The reality is that in any new policy, the President has three options:

1. Throw Israel under the bus and force it to make concessions in order to appease the Arab street while enabling the Palestinian side to avoid making even minor concessions and enabling the Palestinians to strengthen their demands for unreasonable future concessions.
2. Throw the Palestinians under the bus and demand that either Fatah reject working with Hamas or that Hamas publicly renounce armed struggle against Israel and actively combat it. The US would threaten to cut off aid to the PA.
3. Throw both sides under the bus, proposing a solution that is impossible for either side to support publicly for certain, but possibly in private as well, and which will have no impact on the ground (because neither side will be able to accommodate it). This will allow the President to appear to be boldly offering a new solution.

There is no “Win-Win” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are “lose-lose” scenarios and some of them are pretty drastic. More than likely, the President will offer a “lose-lose” scenario, throwing both sides under the bus, that will upset Israel more than the Palestinians in the hope that Israel will opt to take it rather than facing a “lose-win” scenario. A problem arises however in that the Palestinians may believe that if they hold out, they will eventually get their own “win-lose” option anyway.

For any solution proposed by the United States to have any impact, it has to be made abundantly clear by the administration that it will support an Israeli biased solution if whatever is proposed is not accepted by the Palestinians. There must be a credible threat that the Palestinian side could get worse than what is offered and little hope that it could get better if that option is not chosen. Meanwhile, no one should be holding their breath that whatever is proposed will lead to a final peace agreement anytime soon.

This political blunder comes on the heels of what amounts to disgraceful incompetence in the foreign intelligence arena, with the DNI arguing that the Muslim Brotherhood is “a largely secular organization!” And of course, that after this administration appears to have been completely blindsided by the events in Tunisia and Egypt. Let’s not forget whole host of issues related to Iran. There are certainly many more issues that could be raised.

Why does this administration seem to be blindly blundering in the Middle East?

My own answer to this question is that this administration is full of people who feel that a certain type of foreign policy had never been given a real chance, namely reaching out to the Arab world as a friend instead of as a power. Further, that in spite of the dismal failure of this policy thus far, the administration is being urged to go “all in” by its proponents.

To answer my question specifically, people in this administration understand that traditional foreign policy has not brought them what they wish for, which is peaceful coexistence (something they actually deeply down believe is possible). In their minds, traditional foreign policy has promoted hatred of the United States as exceptional (which of course it is).

Their goal with what I would call “Naive Foreign Policy” (literally a foreign policy lacking in experience) is to experiment with alternatives to the tried and true. This is a generation whose actions throughout life have been sheltered by parents and by society. They’ve been able to experiment with drugs. They went through the sexual revolution. They treat religions like they do their cars, trading them in for new ones when they go out of style. And for all of their experiments, they have suffered very little that they can see. Thus, they see no real problem in experimenting with new foreign policies. What real harm can be done? We can always trade it in for a new model later. Worse, they believe not only in microwaving food, but in microwaving societal transformations and even global ones. They actually believe that peace is possible tomorrow, if only the necessary actions were done today.

Reason and rationality are not the basis of this foreign policy. Hope in the common humanity of their fellow men and women is the basis.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one in which both sides violate this utopian ideal. Historical fact violates this ideal and we therefore cannot use history as the basis of our actions now. The President has not used those exact words, but he might as well have. Remember what President Obama said in his speech to the UNGA in September of 2009? I will never forget it:

The time has come to realize that the old habits, the old arguments are irrelevant to the challenges faced by our people. They lead nations to act in opposition to the very goals that they claim to pursue and to vote, often in this body, against the interests of their own people.

They build up walls between us and the future that our people seek. And the time has come for those walls to come down. Together, we must build new coalitions that bridge old divides, coalitions of different faiths and creeds, of northern and south, east, west, black, white, and brown.

The choice is ours. We can be remembered as a generation that chose to drag the arguments of 20th century into the 21st, that put off hard choices, refused to look ahead, failed to keep pace because we defined ourselves by what we were against instead of what we were for. Or we can be a generation that chooses to see the shoreline beyond the rough waters ahead; that comes together to serve the common interests of human beings and finally gives meaning to the promise embedded in the nation given to this institution, the United Nations.

That is the future America wants; a future of peace and prosperity that we can only reach if we recognize that all nations have rights but all nations have responsibilities as well. That is the bargain that makes this work. That must be the guiding principle of international cooperation.

We have a foreign policy in which history is irrelevant. Anyone find that frightening?

Gridlock will make it very difficult, if not impossible, for the President to advance his domestic agenda. You might like that. You might be saying, “And I’m happy!” However, what this means is that for the next two years, the President can almost solely affect foreign policy and foreign trade. Guess what he thinks are two of the primary problems facing the world? Israel-Palestinian peace and Nuclear Arms Control. Guess where much of President Obama’s attention is going to be focused over the next two years? On a tiny sliver of land in the Eastern Mediterranean.

