We’re not waiting for the UN to become toothless; it already has. This means that nothing the UN does will be binding. And that has implications for all kinds of things, from the deterring of Iran to the meaning of a UN resolution declaring a Palestinian state, and the force of UN-sponsored treaties on climate change, small arms, and land mines. Not respecting UN policies is shortly to become a land-office business.
Observers in status quo nations don’t see that clearly because we aren’t motivated to. But others are (e.g., Iran, Russia, ISIS), and still others soon will be. They see the same things about NATO too: the same absence of policy consensus and meaningful enforcement; the same ultimate toothlessness.
I can’t overstress the extent to which Obama himself signed the death warrant for diplomatic shibboleths like the “two-state solution” – ironically, Kerry’s consuming passion – by withdrawing American power from the global order. There are no levers to press now. Team Obama, by its own hand, has now got nothing to hold over Bibi.
It has nothing to hold over anyone else either, and it has signaled that clearly with its little “chickensh*t” snit-fit, faithfully relayed through Jeffrey Goldberg’s article. That’s not what the administration meant to do, but that’s the effect it has actually had.
The hour is late
Where we should be taking this seriously is less in conventional, backward-looking policy advocacy, and more in attention to our most fundamental interests – each nation’s, and each family’s and individual’s. That, I note, is what Bibi has actually been doing throughout his current tenure. As geopolitical earthquakes keep erupting, he’s been focusing on what Israel absolutely requires to defend herself, survive, and have a viable future.
Friends, I urge you most strongly to do the same. Everyone may not be ready to hear this yet. But the hour is late. Nothing is propping up the international order now. The Pax Americana-era mechanisms of multilateral diplomacy and consultation have become nothing more than a convenience for the bad guys – like radical Iran, which uses “nuclear talks” to string the West along and play for time. (Inside our nations, the same can be said of too many of our tools of “soft socialist” government: that they are used by an embedded political class to string along the people.)
Bibi isn’t the only foreign political leader who doesn’t plan to let misguided fealty to a broken order become a suicide pact that takes down his nation. He’s just the one the Obama administration tries to insult by hurling obscenities at him.
It’s important to say this in closing. Neither Israel nor the United States has a future as an inward-looking “fortress.” The nature of freedom, opportunity, prosperity – hope – is to affect others, and take strength from that as well as giving it. America will never stop needing like-minded allies, the free exchange of ideas, and peaceful trade. Neither will Israel.
Cleaning up our own house in America doesn’t mean turning our back on the world. It’s necessary first because we cannot live without integrity and character. But it’s necessary equally because America must either infect the world with hope, or be infected by the world with despair. And we cannot avoid the latter as long as our president is someone who tries to get his way by calling the most stalwart of allies and defenders of Western freedom a chickensh*t.