Both Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu will be addressing several thousand people next week in Washington at the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities, and there has been an assumption that the two leaders would meet during Netanyahu’s visit. But the Jerusalem Post reports that several American Jewish leaders say their optimism about a meeting is waning as Netanyahu’s arrival approaches with no meeting announced. Haaretz has a similar report.

The Jewish leaders told the Post that “the White House wanted to be assured it would be receiving something from Netanyahu in return.” Meetings without preconditions are apparently for adversaries, not allies.

Holding a meeting with the prime minister of Israel would be a useful signal to Iran, as the latter continues its rope-a-dope strategy of precondition-less meetings with Obama, that U.S. patience is waning. The signal would be even clearer if it were accompanied by leaks that the longest discussion was devoted to Iran.

But smart diplomacy may not be that smart.

In Honduras, there are T-shirts being sold on the streets that read “The Little Country That Could.” The San Francisco Examiner editorializes that the denouement there represents “the culmination of the administration’s mystifying diplomacy”:

Even if Zelaya returns to power for a meaningless month, Micheletti has won the battle. . . . [Micheletti] deprived Zelaya of power for five critical months and thus blocked his illegal attempt to seek another term, something that is definitively banned by the Honduran Constitution. Micheletti also guaranteed that constitutional elections will be held to replace Zelaya, no matter who is interim president. . . . Still, this happy ending in no way justifies Obama’s bone-headed interference in Honduran internal affairs, which destabilized that nation’s political institutions and caused totally unnecessary violence and deaths.

Obama converted the attempt by the Honduran Supreme Court and Honduran Congress to enforce the Honduran constitution into a “crisis” by declaring — less than 24 hours after it happened — that it was a “military coup.” But military coups rarely leave civilians in control, much less ones chosen by a democratically elected Congress. Even less often do such coups proceed with previously scheduled elections between candidates chosen prior to the “coup.”

The State Department lawyers, to their credit, found they could not conclude that there was a “military coup” in Honduras, and Hillary Clinton was left to announce that it was a “coup” of some undetermined kind. One of the “Senior Administration Officials” who briefed the press asserted that there were all kinds of coups. Asked for an example of a non-military one, he said he thought there had been a “legislative” coup back in Panama in the 1990s.

The Examiner argues that Obama did not understand that the threat to Latin American democracy these days emerges not from the guerrillas or generals but from presidents elected under one-term constitutional limits who then try to make themselves presidents for life. But the problem may rather have been a breakdown in the Obama administration foreign-policy decision-making system, which allowed the president to make an ill-informed judgment in 24 hours and then permitted him to stick with it months after it was apparent that it had been wrong.

It is the same system that allowed him to base his Middle East peace process on reneging on a six-year understanding with Israel and to continue in that vein for months after the entire Israeli public had been alienated. It is the same system that allowed him to continue with his Iran policy months after it became apparent that Iran had been hiding secret nuclear facilities and secretly shipping massive amounts of weaponry while he “engages.” It is the same system that is now approaching 100 days of seminars reviewing the “comprehensive new policy” for Afghanistan he announced on March 27 and no longer likes. It is the same system that treats allies as adversaries, or vice versa, and substitutes videos, buttons, private messages, feel-good speeches, and other emblems of goodwill for serious policy.

There is a very serious problem with the American foreign-policy decision-making process, and it needs to be corrected soon.

Today in Cairo, Hillary Clinton held a joint news conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Ali Aboul Gheit, in which she was asked about the “shape of the Palestinian state in the U.S. opinion.” Here is the first part of her response:

Well, I can repeat to you what President Obama said in his speech at the United Nations and what he said here in Cairo — that the United States believes that we need a state that is based on the territory that has been occupied since 1967. And we believe that that is the appropriate approach. It is what has been discussed when my husband was president with Yasser Arafat, and it is what has been discussed between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the Bush Administration when President Abbas has been there. [Emphasis added.]

In fact, that was not the position of either the Clinton or the Bush administration. On the contrary, both administrations provided Israel with explicit written statements (in 1997 in a letter from Secretary of State Christopher, and in 2004 in a letter from President Bush) that the peace process must provide Israel with “defensible borders” — which no one can reasonably argue means the 1967 ones.

Hillary is aware, or should be, that the words “the territory” or “all of the territories” are loaded diplomatic phrases. They are the phrases the Soviet Union unsuccessfully attempted to insert in UN Resolution 242 in 1967, which the U.S. explicitly rejected.

The U.S. insisted that the resolution refer only to a withdrawal from an unspecified portion of “territories.” Immediately after the Six-Day War, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had drawn up for President Johnson a map of defensible borders for Israel — with a memorandum describing why, from a military standpoint, Israel would need to retain the “commanding terrain” and other “key terrain” east of the 1967 borders. No rational state would trade strategic military land for a paper promise of peace, particularly when that land has been used multiple times to launch a war against it.

Today the Egyptian Foreign Minister capitalized on Hillary’s answer, immediately asking if he could “follow up” on what she had just stated:

… this position that was just stated by Secretary Clinton — we say that we approve it and we are in agreement totally with it. We support it fully, we support fully this U.S. position because it reflects a conviction that — of a Palestinian state that is capable, that will be on all of the territories that were occupied in 1967 and that will be a hundred percent of those territories, because a hundred percent of those territories goes to the Palestinians despite the (inaudible) that would happen.

And with this, also East Jerusalem is for the Palestinians. With this, this is clear and with this such position, we support the U.S. fully. [Emphasis added.]

Hillary did not seek to clarify or modify Gheit’s summary of the U.S. position.

An Israeli withdrawal from “all of the territories” on the West Bank is inconsistent with the governing document of the peace process, inconsistent with the policies of prior U.S. administrations, inconsistent with written assurances those administrations provided Israel, and inconsistent with President Obama’s frequent pledges of “unwavering support” for Israeli security.