You may say, “Yes, but the country has spoken. The country rejects the Obama Administration’s policies!” That may well be true, but look at the choices presented to President Obama at this point. The first option is that he could admit defeat and alter his policies to please the bulk of the American population, assuming that he believes that the bulk of the population disagrees with him on those issues. To alter his path could displease his own party, actually it almost certainly would. It might please those on the political right, but will any of them vote for him in 2012 if he changes his policies over the next two years? Probably not enough to matter. He may be able to win over some centrist independents by changing his policies, but he cannot count on that. To put it bluntly, changing his policies will likely not help him at all in 2012.

The President’s other options are to try to prove himself correct on foreign policy, potentially, if he is in fact correct, swaying voters to come back to his side, or he can attempt to accomplish the things that he wishes to see accomplished as long as he has the ability to do so regardless of what may or may not happen to please the bulk of the voters or even his party. In other words, he can admit, if he believes it, that his policies are unpopular and alter them while likely accomplishing little to help him in 2012 or he can forge more strongly ahead. This last option may or may not make things better for him in 2012, but might make him feel better.

I think he’s going to choose the latter option, especially if he feels that his policies are correct. He may even believe that he has nothing to lose that has not already been lost, including the 2012 Presidential election. If so, should his actions upset a few voters more than they please, it will not matter.

So not to bring you celebrants down a notch, but for those of you who are not big fans of the President’s foreign policy positions and who are cheering Republican victories in Senatorial, Congressional, and Gubernatorial elections, things might not be great for the next two years.

We have gone into the war not because of the Lusitania nor yet because of the Sussex, nor in truth because of any single ferocity of under-sea warfare, but because these and similar things represent a type of national mind or rather of governmental theory which will either subdue and conquer the world or be overcome by it…

In a sense, it is true that we fare forth into the world of war on behalf of the American ideal. But we war not in order to impose the American ideal–for that were after the more Germanico–but to save the peoples of the earth from the abhorrent necessity of yielding to the attempt of a masterful sovereignty to impose its will and even its way upon their national existence….

May we not put the matter in the simplest terms? We fare forth to shield the souls of nations from destruction by a brutalizing sovereignty.

Stephen Wise went on to discuss the things that America needed to safeguard as it waged the war including freedom of speech and the protection of workers, especially keeping children safe from exploitation by industry. However, the beginning of the speech quoted above is one of the best explanations of American involvement in foreign conflicts that I have yet seen and applies to this day. We do not go to war because of single attacks, but in order to “save the peoples of the earth from the abhorrent necessity of yielding to the attempt of a masterful sovereignty to impose its will and even its way upon their national existence.” Could there be a better explanation of our role in the fight against Radical Islam and our presence in the Middle East? In the fight against Soviet Era Communism? In fighting against the Fascism of Nazi Germany?

Yet Wise himself neglected this concept before the second World War, refusing to support acting upon it until it was far too late. To “save the peoples of the earth from the abhorrent necessity of yielding to the attempt of a masterful sovereignty to impose its will and even its way upon their national existence” is exactly the necessary role of America in the modern world, has been for over 100 years, and acting upon that necessity is the only thing preventing another world war. Failure to realize that fact, one could argue, led directly to World War II. The failure to realize it at the end of the 20th Century led to the rise of a new “brutal sovereignty” seeking to “impose its will and even its way” and even resulted  in our suffering new “Lusitanias,” including the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Solipsism is the belief that the whole world is me, and as Mathematician Martin Gardner points out, its authentic version is not to be found outside mental institutions. What is to be found outside the asylum is its philosophic cousin, the belief that the whole world is like me. This species of solipsism—plural solipsism, if you like—is far more common because it is far less lonely. Indeed, it yields a very congenial world populated exclusively by creatures of one’s own likeness, a world in which Lincoln pines for his dinner with André or, more consequentially, where KGB chiefs and Iranian ayatullahs are, well, folks just like us.

More specifically he wrote:

There are other consequences. If the whole world is like me, then certain conflicts become incomprehensible; the very notion of intractability becomes paradoxical. When the U.S. embassy in Tehran is taken over, Americans are bewildered. What does the Ayatullah want? The U.S. Government sends envoys to find out what token or signal or symbolic gesture might satisfy Iran. It is impossible to believe that the Ayatullah wants exactly what he says he wants: the head of the Shah. Things are not done that way any more in the West (even the Soviet bloc has now taken to pensioning off deposed leaders). It took a long time for Americans to get the message.

This solipsism is very much in evidence among our eilites as Barry Rubin describes in Why Don’t Western Elites and Governments Comprehend International Realities?

To see a society with such advantages and assets act as if it were intent on suicide, or at least with blind disregard for its survival, is a strange phenomenon. To view the stronger obsessed with making concessions, the more moral consumed with guilt, a blind inability to identify enemies who keep proclaiming their nature and intentions is just plain bizarre.

If I had to put it all in one sentence–admittedly a long, complex one–it would be this like this:

American and Western policymakers and intellectuals cannot believe or comprehend that so many would fight for bad causes out of ideological–nationalist, religious, traditionalist–worldviews, turning down material betterment in exchange for years of sacrifice, defeat, and suffering; engaging in a battle that a pragmatic assessment says they cannot win.

