Obama’s New Linkage
- 05.18.2009 - 9:20 PMThe good news from the Obama-Netanyahu press conference today is that the president indicated his engagement with Iran would not be endless, which is nice to hear — but the sense of relief that this has caused indicates a bar that couldn’t be set lower for Obama if it was held off the floor by a couple of Legos.
The bad news is that Obama reiterated his endorsement of “linkage,” or as it’s known around here, the myth of linkage. He said:
If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way. To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians — between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with the potential Iranian threat.
This of course gives rise to a predictable set of questions, such as: what if Israeli-Palestinian peace will take many years to accomplish, but the Iranian nuclear bomb will only take a year or two to accomplish? Obama essentially proposes that America will race the Iranians — our peace process versus their nuclear program. Does anyone wonder who will win?
There are lots more problems with all of this, many of which are discussed with great clarity in the myth of linkage link above. But I’d be surprised if Obama himself believes that the kind of cosmetic progress that might be accomplished in the peace process over the next year will actually create leverage on Iran. Rather, I suspect that his invocation of linkage serves a different purpose: to incorporate the peace process into the U.S.’s dealings with Iran, enabling Obama to extract the maximum possible concessions from Israel in the course of his fruitless attempt to talk the Iranians out of nuclear weapons. It won’t work, but it is shrewd. And it is linkage, albeit of a new kind.
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