In his 2008 “Let Me Be Clear” speech to AIPAC, Obama said that “any agreement” with the Palestinian people must provide Israel with “defensible borders.” It will be important to hear what he has to say about this subject (among others) when he addresses several thousand Jewish activists next week at the General Assembly.

Henry Siegman asserts in “Israel and Obama” in this morning’s New York Times that President Obama’s “unqualified commitment to Israel’s security” is real. Indeed Siegman alleges that the White House is “about to set a new record” for reassuring Israel. But Siegman opposes a campaign to ingratiate Obama with the Israeli public, because the “unprecedented Israeli hostility” springs from Israel’s “pathological” rejection of a “return to the 1967 pre-conflict borders.”

At the risk of being accused of mental illness for doubting Obama’s unqualified commitment (and Siegman’s assertion that the 1967 borders were “pre-conflict” ones), here is an easy test to determine the quality of President Obama’s commitment: Does he stand by the 2004 Bush Letter to Israel, which reiterated the following “steadfast commitment:”

The United States reiterates its steadfast commitment to Israel’s security, including secure, defensible borders, and to preserve and strengthen Israel’s capability to deter and defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats. [Emphasis added.]

No responsible Israeli or American military person considers the 1967 borders “defensible.” It was their indefensible nature that led Arab states to prepare for what they announced in May 1967 would be a “total war which will put an end to Israel.” Israel’s ability to deter and defend itself, by itself, also depends on preservation of its ultimate deterrent — which the words “by itself” in the Bush Letter were intended to reaffirm.

The Obama State Department has declined, no less than 21 times, to pass this test. The administration’s continued silence about it leads to a certain amount of doubt about Obama’s commitment — a doubt increased by Hillary Clinton’s BBC interview on Friday. Asked about Israel’s settlements, she said this:

We continue to have very serious questions about the legitimacy of the settlements that Israel has promoted. We understand that to a large extent, it has to do with their security needs and fears about trying to have a defensible perimeter around Israel.

But we also are committed to a two-state solution. And as President Obama said, that two-state solution will take place in the territory occupied by Israel since 1967. The question is how we get to it. And that’s what we’re trying to achieve.

The paragraph-long “But” that follows Hillary’s asserted understanding of the need for a defensible perimeter undermines Obama’s allegedly “unqualified” commitment — particularly given the structure of her answer, which sets Israel’s desire for such a perimeter against what Obama is “trying to achieve.”

President Obama will speak next week to the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities, undoubtedly to assure Israel and American Jews once again of his “unwavering commitment” to Israeli security. But his speech will be simply rhetorical unless he uses it to end his administration’s silence about the Bush Letter. Without knowing whether Obama supports secure, defensible borders for Israel and its ability to deter and defend itself, by itself, we will not know if his commitment is unqualified. We will not even know what his commitment means.

In a roundtable today with Pakistani editors, Hillary Clinton responded to a question about the Israeli-Palestinian issue with the now-familiar Obama administration litany: the problems are hard, they were inherited, they were ignored by the prior administration:

I think that, look, we all know that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is one that is a very serious and difficult problem that we are working hard also to try to resolve. We inherited a lot of problems. If you remember, when my husband left office, we were very close to an agreement because he worked on it all the time. The next administration did not make it a priority and did not really do much until toward the end. And unfortunately, we are trying to make up for some lost time, in my opinion.

Hillary forgets that the Bush administration in 2001 inherited an even more difficult problem — the new Palestinian terror war that concluded the eight-year Clinton peace process. During the next eight years, the Bush administration nevertheless did the following:

Adopted a new policy officially endorsing a Palestinian state if the Palestinian Authority renounced terrorism and elected new leaders (2002);

Produced a three-phase roadmap to achieve a Palestinian state — and got the UN, EU, Russia, Israel and the PA all to endorse it (2003);

Entered into a deal with Israel to turn over all of Gaza to the PA to enable it to demonstrate its ability to “live side by side in peace and security” (2004);

Arranged a Palestinian election to choose a “moderate” successor to Yasser Arafat (2005);

Arranged another election to give the Palestinians a choice between their new PA and their premier terrorist group (2006);

“Accelerated” the Roadmap to move straight to final status negotiations in the Annapolis Process (2007); and

Dedicated the secretary of state (not just an envoy) to trip after trip, and meeting after meeting, for more than a year, to push a final settlement (2007-2008).

The results of the eight-year Bush administration’s peace process were the same as those of the Clinton one: another offer of a Palestinian state, another Palestinian rejection, and another war, as Israel was finally forced to act against the continuous rockets that came from Gaza.

Two peace processes, two formal offers of a state, and two wars. Even a cursory knowledge of the last sixteen years would suggest the problem is not the absence of attention, nor the absence of effort. But in the tenth month of the Obama administration’s own failures in the “peace process,” it is easier to bash Bush on foreign soil than to give a serious answer.

As the serial seminars continue, the front-page headline yesterday on the New York Times was “Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by CIA.” The article did not waste any time getting to its point: the news “raises significant questions about America’s war strategy.”

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry issued a press release stating it was news to him and raised “serious questions”:

“After reading press accounts which allege that Mr. Karzai has been on the payroll of the CIA, one of the agencies gathering intelligence about narcotics trafficking in Afghanistan, I have serious questions about the information that Congress is receiving. On questions this serious, it is imperative that we receive reliable, current and accurate information. …

The appropriate congressional committees must be immediately provided with the most comprehensive and untainted information about his alleged entanglements.”

Over at the State Department, there was this comedy-silver exchange with Spokesman Ian Kelly:

QUESTION: Ian, quite apart from any report that may have appeared today or in the recent past, what does the Administration think about President Karzai’s brother?

