Why, then, the unease? Because Obama wasn’t speaking primarily to Iran but to Israel. Even when he seemed to be warning Tehran, he was really warning Jerusalem. His goal these last days hasn’t been so much to deter them but us. The headlines got it right: Cool down the war talk. Give sanctions—and diplomacy—a chance.
If this were, say, two years ago, that would be a reasonable request. But it has taken Obama the better part of his first term to finally put in place serious sanctions—and at this late date, the sanctions may still not be strong enough to work. Speaking to AIPAC, Netanyahu implicitly responded to Obama: We gave diplomacy a chance for a decade, and sanctions for the last six years. If you’re asking for more time—when we are now looking at Iran achieving nuclear capacity in months rather than years—the sanctions had better be tougher…
Obama’s resolve on Israel often comes too late, an attempt to compensate for his own clumsiness. Like his speech defending Israel to the U.N. General Assembly last September. It was a powerful speech—I wrote about it enthusiastically in TNR at the time. But in retrospect the speech was irrelevant. Except for the Jews, no one seemed to be listening. In the Arab world the speech was dismissed as electioneering. The missed moment was as much a part of the story as the speech itself. That was the speech Obama should have delivered in Cairo in 2009, when he had the attention of the Muslim world. Instead, he squandered a historic opportunity to affirm Israel’s legitimacy, and by the time he did deliver the right speech, it was too late.
All too often that defines Obama’s relationship to Israel. He finally says the right thing and it no longer matters.
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