After giving the Israelis a scare, the Obama administration stepped in at the last moment last week and spiked a proposal for a United Nations conference on nuclear weapons in the Middle East. The conference would have targeted the Jewish state for its nuclear program and weapons and the Netanyahu government was quick to express gratitude to the administration for at least this one instance, having, as it keeps saying it does, Israel’s back. But contrary to the spin about this coming out of the administration that was reported by the Wall Street Journal, the move tells us nothing about whether President Obama will keep other commitments to Israel or, if necessary, “walk away from a bad deal” with Iran. To the contrary, as welcome as the U.S. stand on this conference was, it was all about keeping Israel and its friends quiet about an impending nuclear deal with Iran that is likely to be terrible.
There’s no question that Israel is greatly relieved about the U.S. keeping its word and heading off what would have been yet another UN-sponsored Israel-bashing festival. With so many senior administration officials issuing thinly-veiled threats about abandoning Israel at the UN out of pique at the re-election of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the U.S. decision to stick to its longstanding policy of backing Israel’s public ambiguity about its nuclear arsenal was a pleasant surprise. But any predictions about this being an indications that relations between Israel and the United States will start to warm up in the last 20 months of the Obama presidency are likely to prove misleading.
This gesture and other moves, such as the president’s speech at a Washington, D.C. synagogue last Friday, are clearly aimed at walking back previous administration efforts to distance the U.S. from Israel and specifically to antagonize and treat Netanyahu as a pariah. But the purpose of this new Jewish charm offensive is tactical, not strategic. As negotiations with Iran head into the homestretch in the coming weeks, the administration is characteristically focused more on the politics of an agreement than on the policy implications of their effort to craft an entente with the Islamist regime.
Though the president reiterated last week that he is prepared to walk away from the talks if they prove unsatisfactory, no one, least of all his Iranian negotiating partners, thinks he will abandon a deal that is the cornerstone of his Middle East policy. After having given in to Iran on virtually every U.S. demand over the course of the last two years of negotiations, Tehran expects him to do so again, even on key issues such as inspections and snapping back sanctions. With Iran’s leaders making it clear it will never allow rigorous inspections or for sanctions to be easily re-imposed, what emerges from the final weeks of negotiations is likely to be a final document that contains many compromises that mark the deal as a Western seal of approval on the regime’s nuclear program and not one that forecloses a path to a bomb.
But even as America’s goal of stopping Iran appears to have been sacrificed in order to achieve what the president hopes will be a new détente with the Islamist regime, the administration is all over the politics of preventing Congress from interfering with such an arrangement. All the president will need is enough votes to sustain a veto of a Congressional vote against the deal (one more than one-third of either the House and the Senate). In order to get those votes, he needs to keep wavering pro-Israel Democrats in line. Given the terms of what looks to be a deal that will sound more like appeasement than restraint of Iran, the president knows he needs to convince those Democrats that the pro-Israel community is not united in opposition to his efforts. And in order to accomplish that, he needs to undo some of the damage that his open hostility toward Netanyahu in the last year has done.
This is, after all, an administration that unfairly blamed Israel for the collapse of the Middle East peace talks even though it was the Palestinian Authority that blew them up with their unity pact with Hamas and by conducting an end run around the talks by going to the United Nations for recognition. And it was only a few months ago that top administration officials were calling Netanyahu a “chickensh*t,” and then treated his speech to Congress about the Iran deal as an insult to Obama. Nor should it be forgotten that Obama halted an arms resupply to Israel during the war with Hamas last summer and subjected it to bitter and unfair criticism during that conflict in order to show the Israelis that they could not count on the alliance.
Those actions as well as the previous fights Obama picked with Israel have raised serious questions about his attitude to the alliance with Israel especially as he warms up to an Iran that still is spouting language about wanting to eliminate the Jewish state. But Obama knows that selling a weak Iran deal to a Congress that is still dominated by friends of Israel won’t be easy. Hence the abrupt shift of atmospherics toward Israel from intense hostility and threats to the sort of friendly gestures and language that we have seen in the last few weeks.
But as welcome as that change may be, no one should be under the impression that this is the last shift in administration policy toward Israel. Once the Iran deal is signed and Congressional interference is headed off, the Israelis should expect the pressure to be back on them. Another push for Israeli concessions to restart the peace process should be expected in spite of the lack of interest on the part of the Palestinians in ever recognizing the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders might be drawn. And in a region where Iran has become bolder and U.S. influence weaker, another round of violence with Hamas or Hezbollah is not out of the question.
Like the last Jewish charm offensive from Obama during his successful re-election campaign, no one should expect this one to last. Moreover, those Democrats who are the targets of this effort should remember how a key element of the last effort to convince them of the president’s intentions — a pledge to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program — has now morphed into something very different and dangerous both for Israel and U.S. security.