MR. KELLY: What do we think about his brother? I don’t know that we necessarily have a view on his brother. I mean, we support the government of President Karzai, and our views are very well known on that.

QUESTION: Well, what do you think of the influence his brother might wield?

MR. KELLY: I don’t think I necessarily have that kind of information.

QUESTION: Okay. Perhaps then maybe you can [give] the guidance you have for the question that you were expecting.

MR. KELLY: You’ve got to ask me the question before I read the guidance. I’m happy to read the guidance, if you’ll ask me the question.

QUESTION: All right.

QUESTION: What about reports that President Karzai’s brother is being paid by the CIA for various activities?

MR. KELLY: We don’t comment on intelligence matters.

One would have thought the serious questions had been resolved long ago. On March 27, President Obama announced his “comprehensive, new strategy” after a “careful policy review … ordered as soon as I took office” that reflected input from “our military commanders, as well as our diplomats” and consultations with Afghanistan, Pakistan, NATO allies, and international organizations working “closely” with members of Congress.

According to Rahm Emanuel, Obama is now asking “the questions that have never been asked on the civilian side, the political side, the military side and the strategic side.” Obama’s current review of his own comprehensive new strategy has now taken him longer than it took him to adopt the strategy in the first place.

Last week, the Associated Press reported that the “heavily politicized” Supreme Court of Nicaragua overturned a ban on Sandinista President Daniel Ortega’s running for re-election, in a ruling issued by Sandinista justices while opposing justices were absent (which was promptly declared “non-appealable” by Ortega). The State Department issued a press release stating it was “very concerned”:

Attempts to short circuit constitutional authority, regardless of ideology or country, threaten democratic governance and are of concern to all members of the Organization of American States.

The “regardless of ideology or country” was an obvious reference to Honduras, where the State Department has consistently described as a “coup” the enforcement by that country’s Supreme Court of an unambiguous constitutional provision that prohibits a sitting president from proposing “directly or indirectly” a change in the presidential term limit and requires anyone proposing such a change to “immediately cease in their functions.”

The State Department is unlikely to revoke the visas of the Nicaragua Supreme Court, much less mobilize the OAS (which has been silent about the constitutional end-run in Nicaragua). The department is “very concerned,” but its concern has no operational significance. It is simply an opportunity to issue a press release to make it appear it is evenhandedly supporting “democratic governance” in Nicaragua and Honduras.

But the situations in the two countries are precisely the opposite: in Nicaragua, the constitutional provision has been ignored, while in Honduras it has been enforced, over the strenuous objections of the State Department. The first requirement of “democratic governance” is that the constitution establishing it must be respected. As the Wall Street Journal editorializes this morning, in Honduras “their action against Mr. Zelaya may well have saved them from Nicaragua’s fate.” And from Venezuela’s.

But not from another fatuous State Department press release.

At the Washington Institute’s Weinberg Founders Conference on October 18, Gen. (Ret.) Charles Wald, former deputy commander of the U.S. European Command, participated in a keynote debate on preventive military action against Iran. (The video is here; the excerpts below are from the Federal News Service transcript.)

Asked directly if such action is feasible, Wald responded in part as follows:

Yeah, I think it is. I mean, I think it would be very difficult. I think the consequences would be problematic to a certain extent. It wouldn’t be easy. It wouldn’t be one strike. …

On the other hand, for people that think just because there isn’t one single target that somebody could go after – frankly the United States – that it’s undoable is false. And I think for us to allow that belief to perpetuate is a dangerous thing. …

And certainly I think people here believe it’s possible they could have [a nuclear weapon] by next summer. And in military terms, something that’s possible that could happen has to be considered as something that’s going to occur. You can’t just kind of put it aside.

Wald later expressed concern about the limited time frame for resolving this issue:

My concern – and I’m not in the military anymore and don’t speak for the administration or the United States military, but as a U.S. citizen and a former military person, my concern is that the Israelis consider this an existential threat, which if I were in Israel I would worry about this. …

So I know there’s a lot of discussions going on with our great ally, Israel, but the pressures are going to mount over the next six months to a year.

Asked if diplomacy can work, Wald endorsed it but said, “You have to have all the different tools all at once”:

I mean, nobody wants to start another front, let’s say, in the Middle East. And the Iranians know this. The Iranians know the American public has quite a bit of [war] fatigue. …

But [the Iranians] need to believe that [they could be subject to military action], and it should be true too. So I think Iran needs to know there are other tools that could be used. … Sanctions are a nice thing but an embargo or potentially a blockade – a blockade is an act of war so you’d need to be ready to go. …

And the other thing, I think Iran – and we should say this in public – is Iran needs to realize – and you can have your opinion about Iraq or Afghanistan or any of those things, but in 2001, our presence was basically in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia to a certain extent, some ships in the North Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, and that was it.

Today we have a presence in Iraq. We have a presence in Afghanistan. We have a presence in the Gulf. And if we’re smart we would have a presence in Azerbaijan as well. If I’m Iran, I’m getting a little nervous about the fact that the U.S. has a presence there. We should take advantage of that.

The reference to the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is a reminder that as Iran considers its nuclear-weapons program, its evaluation of the American commander in chief will be affected by his coming decision on Afghanistan: to follow the advice of Gen. Stanley McChrystal or that of Gen. J.R. Biden Jr. or to vote “present” by sending 10,000 to 20,000 troops (enough to neither win nor lose). It is not only the Taliban and al-Qaeda that are watching Obama in his third month of self-reflection about his self-declared war of necessity. Iran is watching as well.

The present and past chairs of Human Rights Watch (HRW) wrote to the New York Times this week, criticizing the founder of their organization, Robert L. Bernstein, for allegedly arguing that Israel should be judged by a different human-rights standard than the rest of the world.

This was, as Jeffrey Goldberg noted, a gross distortion of Bernstein’s views; Bernstein had written that HRW’s original mission was “to pry open closed societies” by supporting dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky. Open societies could correct themselves — through public debate, an adversarial press, an independent judiciary, a politically active academia, and multiple political parties — all especially evident in Israel and conspicuously absent in the “authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records” around it. Bernstein wrote that to ignore the distinction between open and closed societies is to be taken into a “moral equivalence game.”

No one has described the corruption of that game better than Sharansky himself, recounting in The Case for Democracy the respect he lost for Amnesty International (AI) after he read its annual report:

I immediately noticed that something was terribly wrong.  There were pages and pages of material about human rights abuses in my new country Israel, and very little on the nondemocratic states that surrounded us.  It appeared as though Israel was a bigger violator of human rights than Saudi Arabia, a country where there was no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, and no freedom of religion.

At the time, Sharansky offered what he thought was a constructive suggestion:

Why not divide the report into three sections:  one for totalitarian regimes, one for authoritarian regimes, and one for democracies?  Without those categories, Amnesty was creating a dangerous moral equivalence between countries where human rights are sometimes abused and countries where they are always abused.

His suggestion was rejected out of hand; AI would not “label” countries; it would not “support or oppose any political system”; it would concern itself only with the “impartial” protection of human rights. To which Sharansky responded: “How can a human rights organization be impartial about political systems that are inherently hostile to human rights?”

Israel is the proverbial canary in the coal mine, but now the noxious fumes come from the “human rights organizations” themselves. If HRW were worthy of its name (and its history), it would elevate Gildad Shalit to the status it once gave Sharansky. It would use Shalit not simply to condemn holding a prisoner incommunicado but also to mobilize the moral authority of the free world against a terrorist regime that holds its entire population captive, that caused a war through relentless rockets fired on neighboring civilians, and that used its own civilians as human shields when the inevitable reaction finally came.

Bernstein’s important article demonstrates that HRW once understood the moral stakes involved between open and closed societies before it descended into the game of moral equivalence that has turned it into a part of the problem instead of the solution. It has reduced itself to writing to the Times to distort the argument its own founder now makes against it.

Jennifer, the article you cited, “Biden Asks Eastern Europe to Spread Democracy,” ends with Biden’s exhortation to the students in his audience:

“You were present at the creation of a new Europe, a new security, a new era of peace because you were bold enough to seize that moment,” Mr. Biden told an audience of over 200 university students at the Bucharest library. “Be like those in ’89. Be bold. Exercise your leadership. You have a history and you have a tradition. You can make a gigantic difference, and we’ll stand with you.”

After Biden left, the students perhaps reflected on Biden’s track record. He had proposed withdrawing from Iraq and leaving the nascent democracy there to fend for itself; he is urging the administration to reject the request for sufficient troops to stand by Afghanistan; on this trip, he will not visit Georgia, where Russian troops remain after splitting an American ally in two; and he will be too busy, like his running mate, to travel to Berlin on November 9 to participate in the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It is a shame that one of the students did not get the opportunity to suggest to Biden that “stand with you” does not mean what he thinks it does.

President Obama has reportedly informed the German government that he will not travel to Berlin on November 9 to participate in the 20th-anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is an unfortunate decision on multiple counts.

First, it is another slight to another European ally — one that is going all-out to celebrate the event. The invitation to Obama was extended personally by Chancellor Angela Merkel last June.

Second, it is a failure to correct the historical misstatement of his citizen-of-the-world address last year in Berlin, when he credited the fall of the wall to the “world standing as one” and failed even to mention the names of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

Third, it is an embarrassment for the United States not to be represented at the highest level for the commemoration of an event of this magnitude. As Matt Welch writes in the November issue of Reason magazine, November 1989 was “the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history” — the end of the Soviet Union and communism in Europe and a 50-year Cold War that was a worldwide ideological battle. It was battle led by America.

Fourth, it is an opportunity for Obama to give a speech in which he does not apologize for his country but celebrates the triumph of freedom that has been the driving force of American history from its beginning through his own election. As a former president eloquently said, the power of liberty is one that “brought settlers on perilous journeys, inspired colonies to rebellion, ended the sin of slavery, and set our nation against the tyrannies of the 20th century.” The American president should be in Berlin on November 9 to celebrate a moment that was a triumph for America as well as Germany.

There is still time for Obama to reverse his decision. If he cannot bring himself to see the importance of this issue on the merits, perhaps his political advisers will consider the optics of his ending his first year in office with (1) a trip to Copenhagen on behalf of his hometown, (2) a trip to Oslo to pick up a prize he admits he does not deserve, and (3) a failure to take a trip to Berlin to help celebrate his country’s historic accomplishment. History will notice his absence, and the electorate may as well.

Jennifer and Peter, your concerns about the “seminar presidency” that the Obama administration has become are not likely to be assuaged by the discourse on smart power that Hillary Clinton gave at the town-hall meeting at Moscow State University — just before she left empty-handed from the latest “smart power” exercise.

In response to a question, Clinton gave a 700-word description of smart power that began with its underlying rationale: “avoiding the use of hard power whenever possible, using diplomacy and other approaches to try to prevent having to use military force.”

In the course of her comments, she provided this example of trying to “be smarter than our past”:

Some of you may have seen in the press that we are making an in-depth review of our policy in Afghanistan. There were some things that we inherited from the prior administration that we are (inaudible). But we are committed. Our goal is to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaida and their extremist allies. But who exactly are (inaudible)? Who is really part of the sort of global jihadist movement, and who may be fighting for some other reason?

Here was her concluding description of what “smart power” means:

So that’s what smart power means — take nothing for granted, ask all the questions you can possibly have, come up with the best answer that’s humanly possible, (inaudible) knowing that (inaudible) may not get 100 percent right, and then make the best decisions you can to implement them. So we are very committed to engaging in this smart power approach and doing everything we can to work with our partners around the world on (inaudible).

Smart power is, of course, smart (by definition), and coming up with the best answer humanly possible seems like a good approach. But adversaries are likely to be unimpressed with statements about tough diplomacy or crippling sanctions, especially when they know you are focused on avoiding hard power — and watching you respond to a recommended troop increase by holding a seminar on who really is part of “the sort of global jihadist movement” and seeing you trade missile-defense systems in Eastern Europe for magic smart-power beans. Adversaries know that such sanctions have yet to work in Cuba or North Korea (and actually turned a profit for Saddam Hussein) and that smart power will always permit extended talks before resorting to them.

Hillary ended her discourse by assuring her audience that the U.S. is “very committed to engaging in this smart power approach.” The irony is that smart power may have a chance of success only if adversaries think there is a likelihood that hard power will be applied if it fails.

Writing in the NYR Blog, Jonathan Freedland notes that Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was awarded by a committee of five liberal politicians from a country whose population is half the size of London, reflecting a “Norwegian consensus” that “favors multilateralism, yearns for nuclear disarmament, and believes in international institutions, revering the United Nations above all.” The speculation in Oslo is that what clinched the award for Obama was chairing a UN meeting and “using that body as the vehicle for his disarmament ambitions.”

Freedland concludes that the prize can be considered a “bouquet” from Norway, although one with an exhortatory purpose: “making it harder for the President, as a Peace Prize laureate, to take military action against Iran or escalate in Afghanistan” and “bind[ing] him into further action on nuclear arms and to keep faith with the UN.”

The prize may have been a farce, an award Obama did not seek and admitted he did not deserve, but his acceptance speech in December will reflect his considered views on war and peace. It will be delivered against the background of critical decisions he will have recently made, or need to make shortly thereafter, regarding both Afghanistan and Iran.

In preparing his address, Obama may want to review the Nobel acceptance speech Theodore Roosevelt delivered on May 10, 1910, which recognized that peace is a relative value:

Peace is generally good in itself, but it is never the highest good unless it comes as the handmaid of righteousness; and it becomes a very evil thing if it serves merely as a mask for cowardice and sloth, or as an instrument to further the ends of despotism or anarchy. We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life, but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. . . . No nation deserves to exist if it permits itself to lose the stern and virile virtues; and this without regard to whether the loss is due to the growth of a heartless and all-absorbing commercialism, to prolonged indulgence in luxury and soft, effortless ease, or to the deification of a warped and twisted sentimentality.

TR did not live to see all seven wars the U.S. would fight during the 100 years following his speech: World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Iraq War I, the Afghanistan War, and Iraq War II. But if he were giving his speech this year, he would probably note that hundreds of millions of people are free today because of them, and that it is an exceptional country that would fight them and not claim a single inch of territory as a result. He would probably endorse speaking softly but carrying a big stick.

And he might conclude his speech with his same words from 1910, warning against the deification of sentimentality, particularly the use of the prize as a bouquet to a sort of god.

Perhaps October 9 should be designated as national Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Day, so each year we can commemorate the day almost all Americans had the same reaction on learning who won the Nobel Peace Prize. Even the winner said he did not deserve it. The prize comes with a lot of money, which he will give away, but also with the opportunity to make a formal acceptance speech, which he will take.

It has been widely noted that the prize was awarded for words, rather than deeds. But it is more correct to say it was awarded for eliminating certain words from public discourse, especially war. Obama may not yet have ended a war; nor decided to properly resource another one; nor disarmed a country threatening an even bigger one. But he has succeeded in removing war from the official vocabulary, along with terrorism. We are now engaged in police actions against man-caused disasterism.

Obama’s remarks about the prize included a strangely worded sentence, reflecting a mindset that regards war only as something that must be ended, not something fought for a larger purpose. The sentence read as follows:

I am the Commander-in-Chief of a country that’s responsible for ending a war and working in another theater to confront a ruthless adversary that directly threatens the American people and our allies.

For Obama, Iraq is a war America is “responsible for ending” — not an achievement that removed a vile dictator (whom every government’s intelligence service thought had WMDs) and then protected the representative government that replaced him from relentless man-caused disasters. Afghanistan is simply a “theater” in which he is “working,” presaging a coming effort to assure us that winning or losing the war is a false choice: it is necessary only to define the enemy down and turn the theater over to General J.R. Biden Jr.

When you remove war from your vocabulary (except for talking about ending it), you qualify for a Nobel Peace Prize, or at least what the prize has become. Later this year, unless Obama unexpectedly takes the advice of Thomas Friedman and the New York Sun, we will witness in Oslo the leader of the free world walking down Project Runway, amid great applause, dressed only in rhetoric.

George Mitchell met yesterday with Israeli President Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. He is meeting separately today with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Mahmoud Abbas. Tomorrow he will meet with Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. But there is no expectation of a breakthrough — “breakthrough” being defined these days as simply an agreement to start negotiations again over a Palestinian state, to see if the parties can agree on one.

The Obama administration once had higher hopes. In fact, all the heavy lifting was supposed to have been done by now. Unlike George Bush, who had allegedly been uninvolved in the process and waited too long, Barack Obama would start immediately and be personally engaged. George Mitchell was appointed on January 22 and once thought that by the end of July he would wrap up his meetings, obtain a complete cessation of all Israeli settlement activity, get some steps toward normalization from Arab states, and announce a U.S. peace plan — with negotiations following to implement it. It hasn’t all quite worked out.

At the State Department press conference yesterday, spokesman Ian Kelly indicated that the grand plan has been put off in favor of trying simply to get talks started:

QUESTION: . . . When you said we think it’s time to get to the negotiations, is it fair to say that you are, if not giving up, at least putting on the back burner the idea of putting together a package before getting to negotiations?

