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Ben Smith rounds up some recent failures of the Obama administration to convince its friends to do it some favors, like Jalal Talabani’s refusal to step aside as Iraqi president for Iyad Allawi or Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to stop settlement activity in East Jerusalem. Ben writes:
These allies’ willingness to snub Obama may reflect the perception — among leaders whose habit is to obsess over, and over-read, American politics — that the American president is on his heels, and among the White House’s challenges in the coming months is to remind foreign leaders that Obama’s still fully in control of a foreign policy that was hardly mentioned during the election and is not, in fact, expected to change as a result of Republican control of the House.
Except that the roots of both recent setbacks extend long before the elections, and stem back to something more fundamental. The Obama team came in operating from a sensible-enough presumption: the U.S. has built up enough goodwill and sacrificed enough resources, financial and human, into allied or proxy countries that those allies will be willing to make concessions when the U.S. requires. In each of these cases, Obama figured he asking for things these allies consider fundamental. He needed Iraqi Kurds to make a little institutional room for Iraqi Sunnis; for Israelis to hold off on settlement construction so a two-state solution wouldn’t be stillborn; for, say, Hamid Karzai not to steal an election.
From my perspective, a robust case can be made for each of these courses of action. But what Obama (and favorably-inclined people like myself) didn’t sufficiently appreciate is that each of these allies thinks the U.S. is always on the verge of selling it out. For a new president to start off with the medicine and not the sugar — by figuring he could pocket the gains of his predecessors — is clear in retrospect to have been the wrong move. From there, reluctance by the client gets met with insistence by the patron, and then all of a sudden a dynamic sets in that casts a pall over the whole relationship. We asked for sex before dinner.
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All three have something the U.S. makes no secret that it desperately wants. They hold all the cards and the price will not come cheap.
Marc’s point seems sound to me. I’m not sure there’s any evidence that buying a low-cost sugar would lead to the medicine being taken. So long as we don’t have a best alternative to negotiated offer, they’ve got a monopoly.
Sex for dinner? Are you serious? When it comes to the Israelis, they’ve been getting a three-course meal every day for decades, and Obama’s not even asking for a handjob here.
While it may not be possible for domestic reasons, from a foreign policy perspective, it’s time for Washington to tell the Israelis that they need to realize what side their bread is buttered on or else start buying their own damn dinner.
Yep. If you watch Mr Obama (Barry?) on his return to Indonesia, you’ll note that even the Indonesians, a democracy for only about 10 years, are respectful but not specially cooperative. The US just doesn’t seem _that_ powerful when we’re neither making things that others want nor buying things that others make.
But, Spencer, this – “The Obama team came in operating from a sensible-enough presumption: the U.S. has built up enough goodwill ” – flies in the face of facts. The Bush team eroded huge chunks of goodwill via their highhandedness, obviously the war thing, their willful ignoring of other people / cultures, and so on. Over the 8 years, I probably heard this from people in Rwanda, Uganda, India, Lao, and _certainly_ in Jordan, Syria, Indonesia, Turkey and Yemen. They felt that Bush was burning the “US brand” by acting like an arrogant outlier. (Abu Ghraib anyone?).
When Obama was elected, the people I talk with were thrilled, thrilled to get rid of Bush, thrilled that the US had elected a black man, thrilled that he seemed smart and contemporary. Lots of disillusionment since then, especially related to Afghanistan and to Palestine, but also global warming, the shitty economy, the loss of the House, and so on.
There were a lot of expectations for this administration, including those held outside the country. To some extent those expectations stemmed from the awareness that the US had suffered major hits to its prominence in int’l affairs, that it had behaved like a banana republic. What makes it sensible to assume that there was previously good will — or that current actions decreased it. Basically, we’ve acted like savages for 10 years.
With all respect, I think the original argumentation is wrong and is part just of the recent tide of in US (and elsewhere) of trying to blame especially the foreign policy setbacks in Palestine as Obama’s fault and not Israeli governments. That Obama should have “romanced” them and made them love himself before demanding anything and all such things.
It’s simply wrong, because we have seen this before. It was the same during the Cold War, US supporting nasty regimes and then asking them to do some reforms and overall being less nasty. But they just went on being nasty, because they calculated that after all the amount of political prestige, money, guns and political rhetoric spent on praising these regimes the US couldn’t really do anything meaningful against them, stopping the largesse from flowing, if they would just continue doing things as they had.
And because US saw them as battlegrounds against Communism, in danger of falling to the Reds, then that too made it seem to US government that it’s options were very limited: It could only continue to support the regimes, even when the reformers it praised were jailed or killed by the regimes it sponsored.
I think we still have the exactly same thing here. By supporting these regimes in the first place US has driven itself to corner, where it believes that the only thing it can do is to continue it’s support, with asking occasionally the sponsored regimes to behave better. Let’s remember for example that even when GWB asked something from the Israelis, he didn’t get it either.
Because the Israelis believe that the US has to always support them, that the US government has no other option but accept everything that Israel does and publicly praise Israel to the heavens. And the US presidents believe them, because for some reason it has become an accepted fact – which I find little support in reality – that unconditional support for Israel is demanded so that presidents and their parties can win elections, and that at most presidents can do is verbally ask Israel to act differently and them ask forgiveness when Israel’s leadership refuses to do so.
Obama’s mistake is believing these claims. If the leaders of Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel don’t jump when he says so he could, if he would wish so, just stop US support for them. Bring troops home, stop the US “protection” that Israel takes granted. But of course he believes that he can’t do this, and thus he binds himself to just those verbal options of asking vassals act differently, and the vassals don’t act differently, because they too think that US must continue to support them, no matter what.