
When
his aides get discouraged about the prospects for Middle East peace,
Secretary of State John F. Kerry often bucks them up with a phrase:
“Don’t be afraid to be caught trying.”
But as his tireless efforts to broker Israeli-Palestinian negotiations hit bottom Thursday, with Israel’s cancellation of prisoner releases
that were considered crucial to keeping the talks alive, there are some
around Kerry — including on his senior staff and inside the White House
— who believe the time is approaching for him to say, “Enough.”
Kerry
risks being seen as trying too hard at the expense of a range of other
pressing international issues, and perhaps even his reputation,
according to several senior administration officials who spoke on the
condition of anonymity about sensitive internal and diplomatic matters.
“A
point will come where he has to go out and own the failure,” an
official said. For now, the official said, Kerry needs to “lower the
volume and see how things unfold.”
Jeffrey Goldberg offers a very kind and generous interpretation of Kerry’s entire grandiose, Quixotic effort:
President
Barack Obama’s administration, and specifically its secretary of state,
deserve credit for maintaining the belief — in a very American, very
solutionist sort of way — that the application of logic and good sense
and creative thinking could bring about, over time, a two-state solution
to the 100-year Arab-Jewish war…
This
week, we saw the administration float the idea of releasing Jonathan
Pollard, the ex-U.S. Navy intelligence analyst convicted of spying for
Israel, in exchange for some Israeli movement on the peace process. As I
wrote on
Monday, this was both a dubious idea generally and extremely unlikely
to bring about advances in negotiations. If anything, it was a sign of
desperation. As Andrew Exum
and others have noted, why would the mediator in a dispute make
concessions to one of the parties seeking mediation? It’s up to the
parties to make concessions to each other. Obama has argued that the
U.S. can’t want a peaceful compromise between Israelis and Palestinians
more than the parties want it themselves. The Pollard balloon (now
punctured, presumably) suggests Kerry wants a negotiated settlement just
a bit too much.
American foreign policy can’t just be based upon noble goals – or idealistic visions, grand dreams, noble ambitions, utopian goals and a serious lust for a Nobel Peace Prize. A Secretary of State has to have some judgment on what’s possible, a realistic sense of what our allies, enemies, and states in between want, what they’re willing to accept, and what they’re willing to kill and die for.
To use an example our friends on the Left will appreciate, the Bush administration had very noble goals when it went into Iraq. It had an inspiring vision of a free, democratic, pluralistic, modernized Arab state in the middle of a turbulent region, at peace with its neighbors and providing a role model for the rest of the region. Obviously, things didn’t turn out the way we hoped. Very bright people in the Bush administration misjudged how the various factions within Iraq would respond to life without the brutality of Saddam Hussein.
Foreign leaders’ world views, philosophies, perspectives and desires matter a lot.
Which is why it’s a little unnerving to hear President Obama say something like this:
With
respect to President Putin’s motivation, I think there’s been a lot of
speculation. I’m less interested in motivation and more interested in
the facts and the principles that not only the United States but the
entire international community are looking to uphold.
Ron Fournier:
Taken
at face value, it’s a disturbing response from a world leader who
should lie awake at night concerned about the motivation of U.S.
adversaries, whose first meeting of every day involves an intelligence
briefing on the motivations of global actors…
I take him at his word: He doesn’t care.
First,
his handling of leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, China and
most recently Russia exposes a lack of empathy and sophistication…
…Caring
little about the motivation of his rivals seems to be a trait of
Obama’s leadership that has hurt him in Congress, where the opposition
party is stubbornly opposed to his agenda…
Putin knows his enemies. Obama dismisses his.
(Click link below to read more)
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