America is the arsonist of the Middle East

All of the administration’s Middle East policies pointed to the same thing: America wants out of the Middle East. From the perspective of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the administration has unaccountably weakened its own negotiating position with Iran over the clerical regime’s nuclear weapons program. Why would you play nice with an adversary and relieve sanctions when the point is to crush your enemy and then show mercy? If the Iranians get the bomb, it’s a problem not only for Israel, but also Abbas, whose Iranian-backed rivals will be strengthened. For three years, the administration had no policy to address the Syrian conflict, which Obama called someone else’s civil war—i.e., not America’s problem. If the administration’s press surrogates, Washington insiders, and the Europeans think the American commander-in-chief pulled off a diplomatic masterstroke when he signed on to the Russian initiative to get Bashar al-Assad to relinquish his chemical weapons arsenal, this is simply not how it looks in the Middle East. From that perspective, Obama is a bluffer. And a guy who won’t back up his own words with actions is not likely to back up his allies with actions when the going gets tough—and even the most cockeyed optimist in the region knows that actually solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be tough.

At a time of relative peace and quiet, the White House put the Israelis and Palestinians under the spotlight with a buzzer set to go off at the end of April. What both soon realized was that whatever they decided, the Americans weren’t going to be around to give them cover. Both Jerusalem and Ramallah started looking for ways to protect their flank and mapped a route separate from that of the White House. If the administration had issues with Egypt’s new military strongman, Israel praised Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to the skies. Netanyahu’s very public pronouncement last week in support of the Kurds should also be understood as a Bronx cheer directed at the White House, which strongly opposes Kurdish independence.