The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating story discussing how, as bilateral relations deteriorated during the Obama administration, both the United States and Israel relied on their respective intelligence services to fill in the gaps about what was not being said. According to the Journal, U.S. officials became upset that Israel was allegedly spying on the talks:
As talks began in 2014 on a final accord, U.S. intelligence agencies alerted White House officials that Israelis were spying on the negotiations. Israel denied any espionage against the U.S. Israeli officials said they could learn details, in part, by spying on Iran, an explanation U.S. officials didn’t believe.
Surprisingly, the story ignores an important irony: If U.S. intelligence agencies alerted the White House that Israel was spying on negotiations, that was because the U.S. intelligence agencies were spying on the Israelis as well. Certainly, it’s the job of the United States to protect its information and counter-espionage against it by both friends and foes, but feigned grievance comes off as silly. Surely, the White House understands that not only China, Russia, and Iran, but also Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan and, yes, Israel spies; all the more so when they believe U.S. positions might undercut their security (and, in the French and German cases, commercial) interests. To not understand that represents the utmost naïveté, the type that leads U.S. officials to use unsecured email servers or trust hotel networks.
The Wall Street Journal story continues to complain that Israel allegedly leaked the progress of negotiations. This also seems like a contrived complaint, given the degree to which U.S. and Iranian officials leaked to favored reporters, and how the Obama administration repeatedly leaked its private conversations with Israeli leaders. Remember the “chickensh*t” comment? The relevance of that interview was not so much the crudeness and immaturity of senior Obama administration policymakers, but rather that they were leaking the contents of their private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There is also an irony when both Congressmen and Americans more broadly learn about their negotiating position from leaks by foreign powers, all the more so since the Obama administration promised to be the most transparent in history.
The almost petulant desire to cut off Israel and America’s Arab allies from the context of the negotiations flew in the face of both good sense and precedent. If Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry had confidence in the strength of their negotiating position and the formulas being hashed out, they need not fear transparency. To some extent, the Clinton administration had understood this with regard to the Agreed Framework negotiations with North Korea: While they certainly sought to keep details out of the press, Clinton understood that the negotiations had to include Japan and South Korea, the two allied countries most impacted by any potential deal.
There’s always been a great deal of hypocrisy in U.S. policy, but it has grown to new and quite destructive heights with the petulance toward Israel. The willingness to permanently undercut the security of a country facing an existential challenge simply because, when it comes to the Islamic Republic of Iran, its leadership refuses to put lipstick on a pig and thereby risks the legacy which Obama and Kerry seek apparently more for personal rather than solid national security reasons.