Much of the West has lost the ability to understand how a world view can be narrow and fantastical or, on the contrary, quite internally rational but merely designed to deal with a very different set of circumstances and society. You don’t get to be the dictator of Venezuela or leader of al-Qaida or a powerful cleric in Iran by behaving and thinking like a Western democratic politician.

They don’t understand what Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini tried to explain back in 1979: We didn’t make the Iranian revolution to lower the price of watermelons. In other words, material deprivation doesn’t motivate the revolution, and the goal is not higher living standards as the main priority. The goal is to manifest the divine will, to take over the world, to create a utopian society which invokes the absolute good against the absolute evil; to gain total victory because one is absolutely in the right.

In this political world, pragmatism is immoral compromise is treason. The situation is NOT one of business as usual.

Not much has changed in 26 years, except, that the solipsism has become mainstreamed even more.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

In regard to Prince Turki’s recent up-ed in the NY Times, Rubin writes:

Note also–something else nobody is going to notice–that the op-ed insults the United States as it directly contradicts Obama’s current initiative to get something from the Arab states to match an Israeli construction freeze.

And in regard to the latest maneuvering between Tehran and Washington he writes:

This means: By sending a five-page insulting letter the Iranian government has derailed the sanctions’ project and will gain in prestige without any cost.

(emphases mine)

I thought that by showing greater respect to the Muslim world, President Obama was going to repair the damage done by the Bush administration to America’s reputation in the region. Rather the outreach appears to be the equivalent of hanging a “Kick me” sign on America’s posterior.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Some, including James Baker have been urging, President-elect Obama not to wait until the last minute to be engaged in Arab-Israeli peace.

Daled Amos strings together posts by Emanuele Ottolenghi and Rick Richman to argue that neither Bill Clinton or George W. Bush exactly waited until the last minute or their respective terms to engage in the Middle East peace process. Daled Amos with this from Rick:

During the entire 14-year process, not a single terrorist organization was dismantled. The problem was most certainly not U.S. presidents who “waited too long.”

and adds his own, very worthwhile two cents:

Of course, to admit such a thing would be to hold the Palestinian Arabs actually responsible for something in this mess–ant that is just not going to happen.

On a more general note, Bret Stephens observes that President-elect Obama’s foreign policy team is looking more and more like a third term of George W. Bush’s. (Or, at least, a continuation of the incumbent’s second term.)

Instead, Mr. Obama has assembled a team of intellectual clones. Not only that, it’s one that neatly conforms to the same foreign-policy consensus that typified much of President Bush’s second term: revival of the Arab-Israeli “peace process”; a diplomatic approach toward Iran; concessions to North Korea (with no serious expectation of genuine reciprocity); abandonment of what was once called the freedom agenda. As for Iraq, whatever differences there might have been are now moot, thanks to the surge and the passage last week of the status-of-forces agreement.

Stephens expects that Presdient Obama’s will be just like the past four years, but faster. And he doesn’t mean that in a positive way.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

By contrast, in 2000, Gov. George W. Bush promised a “humble foreign policy” and criticized our peacekeeping operations in the Balkans.Today, less than a decade later, the parties have completely switched positions. The reversal began, like so much else in our time, on September 11, 2001. The attack on America by Islamist terrorists shook President Bush from the foreign policy course he was on. He saw September 11 for what it was: a direct ideological and military attack on us and our way of life. If the Democratic Party had stayed where it was in 2000, America could have confronted the terrorists with unity and strength in the years after 9/11.

Instead a debate soon began within the Democratic Party about how to respond to Mr. Bush. I felt strongly that Democrats should embrace the basic framework the president had advanced for the war on terror as our own, because it was our own. But that was not the choice most Democratic leaders made. When total victory did not come quickly in Iraq, the old voices of partisanship and peace at any price saw an opportunity to reassert themselves. By considering centrism to be collaboration with the enemy – not bin Laden, but Mr. Bush – activists have successfully pulled the Democratic Party further to the left than it has been at any point in the last 20 years.

(This is adapted from the speech he gave at the Commentary Fund Dinner.)

John Podhoretz, yesterday, explained why Sen. Lieberman is not – as some of his critics assert – a hack:

By remaining steadfast on the war in Iraq when others in his party fled their vote and then blamed their inconstancy on the supposed “lies” of the administration. And by refusing to join the jackal-like feast on George W. Bush’s reputation, Lieberman earned the hatred of many fellow Democrats. That hatred caused a hugely rich man in his state to spend millions of his own money to oust Lieberman from his own party’s nomination after serving three full terms as senator.And yet there he remained, and remains, unbending. This is the opposite of hackery. It is the antithesis of hackery. It is the quality everyone says he yearns for in Washington — principled consistency, a willingness to work across the aisle in a bipartisan fashion, and a refusal to kowtow to the loudest voices merely because they are so loud. Last night, at the annual dinner of the Commentary Fund, Lieberman said he remained a Democrat precisely because he believes the strong foreign policy he espouses must have a bipartisan foundation.

California Conservative adds his thoughts. One nitpick though: He casts Clinton with other pacifists. Clinton, at least in the case of the NATO war against Serbia was willing to go to war to spread freedom. It was a stance that Sen. Lieberman praised in his speech.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad