Previous quarrels between Washington and Jerusalem were
about differing Mideast perceptions. Now the issue is how the U.S. perceives
itself.
By BRET STEPHENS
Recent conversations with senior Israeli officials are
shot through with a sense of incredulity. They can’t understand what’s become
of U.S. foreign policy.
They
don’t know how to square Barack
Obama’s promises with his policies. They fail to grasp how a
president who pledged to work toward the abolition of nuclear weapons is
pushing an accord with Tehran that guarantees their proliferation. They are
astonished by the nonchalance with which the administration acquiesces in
Iran’s regional power plays, or in al Qaeda’s gains in Yemen, or in the Assad
regime’s continued use of chemical weapons, or in the battlefield successes of
ISIS, or in Russia’s decision to sell advanced missiles to Tehran. They wonder
why the president has so much solicitude for Ali Khamenei’s political needs, and
so little for Benjamin
Netanyahu’s.
In a
word, the Israelis haven’t yet figured out that what America is isn’t what
America was. They need to start thinking about what comes next.
The most
tempting approach is to wait Mr. Obama out and hope for better days with his
successor. Israel and the U.S. have gone through bad patches before—under Ford
in the 1970s, Reagan in the early ’80s, Bush in the early ’90s, Clinton in the
late ’90s. The partnership always survived the officeholders.
So why
should it be different this time? Seventy percent of Americans see Israel in a
favorable light, according to a February Gallup poll. The presidential candidates from both
parties all profess unswerving friendship with the Jewish state, and the
Republican candidates actually believe it. Mr. Obama’s foreign policy is
broadly unpopular and
likely to become more so as the fiascoes continue to roll in.
Yet it’s
different this time. For two reasons, mainly.
First,
the administration’s Mideast abdications are creating a set of irreversible
realities for which there are no ready U.S. answers. Maybe there were things an
American president could have done to help rescue Libya in 2011, Syria in 2013,
and Yemen last year. That was before it was too late. But what exactly can any
president do about the chaos unfolding now?
Shakespeare
wrote that there was a tide in the affairs of men “which taken at the flood,
leads men on to fortune.” Barack Obama always missed the flood.
Now the
president is marching us past the point of no return on a nuclear Iran and
thence a nuclear Middle East. When that happens, how many Americans will be
eager to have their president intervene in somebody else’s nuclear duel?
Americans may love Israel, but partly that’s because not a single U.S. soldier
has ever died fighting on its behalf.
In other
words, Mr. Obama is bequeathing not just a more dangerous Middle East but also
one the next president will want to touch only with a barge pole. That leaves
Israel alone to deal as best as it can with a broadening array of threats:
thousands more missiles for Hezbollah, paid for by sanctions relief for Tehran;
ISIS on the Golan Heights; an Iran safe, thanks to Russian missiles, from any
conceivable Israeli strike.
The
second reason follows from the first. Previous quarrels between Washington and
Jerusalem were mainly about differing Mideast perceptions. Now the main issue
is how the U.S. perceives itself.
Beginning
with Franklin Roosevelt, every U.S. president took the view that strength
abroad and strength at home were mutually reinforcing; that global security
made us more prosperous, and that prosperity made us more secure.
Then
along came Mr. Obama with his mantra of “nation building at home” and his
notion that an activist foreign policy is a threat to the social democracy he
seeks to build. Under his administration, domestic and foreign policy have been
treated as a zero-sum game: If you want more of the former, do less of the
latter. The result is a world of disorder, and an Israel that, for the first
time in its history, must seek its security with an America that, say what it
will, has nobody’s back but its own.
How does
it do this? By recalling what it was able to do for the first 19 years of its
existence, another period when the U.S. was an ambivalent and often suspicious
friend and Israel was more upstart state than start-up nation.
That was
an Israel that was prepared to take strategic gambles because it knew it
couldn’t afford to wait on events. It did not consider “international
legitimacy” to be a prerequisite for action because it also knew how little
such legitimacy was worth. It understood the value of territory and terrain,
not least because it had so little of it. It built its deterrent power by
constantly taking the military initiative, not constructing defensive
wonder-weapons such as Iron Dome. It didn’t mind acting as a foreign policy
freelancer, and sometimes even a rogue, as circumstances demanded. “Plucky
little Israel” earned the world’s respect and didn’t care, much less beg, for
its moral approval.
Perhaps
the next American president will rescue Israel from having to learn again what
it once knew. Israelis would be wise not to count on it.
