US – Middle East Relations: New Administration; New Relationship?

Dr Steven Rosen is head of the Washington project of the Middle East Forum in Washington DC. For many years he was policy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and he has held professorial positions at many universities including Brandis University, Pittsburgh University and the Australian National University. And he’s currently teaching at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC. On a visit to Sydney, hosted by the Australia Israel Jewish Affairs Council, Steven Rosen addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 12 March 2013. The paper which follows is taken from an edited transcript of Dr Rosen’s presentation.

 US – MIDDLE EAST RELATIONS: NEW ADMINISTRATION; NEW RELATIONSHIP? 

STEVEN ROSEN

Next Wednesday, eight days from now, President Obama will land in Israel for the first time as president. He is now beginning his second term of office, as you know, and so is Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

When any president of the United States travels abroad, it’s quite a stunningly visual. When he travels to the Middle East, he not only comes on Air Force One, a gigantic 747, but they bring Air Force Two along – an entire second 747 – in case something goes wrong with the first one. And they bring not one, but two, presidential limousines on the plane because they don’t trust these Middle Easterners. That’s probably a good decision.

Two months out from any visit, without exaggeration, a thousand US staff are involved in the advance work for the President of the United States to visit the Middle East. It is a dangerous part of the world. But that’s not actually the interesting part.

It’s no secret there has been a tense relationship between Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but I don’t think tense relations are what you’re going to see next Wednesday. On both sides, the situation has changed.  And I want to spend just a few minutes with you talking about what has changed, what is different.

The second Obama administration is not going to look entirely like the first. This was a president who came to the White House with very little foreign policy experience. You probably know the basic facts. He was a state legislator in the state of Illinois until only two years before he went into the White House. He served in the US Senate for only two short years before becoming president in January 2009.

In Illinois, Obama was a professor at the Illinois Law School, which is not exactly a world affairs specialist. So, when he came to Washington in 2006 and joined the US Senate, Obama had himself put on the Senate US Foreign Relations Committee because he already had it in mind to run for the presidency. He knew that he had to burnish his international credentials.  But, and this well known in the United States Senate, he never actually attended these Senate Foreign Relations Committee meetings.

I’m not making any moral judgment on this, because Obama was quickly absorbed into the struggle for the Democrat presidential nomination. You may remember that the front runner was Hillary Clinton and she was the heir to Clinton dynasty which is a huge political machine that had raised more money than the world had ever seen for a political campaign till then. Hillary Clinton was considered to be unbeatable. And, Obama was determined to prove that wrong. To his credit he did.

In a mere two years, Barack Obama rose from obscurity to defeating the Democrat frontrunner for the Democrat Party’s presidential candidate, and then beating the Republican candidate, John McCain. In a stunning performance, Barack Obama became President of the USA. He’s an exceptionally intelligent man and he has done a masterful job of learning on the job. But he did not start out as somebody who knew the world very well.

Obama came into the White House with some gut instincts on how to deal with the problems facing the US. He also had a lot of advice from his Democrat colleagues. To understand the kind of advice he was getting from his Democrat colleagues, you have to take yourself back to 2008. At that time, Republicans had been in the White House for eight years with George W Bush. They had, among other things, fought the Iraq war, which Democrats thought was an enormous mistake.

Democrats believed that the President George W Bush had ignored the tools of diplomacy and that he and the Republican Party had an undue love for the use of force and little appreciation for diplomacy, especially multilateral diplomacy, or working with the world community and using the tools of persuasion and communication and dialogue. So, Obama’s perspective was to be a president who undid the damage that had been done by George W Bush. He would bring us back to the promising diplomacy of the Clinton era that had preceded it. Especially in the Middle East.

The Middle East had a special place in Barack Obama’s world view because, as you are probably well aware, his family history was steeped in a Muslim heritage. Although he was brought up by his white Christian grandparents, he was the product of his mother’s first marriage to an African Muslim and he was later to have a Muslim step-father when his mother remarried. Some of his early growing up was in Indonesia, from where he had fond memories of all kinds of decent people who were not the sort to blow up the World Trade Towers or be terrorists.

Obama felt that he had a unique and personal calling to prevent the conflict of civilisations, envisaged around a Judea-Christian West versus the Muslim peoples of the Middle East and much of the world to the east of the Middle East. He thought that he could play a transformative role in the world system and create a dialogue of civilisations instead of a conflict of civilisations. And that included, among other matters, relations with Iran. Obama agreed that it was not a good thing for extremists in Iran to get nuclear weapons. But he also banished from the White House the term “Islamic extremism” because he felt it was a racist term.

Obama was willing to talk about extremism but not Islamic extremism. He felt that the Bush administration had mishandled US relations with Iran and that an approach of dialogue and outreach to the Iranians, an approach based in diplomacy – especially multi-lateral diplomacy and working with others – might win over the Iranians where a confrontational approach had been so unsuccessful. So Obama announced, during his presidential campaign, his intention to do this. Similarly, on the issue of the Palestinians, he didn’t think the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was the source of all problems in the Middle East. He thought it exacerbated all the other problems and that, most importantly, it was a problem that could be solved by diplomacy.

