To repeat myself: what did you expect?

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Monday, January 25, 2010 - 7:17 PM Share

Marc Lynch and Andrew Sullivan both have posts up today that share a similar theme.  Marc looks at Obama's effort to jumpstart the Israel/Palestine peace talks, while Sullivan looks at the efforts to close the Guantanamo prisons.  Both Lynch and Sully make the same points:

1)  These are good ideas;

2)  One year in, these initiatives are completely bogged down;

3)  A key reason they've been bogged down is the fecklessness of the Obama administration.

Well.... maybe.  External circumstanves play a role here as well.  I'm sympathetic to generating forward momentum for Israel/Palestine peace talks, but it strikes me that people who bewail the lack of progress on this issue suffer from the liberal variant of Matt Yglesias' Green Lantern Theory of International Relations.  Given the state of Israeli public opinion and the state of Palestinian political coherence,  a Netanyahu-led Israeli regime was not going to acquiesce to outside pressure.  An Obama administration that tried such pressure and failed would actually be in a weaker position than they are now. 

Similarly, on Gitmo, when Obama seemed to push forward on this issue, he ran up against the political reality that Americans like closing Gitmo down in theory more than in practice.  And Obama then acted... politically. 

What I find striking is that many people who consider themselves part of the "reality-based community" now want the Obama administration to absorb the Bush administration's ontological beliefs and thereby create their own realities. 

In a manner of speaking, the Bush team did have a small point.  What the Bush administration excelled at was making irreversible policy decisions.  You can't uninvade Iraq or Afghanistan -- and, as Obama is finding out, undoing Gitmo is much harder than it souds on the campaign stump.  There are some policy decisions that, once they are made, are so path dependent that they are either impossible or really difficult to reverse. 

The thing is, I don't see a lot on Obama's foreign policy agenda that qualifies (though Gitmo might).   Policy initiatives that require multilateral cooperation are pretty easy to undo.  So unless there's buy-in from other key actors, there's only so much the Obama administration can do on things like Israel/Palestine. 

Which is Reason #451 why Obama won't be turning to foreign policy post-SOTU. 

EXPLORE:FOREIGN POLICY, FOREIGN POLICY COMMUNITY, GREAT POWER POLITICS, OBAMA
 

BLUE13326

9:07 PM ET

January 25, 2010

Wow. Are you really that

Wow. Are you really that self-referential you're linking to your post immediately below this one? too funny...

 

DANIEL W. DREZNER

9:19 PM ET

January 25, 2010

Well....

As I said in my last reply to a comment of yours.....

 

INSIDERORION

11:04 PM ET

January 25, 2010

Closing Gitmo was a political

Closing Gitmo was a political rather than a substantive issue from Day One. It was designed to appeal to the Left in the primary battle against Hillary. It had nothing to do with the economic downturn and everything to do with politics.

Regarding Israel, Obama probably really did want to forge a Middle East peace process but just didn't get anywhere, not because of the economy, but because of Israel and the Palestinians...

 

ZATHRAS

12:01 AM ET

January 26, 2010

Obama and the Middle East

I've always thought that the near-term objective of American policy toward the Middle East ought to have been to put some public distance between us and the most unreasonable factions in Israeli politics.

Don't misunderstand -- I'm pro-peace. I'm pro-negotiations. But I've also been around long enough to know how intractable the Israeli-Palestinian quarrel is. If your metric for success is whether you achieve something none of your predecessors were able to under more favorable conditions, the odds of your being judged a failure are pretty high.

President Obama could have set his sights on a different metric, addressing the Arab grievance that American is reflexively supportive of anything any Israeli government does on settlements on the West Bank and Jerusalem at the price of perpetuating public tension between Washington and Tel Aviv. There are political reasons for an American President to avoid such tension, sure. The question is, how strong are those reasons? How much should Obama fear a protracted chill in relations with the Netanyahu government over settlements that serve no American interest and aggravate Arab opinion whenever a new one is announced?

That was Obama's problem, right there. He, or at least his team, were terrified of crossing Israel's American supporters. They're pretty spooked about crossing other interest groups as well, of course; in Democratic Party politics, loyalty to organized interests has been the coin of the realm for generations, and supporters of Israel are one of those interests. How much trouble would a chill with Israel over settlements have meant for Obama politically? I don't think very much at all, honestly; there are American supporters of Israel who would have been angered, but they would have been mostly the kind that dislike Obama anyway.

It's really about how much Obama was prepared to risk for a foreign policy objective. There are some risks you take and some you don't, but if you're not prepared to risk anything -- if you're willing to go the extent of folding a publicly announced position like the one Obama stated last spring in Cairo after a few objections from one foreign government -- why did you want to be President in the first place?

 

DAVE123

9:05 PM ET

January 26, 2010

"President Obama could have

"President Obama could have set his sights on a different metric, addressing the Arab grievance that American is reflexively supportive of anything any Israeli government does on settlements on the West Bank "

Certainly Obama has put far more pressure on Israeli to stop settlements than the Palestinians to stop indoctrinating their population to Jihad against Israel. In fact, Obama did get some concessions from Israel on the settlement issue. Just today Israel destroyed a West Bank Synagogue that violated the settlement freeze.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/135701

Can you imagine the Palestinians destroying a Mosque that was a center of Martyrdom operations? Of course not; Abbas just named a square after a participant in the worst terrorist attack in Israel's history.
http://thebulletin.us/articles/2010/01/23/top_stories/doc4b5b54912bcc9418909078.txt

And Hamas continues its children's shows with 12 year old girls calling for kids to Martyr themselves.
http://newsblaze.com/story/20100125100652zzzz.nb/topstory.html

"and Jerusalem at the price of perpetuating public tension between Washington and Tel Aviv."

I also note you can't quite get yourself to recognize the fact that Israel's capitol and government is in Jerusalem not Tel Aviv.

 

ZATHRAS

8:24 PM ET

January 27, 2010

Exactly the Point

I expect that American diplomacy intended to produce distance between the United States and Israel on the settlements issue would outrage Americans who, for whatever reason, are partisans of Israel and identify the interests of the United States with those of the current Israeli government.

It doesn't bother me. My point upthread is that it shouldn't bother President Obama, since most Americans who feel this way aren't supporters of his anyway. Why would they be, when Obama's predecessor was less willing to disagree in public with Israel than American President since 1948?

The status of Jerusalem is, of course, one of the principal issues in disputes between Israel and the Palestinians. I understand why this issue, and securing unqualified American support in advance of negotiations between the affected parties for Israel's position on this issue, should be important to Israelis. It is not central to the interests of the United States, the country that matters. Officially, the American government has never accepted that its position on this issue is identical to that of the Israeli government.

 

OBADIAH SHOHER

2:52 PM ET

January 30, 2010

This is not about Netanyahu government

During his previous term as prime minister, Netanyahu had actually given the Palestinians more Israeli land than any government before him. In the current government, he enjoys the support of leftist establishment, and can pursue any concessions to the Arabs.

Israeli reluctance in acquiescing to Obama's pressure is not confined to the government or public opinion, but is a matter of common sense: we have defeated enemies next door, terrorists who wages a war on us, and there is simply no reason for us to concede anything to them, let along our capital.

No Palestinian government can abandon the 'refugees' right of return, and no Israeli government can accept it. So simple.

 

Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

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