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Wading into the Middle East Morass

(Washington Post) Jackson Diehl - On his second day in office in 2009, Barack Obama launched an ambitious effort to broker peace in the Middle East, ignoring warnings that neither Israelis nor Palestinians were ready for a deal. He was badly burned. Israelis and Palestinians never began substantial negotiations. Four years later, the diplomatic landscape looks even more forbidding. Gaza remains firmly in the possession of the Hamas movement, which has not budged from its refusal to recognize Israel. The Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas appears to be crumbling. Yet if Obama were to listen to his European counterparts, Arab leaders and even his incoming secretary of state, he would, once again, make the "peace process" a top priority in his second term. In Washington, some of the loudest calls for Obama's reengagement come from the "realist" foreign policy camp. These folks have been arguing for years that it is time for the U.S. to recognize limits to its power. When it comes to Israel, however, the realists assume boundless U.S. strength. The supposition seems to be that a U.S. too weak to force Bashar al-Assad out of Syria can compel Israel's advanced democracy and the leaderless Palestinians to accept compromises they have resisted for decades. What's needed is a concerted but low-key policy that aims at creating conditions for a long-term solution but does not pretend that it can be delivered in the next year or two. Above all, Obama should accept the lesson of his first term: that making Middle East peace a presidential priority will not make it happen.
2013-01-07 00:00:00
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