Can Israel Survive Obama?

In the spring of 2012, when I wrote The Last Israelis, I thought the pessimistic premise of my cautionary tale on Iranian nukes was grounded in realism. I had imagined a U.S. president who passively and impotently reacted to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, leaving it to tiny Israel to deal with the threat. But something far worse is happening: The Obama administration is actively making it harder for Israel to neutralize Iran’s nukes and more likely that Iran will develop a nuclear arsenal.

 

A few months after my apocalyptic thriller was published, the New York Times reported that “intense, secret exchanges between American and Iranian officials [dating] almost to the beginning of President Obama’s term” resulted in an agreement to conduct one-on-one negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. In those secret talks, did Obama long ago concede to Iran a nuclear capability? If so, then the current Geneva negotiations merely provide the international imprimatur for what Iran and the U.S. have already privately agreed. That might explain why France (of all countries) had to reject a Geneva deal that would have left Iran with a nuclear breakout capability. 

An investigation by the Daily Beast also reveals that the “Obama administration began softening sanctions on Iran after the election of Iran’s new president last June, months before the current round of nuclear talks in Geneva.” The report notes that Treasury Department notices show “that the U.S. government has all but stopped the financial blacklisting of entities and people that help Iran evade international sanctions since the election of its president, Hassan Rouhani, in June.”

Obama’s desperately eager posture toward the smiling mullahs has doomed any negotiation to failure by signaling the U.S. fears confrontation more than anything else. Obama’s pathetic approach to the world’s most pressing national security threat also makes U.S. military action virtually impossible from a public relations and diplomatic standpoint because it promotes the naive idea that more diplomacy will resolve what a decade of talking hasn’t. And as long as the Iranians are “talking,” world opinion will also oppose an Israeli military strike—so naturally Iran will find ways to keep talking until it’s too late for Israel to act.

On the other hand, after Obama’s weak response to Syria’s crossing of his “red line” against the use of chemical weapons, the threat of U.S. force against Iranian nukes lost all credibility, making it even harder to change Iranian nuclear behavior without force. So containing the mess produced by weak negotiations is really all that’s left of Obama’s Iran “strategy.”

Only epic ineptitude or anti-Israel hostility no longer checked by reelection considerations can explain Obama’s moves on Iran. And the stakes couldn’t be higher for the rest of the world. After all, if Iran is the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism without nuclear weapons, what will terrorism look like once Iran goes nuclear? And there are already hints of the nuclear proliferation nightmare that will follow Iran’s nuclearization: Saudi Arabia has Pakistani nukes already lined up for purchase. Remarkably, Obama has known this since 2009 and apparently doesn’t care about that consequence any more than he does about Israel’s security. How else to explain his acceptance of the dreadful Geneva proposal granting Iran a nuclear weapons capability?

 

Exacerbating an existential threat against Israel is bad enough, but Obama has been an abysmal ally in other respects. Despite being history’s most aggressive president to punish leakers (except when they make him look good), Obama’s administration has repeatedly leaked sensitive Israeli information that could have easily provoked a Syrian-Israeli war. Obama summarily dumped a decades-long alliance with Egypt (that is also key to Israeli security) over some Egyptian state violence that is dwarfed by the decades-long brutality and terrorism of the Iranian regime now enjoying Obama’s overzealous courtship. And Obama’s image as a multilateralist who subordinates U.S. interests to higher principles has been exposed as a fraud following reports that he knew the U.S. was spying on close European allies (contrary to his denials).