{Originally posted on author’s site, Liberty Unyielding}
Many are misreading the import of the Obama administration’s latest essay in narrative placement: the “chickensh*tting of Bibi.”
There is no doubt that the administration wanted to defame Benjamin Netanyahu: to undermine his reputation as a national leader, impugn him and his policies. The administration has been in high dudgeon over Netanyahu and Israel for some time now, flouncing around in impotent fury like Scarlett O’Hara looking for a vase to throw.
Team Obama is caught, after all, between the stark realities that keep Israel’s security policy constant, and the constancy of American public support for Israel. Making substantial moves against Israel is a non-starter for an American president; Congress may not agree on much, but on that, it would act with unity and swift purpose – and the urgent support of the people
No form of diplomatic pressure, meanwhile – no matter how publicly uncomfortable – is going to make Netanyahu give in on Israel’s security and her hope of a future. Nothing short of giving Israel over to destruction is acceptable to the Palestinian Arab leadership as the price of a “peace deal,” and Netanyahu will never agree to that just to make John Kerry or Barack Obama happy.
So the Obama administration snipes from the shadows (and puts on passive-aggressive spectacles like the ridiculous shunning of Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon during his recent visit). John Podhoretz aptly characterized an earlier incident in the administration’s series of pokes and jabs as a “hissy fit.” What we’ve been seeing is a very prolonged hissy fit; I almost feel a certain solicitude for the psychological effort it must take to keep it going.
Earnest observers in the U.S. and Israel are taking it seriously. A policy rift between the U.S. and Israel makes it hard, probably impossible, to confront Iran effectively – that’s the grown-up sense they are trying to make of it all. And they’re not wrong about that. But they’re behind the train, standing on the tracks as it pulls away in the distance.
Reality has moved beyond the old touchstones: U.S. power, a “concert of nations” addressing common security threats, maneuvers to line up “global” principles that every nation will feel itself bound to live by. The status quo defined by those characteristics is collapsing. In important ways, it has already collapsed, as evidenced by the utter, unaddressed chaos in Syria and Iraq, and the unaddressed Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Hoist on its own petard
This has all come to a head at this particular time largely because the Obama administration thinks it’s a foreign policy to place a narrative in the media about Bibi being a chickensh*t. The posture represented by that form of sophomoric intrigue is deeply irresponsible, morally vicious, and anti-Westphalian, and it has come out in Obama’s policies over and over and over again. The entire world, outside of Western academia and the editorial boards of the left-wing media, already knows that Obama is not an honestly-intentioned Westphalian statesman.
That knowledge has material consequences. Chief among them is the collapse of the global order, and that collapse has follow-on consequences in turn. Looking just at factors relating to the Iran problem, two of the most important consequences are a loss of prestige for the UN, and a loss of cohesion and purpose in NATO.
The UN today is as toothless as the League of Nations. The tooth in the UN was all America, and now “America” has stepped out of her role. The UN has been unable to have any effect on problems like the civil wars in Libya and Syria, or the Russian invasion of Crimea. It recently had to simply abandon one of its oldest peacekeeping missions, in the Golan Heights – literally flee the 40-year-old mission under attack – because the U.S. made no effort to protect the mission and keep it going.