MR. KELLY: Yeah. I – as I said before, I mean, you’ve seen what the President has said, that it’s – the time has come for both sides to agree to just cut right through all of this and get back to peace talks. And this is something that the two sides have to work out. I think too much emphasis has been on our role in this. And I’m glad that we’ve been able to play a helpful role. But it’s really – it’s between really the two sides to work out the kind of package that you’re referring to.

That answer prompted a colloquy about who had previously put too much emphasis on the U.S. role:

QUESTION: You were the one who put the emphasis on it. It wasn’t us. It wasn’t anyone else. I mean, the Administration came in the first or second day, and it was like, here he is, our special envoy.

MR. KELLY: Right.

QUESTION: And this is going to be our top priority.

MR. KELLY: It still is.

QUESTION: So what do you mean, too much emphasis has been placed on your role?

MR. KELLY: Well, I just think that for this to succeed, it’s going to have to be the two sides, first of all, agreeing to sit down and talk, and second of all, coming up with a comprehensive peace proposal.

So the current plan has two steps: (1) have the two sides agree to sit down and talk; and (2) have them come up with a comprehensive peace proposal. Call it Annapolis Process II.

Benjamin Kerstein has a 3,500-word essay entitled “Obama and Israel: Betrayal in the Broken Places” that is essential reading. It is a portrait of Obama as a dangerous combination of hubris and ineptitude, and a description of the process by which he “lost the Israelis, possibly for good,” with “no one to blame but himself.”

Obama centered his policy on an unrealistic call for complete cessation of all settlement-building, violating longstanding understandings with Israel underlying the “peace process.” But if it had been handled differently, it might not have had such disastrous consequences:

Had Obama proved flexible on Jerusalem and its nearby “consensus” settlements, which most Israelis consider essential to their security and want to retain in any peace agreement, some sort of modus vivendi might have been reached early enough to avoid a serious breach. In his insistence on a total freeze, however, Obama was demanding something that was both too much for most Israelis to swallow and Netanyahu simply could not deliver. . . . Obama may have hoped for precisely that, believing that a new, more pliable government led by Livni would replace Netanyahu. If so, it was a horrendous miscalculation.

But it was not the push for a total, uncompromising settlement freeze, however, that was the key moment. That moment was, ironically, the one Obama considered one of his triumphs: the Cairo “address to the Muslim world”:

Taken as a whole, the speech was simply a craven embarrassment; but the references it made to Israel could not have been more alienating and insulting had they been calculated for the purpose. How Obama’s speechwriters and advisors became convinced that equating the Holocaust with the Palestinian nakba . . . comparing Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to segregation in the United States, and pointing to the Jewish people’s “tragic history” as the sole justification for Israel’s existence would assuage Israeli concerns about the new administration must remain a question for history to answer. There is no doubt, however, that this single speech (which everyone in Israel watched) did more to demolish Obama’s credibility in Israeli eyes than any of his demands on Netanyahu ever could have.

The Cairo speech, with its emphasis on the Holocaust as the justification for Israel (to the exclusion of thousands of years of Jewish civilization and historical claims to the Land predating by centuries the birth of Islam and extending through the 20th century in the Balfour Declaration) revealed a “glaring ignorance of Israeli history and sensibilities,” as did the reference to segregation, which recalled the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism.

But the worst was Obama’s moral equivalence between Nazi genocide and the Arab displacement in 1948, occasioned by a war the Arabs started after rejecting — not for the first or last time — a two-state solution:

It is true that 1948 was a catastrophe for the Palestinians, and many thousands of them were displaced — voluntarily and involuntarily — as a result of the war; but for many Jews (and many non-Jews) the equation of this to the Holocaust was not only morally appalling but served to minimize a genocide that is still within living memory, and did so in front of an audience that often claims it never happened at all.

Watching Obama, Israelis recognized something they have seen before in the violent and unstable Middle East: idealistic incompetence. That judgment was confirmed by Obama’s failure, also glaringly obvious, to obtain any steps toward normalization to accompany any new settlement freeze, and his passive encouragement of maximalist Palestinian claims even after the most pliant prime minister in Israeli history had spent a year in the Annapolis Process unsuccessfully offering the Palestinians a state.

The result is that “[Obama’s] relationship with the Israelis is now so damaged that Netanyahu probably could not sell further concessions to the Israeli public even if he wanted to (which he most certainly does not).”

The portrait of Obama that emerges in Kerstein’s article has ramifications beyond the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Obama’s idealistic but unrealistic belief that speeches, videos, reset buttons, bows, unclenched fists, and other gestures of goodwill are the key to resolving international disputes is now well-known. His combination of extreme self-regard and absence of actual accomplishments (both before and after he became president) reflects a mindset that is, in Abe Greenwald’s perceptive phrase, anti-decisive (since it is easier to protect a self-portrait by merely voting “present”). He is tough on small allies (Israel, Honduras, Georgia), or those deemed inconsequential (Poland, the Czech Republic, the UK), but endlessly patient and non-confrontational with adversaries. It is not a very presidential picture.

The respected Pew Research Center released a national survey yesterday finding that Americans: (a) approve of negotiating with Iran (61-28); (b) think such talks will fail (64-22); (c) favor tougher economic sanctions (78-12); (d) believe such sanctions will not get Iran to drop its nuclear program (56-32); and (e) think it is more important to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, even if it means taking military action against Iran, than it is to avoid a military conflict (61-24).

Over at the New Republic, Michael Crowley’s reaction was “Woah.” He found the poll “very surprising, and frankly even a little hard to believe”:

At first I wondered if this was a result of responses from people who haven’t been paying much attention, and thus may not appreciate the consequences of attacking Iran. But no: The poll also finds that “comparable majorities of those who have heard a lot about the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program (64%), and those have heard little or nothing about this (59%), say it is more important to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, even if it means using military force.”

