American history, the administration has imposed a ceiling on defense spending. At the same time it advocates an $800 billion stimulus plan that seems to include every idea ever hatched in Washington, it is making radical cuts on missile de-fense and cancelling the F-22 fighter aircraft. It supports a deposed president in Honduras--deposed, in accordance with the Honduran Constitution, for attempting to subvert the Constitution as his thuggish ally President Chavez did in Venezuela--against its legitimate government which promises a free and transparent election. The list goes on. And even where the administration has pursued sensible policies, it has only done so grudgingly, and with the clear understanding that, absent political constraints, it would have done things differently.

I understand that Americans are concerned about the economy. And I understand that every new president is going to have domestic priorities. But our adversaries around the world are not standing idly by while we debate these domestic issues. Our current focus on health care is very important, but people like Kim Jong Il don't care about it. We need a president who is going to provide us with leadership in international affairs--not one who believes that America should simply come home. And we need a president who believes that the best place to defend our interest is overseas rather than in the streets of America.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/09/AR2009110902793.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter


'Strategic reassurance' that isn't

By Robert Kagan and Dan Blumenthal
Tuesday, November 10, 2009

The Obama administration's worldview is still emerging, but its policies toward Russia and China are already revealing. Its Russia policy consists of trying to accommodate Moscow's sense of global entitlement. So far that has meant ignoring the continued presence of Russian forces on Georgian territory, negotiating arms-control agreements that Moscow needs more than Washington does and acquiescing to Russian objections to new NATO installations -- such as missile interceptors -- in former Warsaw Pact countries. An aggrieved Russia demands that the West respect a sphere of influence in its old imperial domain. The Obama administration rhetorically rejects the legitimacy of any such sphere, but its actions raise doubts for those who live in Russia's shadow.

The administration has announced a similar accommodating approach to China. Dubbed "strategic reassurance," the policy aims to convince the Chinese that the United States has no intention of containing their rising power. Details remain to be seen, but as with the Russia "reset," it is bound to make American allies nervous.

Administration officials seem to believe that the era of great-power competition is over. The pursuit of power, President Obama declared during a July speech about China, "must no longer be seen as a zero-sum game."

Unfortunately, that is not the reality in Asia. Contrary to optimistic predictions just a decade ago, China is behaving exactly as one would expect a great power to behave. As it has grown richer, China has used its wealth to build a stronger and more capable military. As its military power has grown, so have its ambitions.

This is especially true of its naval ambitions. Not so long ago, our China experts believed it was absurd for China to aspire to a "blue-water" navy capable of operating far from its shores.

Yet the new head of the U.S. Pacific Command, Adm. Robert Willard, noted last month that "in the past decade or so, China has exceeded most of our intelligence estimates of their military capability. . . . They've grown at an unprecedented rate." Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently warned that China's military modernization program could undermine U.S. military power in the Pacific.

It is hardly surprising that China wants to supplant U.S. power in the region. To the Chinese, the reign of "the middle kingdom" is the natural state of affairs and the past 200 years of Western dominance an aberration. Nor is it surprising that China wants to reshape international security arrangements that the United States established after World War II, when China was too weak to have a say.

What is surprising is the Obama administration's apparent willingness to accommodate these ambitions. This worries U.S. allies from New Delhi to Seoul.

Those nations are under no illusion about great-power competition. India is engaged in strategic competition with China, especially in the Indian Ocean, which both see as their sphere of influence. Japan's government wants to improve relations with Beijing, but many in Japan fear an increasingly hegemonic China. The nations of Southeast Asia do business with China but look to the United States for strategic support against their giant neighbor.

For decades, U.S. strategy toward China has had two complementary elements. The first was to bring China into the "family of nations" through engagement. The second was to make sure China did not become too dominant, through balancing. The Clinton administration pushed for China's accession to the World Trade Organization and normalized trade but also strengthened the U.S. military alliance with Japan. The Bush administration fostered close economic ties and improved strategic cooperation with China. But the United States also forged a strategic partnership with India and enhanced its relations with Japan, Singapore and Vietnam. The strategy has been to give China a greater stake in peace, while maintaining a balance of power in the region favorable to democratic allies and American interests.

"Strategic reassurance" seems to chart a different course. Senior officials liken the policy to the British accommodation of a rising United States at the end of the 19th century, which entailed ceding the Western Hemisphere to American hegemony. Lingering behind this concept is an assumption of America's inevitable decline.

Yet nothing would do more to hasten decline than to follow this path. The British accommodation of America's rise was based on close ideological kinship. British leaders recognized the United States as a strategic ally in a dangerous world -- as proved true throughout the 20th century. No serious person would imagine a similar grand alliance and "special relationship" between an autocratic China and a democratic United States. For the Chinese -- true realists -- the competition with the United States in East Asia is very much a zero-sum game.

For that reason, "strategic reassurance" is likely to fail. The Obama administration cannot back out of the region any time soon; Obama's trip this week, in fact, seems designed to demonstrate American staying power. Nor is China likely to end or slow its efforts to militarily and economically dominate the region. So it will quickly become obvious that no one on either side feels reassured.

Unfortunately, the only result will be to make American allies nervous. For an administration that has announced "we are back" after years of alleged Bush administration neglect in Asia, this is not an auspicious beginning.

Robert Kagan, a monthly columnist for The Post, is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dan Blumenthal is a resident fellow in Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute.