America’s relationship with the Middle East and with the Muslim world is about more than confronting al-Qaeda, however. And it is in the realm of diplomacy that more substantial changes have occurred. Obama reached out to American enemies such as Syria and Iran, and has pressured and publicly criticized Israel in a way previous administrations did not. His goals are narrower than those of Bush. Obama doesn’t want to democratize the region. He hopes to soften the behaviour of hostile regimes, and to push Israel toward a peace deal in an effort to build Arab support for a tough line against Iran should his outreach efforts there come to naught.
So far these efforts have been fruitless. Iran responded to Obama’s extended hand with an even firmer fist—continuing its apparent pursuit of nuclear weapons and its support for Hamas and Hezbollah, while crushing dissent in an increasingly brutal fashion at home. Syria, which conducted peace talks with Israel during Bush’s second term, still ships weapons to Hamas and Hezbollah, interferes in Lebanon, and sticks close to Iran. Progress toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians remains elusive.
Elliott Abrams, a deputy national security adviser during the George W. Bush administration, accuses Obama of neglecting America’s commitment to Israel and says this shift will not lead to progress on peace negotiations. He argues that previous Israeli willingness to compromise—such as at Camp David during the Bill Clinton administration—came during periods of close ties with the United States. “This tactic of thinking that an insecure Israel is going to be more flexible than a secure Israel is a mistake,” says Abrams, now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world, coupled with demands that Israel stop building settlements, as well as recent diplomatic snubs, have certainly caused unease in Israel. Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, says Israel is weaker as a result. “Bush was feared,” he says. “Bush was a tough guy, a cowboy. The Syrians were afraid of Bush, and we were seen as the American proxy in the region, so they were afraid of us. Now they are less afraid. Weakness invites aggression in our part of the world.” It’s a flawed argument, according to Steven Simon, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who worked on counterterrorism and Near East security policy in the Clinton administration. Simon points out that Syria started a nuclear program during the Bush administration and that its proxy militia, Hezbollah, triggered a war with Israel in 2006—hardly the actions of a state paralyzed by fear.
Obama’s pressure on Israel is motivated in part by a desire to reassure America’s Arab allies and ensure their support for any future showdown with Iran. In January, Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, which oversees American security interests in the Middle East, dispatched a team of senior military officers to the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They said Arab leaders feared America would not stand up to Israel and were losing faith in American promises. In other words, says Bruce Riedel, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who last year helped Obama overhaul U.S. policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, what happens in Gaza and the West Bank makes it harder for the United States to succeed elsewhere in the region.
Obama’s tougher line, however, hasn’t yielded results. “Ultimately, we’re still hamstrung by the limited leverage we have over the parties at the negotiating table,” says Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at Brookings. Leslie Gelb, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and long-time foreign policy analyst, says both Bush and Obama began their presidencies with too little experience and too much idealism about what America could accomplish in the Middle East. Bush believed force could democratize the region. Obama was “overeager, or over-optimistic, about diplomatic resolutions of these matters.” He tried to reach out to Syria, says Gelb, author of the 2009 book Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy. “But the Syrians, like a lot of those dictatorships, they’re a pain in the neck. They’re not trustworthy. So you try to do these things, and they screw you.”
Gelb believes America’s most effective tools in the region are patience, and carrots and sticks designed to produce gradual shifts in behaviour rather than nation-rocking upheavals. “The United States has leaning power,” he says. “If we lean on the situation long enough, we can make a difference, and we can change policy. We screw up when we expect the changes to come in the short and medium terms.”
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