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey summarized the “rather remarkable consensus”:

Direct talks, tougher negotiations, and the use of force all get relatively consistent support from Americans regardless of political affiliation. It shows a rather remarkable consensus that supports Barack Obama on the question of diplomacy, but opposes the use of appeasement and shows far less optimism than the administration has thus far shown for its attempts to open Iran to talks.

The Pew poll tracks similar results recently found by Fox News (finding majorities for U.S. military action among Republicans, Independents, and Democrats) and by the American Jewish Committee (finding 56 percent support among American Jews).

The American people seem to have a more sophisticated strategic and tactical understanding than the administration. They would be pleased if the problem of Iran could be solved by “talks” or by “sanctions,” but are unimpressed by the arsenal of adjectives used to accompany such solutions (with talks always described as “tough and direct” and sanctions always described as “crippling” in order to give the content-less nouns a rhetorical force they do not have on their own).

The public is realistic about the prospects for the “tough” talks and “crippling” sanctions solving anything and unwilling to see the process end with a nuclear-armed Iran. Ironically, if Iran believed that the Obama administration might actually entertain military action, talks might work. But as long as the Iranians believe the talks are motivated by Obama’s increasingly obvious desire to avoid fighting even a self-declared “war of necessity” if it would interfere with health care, climate change, and other issues closer to his heart, the chances for talks succeeding are nil.

Andrew Sullivan had a post yesterday entitled “Why Did We Block Goldstone’s Report?” It consisted of an excerpt from a Marc Lynch column questioning whether the Obama administration had considered how pressure on the Palestinian Authority about the report would affect the PA’s “legitimacy and efficacy” and “Obama’s credibility among Arab and Muslim audiences.” Lynch had written that the U.S. move was most likely in response to “the intense public and private Israeli campaign against the report.”

Sullivan commented as follows:

It appears at times that Obama does not have the final say over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Israel does. At some point, it is not unreasonable to ask for a little help from our alleged friends.

(My first version of this sentence was intemperate and over-wrought. I apologize. My point is strong enough without stupid exaggerations.)

If the allegation that our “alleged” friend Israel has the “final say” over U.S. foreign policy was Sullivan’s second attempt at temperate writing, one wonders what the overwrought, stupid exaggerations were in the first one.

The original version is apparently here, which seems to be a feed from Sullivan’s original post. In this version, Sullivan’s post ends with these words:

Obama does not have the final say over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Israel does. This country will do whatever Netanyahu demands. And the Congress, for all its alleged concern about settlements, will insist on it.

Sullivan — on reflection — added the words “It appears at times that” before his allegation that Israel controls American foreign policy. Then he substituted an assertion that Israel is an “alleged” friend and struck his assertion that Congress insists on whatever Netanyahu wants. The apology apparently was for the overwrought description of Congress, not Israel.

And what was the “help” Sullivan thought we might reasonably request from an “alleged” friend?  Sullivan’s reconsidered and redrafted thought was apparently that Israel should provide a little help in permitting the PA to use an egregiously one-sided report to demonize the Jewish state at the UN — unless this was another one of those times when Obama could not be permitted to have the final say over U.S. foreign policy. How temperate.

Last week, John Kerry tried to block a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from traveling to Honduras on a fact-finding mission. The committee, in the three months since Manuel Zelaya was removed from office on June 28 on order of the Honduran Supreme Court, has yet to hold a hearing on Honduras. In the meantime, it has held hearings on reform of foreign aid, climate change (twice), and East Asia maritime disputes, among other important issues.

Not so long ago, Kerry was quite concerned about the future of constitutional government in Honduras. On Friday, June 26, Kerry issued a press release saying he was “deeply disturbed” about Zelaya’s pending referendum:

Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry (D-MA) today expressed concern about the growing tension in Honduras over an unofficial vote, scheduled for Sunday, intended to build public support for rewriting the Honduran Constitution. “America values its longstanding partnership with Honduras, but a push to rewrite the constitution over the objections of Honduras’s top court, legislature, attorney general, and military is deeply disturbing,” said Chairman Kerry.

Honduras’s top court, legislature, attorney general, and military — joined by Honduran religious, business, and civic leaders – have consistently maintained that Zelaya was properly removed and properly replaced, with a member of his own party, in a 124-4 congressional vote in which every member of his party voted in favor. The interim president announced that the scheduled November presidential election to choose his successor would proceed unimpeded. Honduras had dodged a Chavez-aimed bullet.

One might have expected a follow-up press release from Kerry, expressing satisfaction that the deeply disturbing situation had been resolved in accordance with Honduran law (with the possible exception that Zelaya should have been tried after being removed from office, rather than deported). But Kerry’s next press release, released two months later, called the removal of Zelaya a “coup,” an “uncompromising power-grab,” and a “dark shadow over every aspect of preparations for the elections scheduled for November,” echoing the Obama administration party line.

For three months, the Obama administration has been locked in an untenable position, increasing threats against a small American ally seeking to abide by its own constitution and hold an election. Jamie Kirchick suggests that U.S. policy has become “a mistake in search of a rationale,” while Ross Mackenzie argues the unstated rationale is “no enemies to the left.” As Jennifer points out, Mary Anastasia O’Grady makes it clear that the implications of the Honduras issue are even broader.

The “Honduran Crisis” will one day be a case study in some graduate seminar on counterproductive foreign policy, for students who have successfully completed the introductory course on the Carter administration. Kerry’s small but illustrative contribution to the process will be noted.

In the Q&A session with the International Olympic Committee Members, after the formal presentations, President Obama was asked to comment on how the U.S. would deal with the millions of people who would come to the U.S. for the Games.