I would say most Democrats in 2009 believed likewise; that if only there was presidential involvement and a president willing to roll up his sleeves and use the tools of diplomacy and play a leadership role that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was near at hand. The typical way the Democrats would express this in 2009 was something that said – we were so close to an agreement under Bill Clinton, but George Bush threw it all away because he had a policy of benign neglect and he neglected the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Democrats broadly were behind the Obama diplomacy.

But there was one more element. If you draw a pin from Washington DC through the entire globe – I’m not making this up, I live in Washington – to the furthest point, it is Sydney, Australia. It is really a far away place. You may not realise, being so far away, that America had a magical moment in January 2009. A magical moment that dwarfed the Kennedy years. There has never been a love affair between very large parts of the American people and the occupant of the White House quite equal to what we saw in January 2009. Millions of people came to Washington cheering their lungs out. Obama was on the other end of that. It was an intoxicating experience, and he saw himself, and many encouraged him so, as a transformative figure who had the power –  through his extraordinary command of words (he is one of the greatest speakers ever) – to change the world and especially change the Middle East.

That’s how it started. But four years have passed. And that’s not how the four years ended. Instead, a lot of bad things have happened in those four years. Obama had thought, for example, that all the negative poll data on America in Islamic countries – there are 50 Islamic countries – was because of George W Bush and the Iraq war and the Republicans and so on. But, with the advantage of data over his first four years in the White House, polls now show that America’s image among Muslims around the world is today even lower than what it was in 2009. Muslims didn’t fall in love with the US. They’re actually angrier than ever. Including the Palestinians.

From 1989 until 2008, there was a steady stream of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. But, since the day Barack Obama took office, the Palestinians have refused to negotiate with Israel. There have been no Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for four years. Far from any Obama transformation, we have seen four years of zero Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Meanwhile, more bad things happened. There were protests in Tahrir Square which President Obama was convinced were street protesters of a democratic movement. It was seen as somewhat romantic; there was going to be a new Middle East. Instead, we have a monstrous situation of uncertainty and new kinds of repression. Just this week, Egyptian street protests are demanding that the Supreme Command of the Egyptian armed forces take over the administration and throw out the Muslim Brotherhood. This is astonishing. Street protestors demanding a military coup to save them from a government.

As far as Iran is concerned, it was on Obama’s watch that Iran doubled and doubled again, and quadrupled and quadrupled again, its production of enriched uranium. Including enriched uranium to the 20 per cent level which they had never achieved before. They have built a secret facility under a granite mountain, explicitly so it couldn’t be bombed. The Iranians have also become more and more defiant. In Syria, apart from the civil war, the government has carried out torture on a huge scale. And so on. The Obama outreach hasn’t exactly been a glowing success.

President Obama is an intelligent man. And he has taken account of all of this. In 2010, he gave a series of interviews in which he told journalists that he regretted having inflated expectations so much. He agreed that it perhaps had harmed the situation. His new Secretary of State John Kerry, to his credit, publicly expressed disagreement with some of the things that Obama had been doing. While chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry expressed doubt about Obama’s monolithical focus on the Israeli settlement issue. Although Kerry did not agree with the settlements, he thought it was a mistake to make them the centrepiece of peace talks. This, he believed, would reduce the chance of progress rather than help.

In this 2013 visit by Barack Obama to Israel, aside from the hoopla with the limousines and so on, you will see a different President Obama. He very much intends to try to reset the relationship with the re-elected government of Israel.

I want to digress for a moment about changes on the Israeli side. Israel had, from March 2009 until pretty much today, the most conservative government in its history. It has been more conservative than the government that Menachem Begin headed, and more conservative than the government Yitzhak Shamir headed. It wasn’t a perfect combination with a Democrat liberal-left government in Washington and there were some well known tensions.

There is a second Netanyahu Government, in formation. It is still led by the right but it’s in partnership with the centre left, not the far left but the centre left in Israel. And they are roughly almost something like 40 per cent of members of the new coalition, the new ruling coalition. Israel is a complicated country, where there are seven so-called major political parties.

The new Israeli government is going to be an exceptionally complicated coalition. But, broadly speaking, it’s a coalition of the right and the centre left as opposed to the far left. The Obama team believes that they need to try to work with, rather than have an adversarial relationship with, the new Israel administration. I have been in close contact with the Israeli side and I can tell you that the Israelis have a similar view. Barack Obama won the election, he’s the President of the United States, and he’s going to the be the President of the United States for four more years. Israel has a lot of very important issues that it faces, and it very much needs its principal ally – the United States.

As a result, we shall see a supreme effort by the Netanyahu team to work more closely with the Obama team.