I was struck by this Wall Street Journal article today, which reports on the visit to the United States of Pakistan’s foreign minister and military chief of staff:

The top U.S. foreign-policy officials gave their Pakistani counterparts a full public embrace Wednesday, even as some senior Obama administration officials say they still need to be convinced that Islamabad is fully committed to eradicating Islamic militants based in the tribal regions bordering Afghanistan.

The public praise from the U.S., made as part of high-level bilateral talks at the State Department and in Capitol Hill testimony, acknowledged some continuing differences. But the praise was otherwise almost unreserved—highlighting how central gaining Pakistani cooperation has become to the administration’s highest-risk foreign policy challenges.

Now that’s how you are supposed to treat allies: praise in public, pressure in private.

Consider, by contrast, the treatment now being meted out to Israel, which is being publicly condemned by senior administration officials, and whose prime minister was hustled out of an Oval Office meeting without even a photo-op or a word of praise from the president — the kind of treatment afforded to disreputable Third World dictators rather than to the duly elected leader of one of our closest allies.

The contrast is all the more striking because Pakistan has been a greater thorn in our side than Israel could ever be. Israel’s critics claim its policies are responsible for killing American soldiers. Even if you accept their arguments at face value, they are engaging in hyperbole. But in the case of Pakistan, this is no exaggeration — Pakistan has provided arms and training to Taliban terrorists who really have killed many American soldiers in Afghanistan.

True, Pakistan has been cracking down more on the Taliban recently, but administration officials are well aware that this cooperation is partial and incomplete. Pakistan has by no means totally divorced itself from the Taliban or other Islamist terrorist groups that it has used as instruments of statecraft. Nevertheless, it is moving in the right direction. So the public praise, while fulsome, is well-warranted.

The diplomatic approach to Pakistan makes the administration’s punitive approach to Israel all the more striking. As Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post has aptly observed, when it comes to Israel, Obama “appears ideological – and vindictive.”