Leon Hadar

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has revealed what members of his country’s national security elite have been chatting about behind closed doors for quite a while. “The United States has been, and will always be our best friend,” the Israeli PM said in a speech delivered before the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) at Tel Aviv University. Then came the big “but”: “Washington has its own set of interests, which we must honestly admit do not always overlap with ours.” “We are speaking honestly and understand one another,” Bennett elaborated. America’s “interest in the region is dwindling. The United States is currently focused on the Russian-Ukrainian border and it is in a strategic conflict with China.

We were promised a war of nerves in Vienna between Washington and Tehran, a game of chicken. Instead, President Biden has chickened out. He's also blaming Israel. Call it fowl play. Here's how it should be going. The United States wants Iran to re-commit to refreezing its nuclear program. Iran demands in exchange the revoking of the economic sanctions against it. Each side insists that it won't give up on its demands — even if that could lead to the collapse of the negotiations, the demise of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and eventually to a military confrontation. The diplomatic and military tensions between the United States and Russia over Ukraine involve just such an exercise in brinkmanship.

President Joe Biden talks the liberal internationalist talk but walks the realist walk. The recent Summit of Democracies wasn't idealism but part of a strategy to contain China and Russia. Internationalist rhetoric aside, Biden has a dark Realpolitik side — which explains why he was able to survive so many decades in Washington and get elected as president. Some of my friends on the right have criticized me for recommending Biden for the diplomatic move that should have earned him the 2021 Machiavelli Award. Announcing a new military pact with Britain and Australia (AUKUS) to deter China stabbed France in the back — or to put it another way, emulated the modus operandi of traditional French diplomacy.

Was it inevitable that Iran would one day gain nuclear weapons? Identifying causality in human actions is a tricky exercise, especially when it comes to historical events, like the outbreak of World War Two. Was appeasement the cause? Or perhaps a war with Germany was unavoidable as long as Adolf Hitler was in power? It may also be fated that a nation of ninety million people, proud about its history and place in the world — Persia was already an advanced civilization when barbarian tribes roamed the British Isles — would become a nuclear military power. That nuclearization process actually commenced under Mohammad Reza Shah and continued because of concern that, thanks to French assistance, Iran’s adversary Iraq was on its way to developing a nuclear weapon.

Long-time readers of this site may be aware that yours truly has not only applauded the Trump administration’s successful efforts to normalize Israel’s relationship with several Arab countries but has also proposed awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Jared Kushner, the architect of the Abraham Accords. There were many reasons for my bullish sentiments regarding the Trump administration’s Middle East policy. First and foremost, as I pointed out, it disrupted the old American paradigm that held that any effort towards rapprochement between Arabs and Israelis hostage to the ultimatums of the radical Palestinian leadership.

Following the US setback during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968, Walter Cronkite, the mythical CBS News television broadcaster, was sent to Southeast Asia to report on the military intervention there. After Cronkite proclaimed in his broadcast that the US lost the war in Vietnam and that it was time to bring the boys back home, then President Lyndon B. Johnson told his advisors, 'If I lost Cronkite, I lost Middle America.' Urban legend or not, it reflected the way I imagined the role of the American media to be when I had served as a press officer at the Israeli Consulate in New York about a decade or so after Cronkite aired that broadcast from Vietnam.

For years Benjamin Netanyahu has been imagining himself in the role of Winston Churchill during the Blitz, the German bombing of Britain in 1940-41, when the United Kingdom stood alone in a Nazi-ruled Europe, hoping that soon their American cousins would join them in a joint campaign to defeat Adolf Hitler. In Netanyahu’s movie, the ayatollahs in Tehran play the role of the Nazi leaders, while he, like Churchill, tries to convince the Americans that the Islamic Republic poses an existential danger both to Israel and the United States and that everything must be done, including the use of military force, to prevent these successors to the Nazi regime from acquiring nuclear weapons. The British employed many methods, including disinformation, to drag Americans into the war in Europe.

In these pages last year, I suggested that while the President’s son-in-law may not be a great geo-strategic mind, we should give Jared Kushner a chance to give peace in the Middle East a chance. After all, to paraphrase President Trump’s message to African American voters, what do those suffering Middle Easterners have to lose after close to two decades of failed US military interventions in the area that brought about chaos and bloodshed? Needless to say that I was bombarded with dismissive messages from pals who are proud members of Washington’s ‘foreign policy community’. They thought I was out of my mind and/or trying to land a job in the Trump administration.