Here is the concluding paragraph of his two-paragraph response:

And I’m very impressed with part of the presentation that we made matching up host families for the athletes who are going to be there, because, as I said, Chicago, we’ve got — we’ve got everybody. This could be a meeting in Chicago, because we look like the world. And I think that over the last several years sometimes that fundamental truth about the United States has been lost. And one of the legacies, I think, of this Olympics Games in Chicago would be a restoration of that understanding of what the United States is all about, and the United States’ recognition of how we are linked to the world.

He asked to be awarded the Games to help him overcome the legacy of George W. Bush.

Yesterday, the assistant secretary of state, briefing reporters on the upcoming meeting with Iran, was unable to say who would be attending for Iran, but he indicated that the department would post an additional answer if it had “any further indication as to who will be in the delegation.”

Late this morning, the State Department posted its further response:

Question Taken at the September 29, 2009, Daily Press Briefing

Question: Have we been told by the Iranians who they are sending to participate in the meeting in Geneva? If so, who?

Answer: We refer you to the EU for all inquiries on P5+1 meeting discussions and logistics.

I believe that the department’s answer represents a 15-word diplomatic response meaning “no.”

Back in 2004, in a minor moment in the presidential campaign, John Kerry accused the White House of a misrepresentation “no matter how much they bluster and futz.” It is probably safe to say there were not many political columnists who recognized that Kerry, with his “futzing” accusation, had used a Yiddish word.

There certainly was only one columnist who wrote a column about it. Safire traced the Yiddish origin of the word, and then its first use in American English by James Farrell in his 1936 novel Studs Lonigan, then its appearance in Budd Schulberg’s 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run?, then noted a music critic writing that “you don’t want to futz with Shubert,” and finally—lest the entire Jewish vote go to Kerry—cited “futzing” statements by President Reagan and the Republican majority leader in New York.

Safire is also probably the only columnist who ever wrote an entire column on whether the proper reference to the Jewish Bible is the “Old Testament” or the “Hebrew Bible.” He concluded that the most accurate title might be “the Hebrew Bible, plus parts of Daniel, Ezra, Jeremiah and the others that were written in Aramaic.”

Most people will remember him as a New York Times columnist, since his column ran for 32 years and became an American institution, but he was probably the closest thing we had to a Renaissance man. He wrote 16 books on language, with titles such as Quoth the Maven and The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time. He was the author of a dictionary.

In addition to his books on language, he was the author of four novels, the editor of five anthologies, and the author of five other books on politics—30 books in all. And it is also safe to say there was no other political columnist who saw in the Book of Job a political parable, with contemporary relevance, and wrote a book about it (The First Dissident) that became a classic.

Not bad for someone who didn’t finish college. Safire attended Syracuse University but left after two years. He returned a generation later to deliver the commencement address, telling the graduating class that his honorary degree demonstrated there was hope for slow learners. He became a member of the Syracuse Board of Trustees, where he said his function was to represent the dropouts.

He once described himself facetiously as a neo-neanderthal, someone whose favorite day was the end of Daylight Savings Time, when he got the chance to turn back the clock. But his serious self-description was “libertarian conservative”—although his longtime championship of civil liberties, and his criticism of the Patriot Act, was admired by liberals as well.

He was a recorder of the American language, a chronicler of American history in fact-based novels, and a writer of one of the most enduring and widely read political columns in American history. But it is his book on the Book of Job that may ultimately be viewed as his most important contribution. It captures the literary brilliance, the challenges to theology, and the continuing political significance of one of the seminal works of the Hebrew Bible.

Ironically, it is also what gave him the opportunity to demonstrate that he was the furthest thing from a “rigid Republican.” At an earlier point in the 2004 election, when Howard Dean was the front-runner, Dean made a huge gaffe: attempting to appeal to Midwestern Christians before the Iowa primary, he described the Book of Job as his favorite one in the New Testament. He was one testament off, and his rivals savaged him for his misstatement. Safire came to his defense, devoting a column to Dean’s remarks, arguing he had in fact subtly described some of the complicated themes in the book. Safire did not use his erudition to politically pile on.

He would not have liked that last sentence, since his first rule of writing was “Remember to never split an infinitive.” And another was “And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction,” and that “a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.” But (if you will excuse a sentence starting with a conjunction), the sentence accurately describes his spirit, and our loss.

At the State Department press conference yesterday, Assistant Secretary of State Philip J. Crowley was asked to respond to Iran’s assertion that it will not talk about its second nuclear facility at this coming Thursday’s meeting:

MR. CROWLEY: Well, we’re — as we have stated quite clearly, we have encouraged this meeting because the United States and the international community have concerns about all of Iran’s activities, all of its nuclear ambitions. We seek answers to questions that we’ve had for some time and questions that were raised most recently by this covert reactor.

So that is the ultimate question on the table: Is Iran going to come to the meeting on Thursday, prepared to seriously address the concerns that the international community has? And we’ll see what happens on Thursday.

Sounds tough. One wonders exactly how tough, however, given the answers to the questions that followed. First–since Obama assured us last year that his advocacy of meetings without “preconditions” did not mean lack of “preparations”–do we know who is going to show up for Iran?

QUESTION: Have they even actually confirmed that they are going to attend the meeting — and at what level — or even attend it at all?

MR. CROWLEY: We — I don’t — as of last night, I don’t know that we had a confirmation as to who was attending the meetings. So I think that — I’ll take the question if we have any further indication as to who will be in the delegation.

Okay, so we don’t know who’s coming. But what about the details of the meeting from our side? Has anyone thought them through, especially what happens if Iran says it won’t talk about the nuclear issue?

QUESTION: P.J., do you have any indication, do you know any of the details of how this will come about, the talks Thursday, in the sense that — do they all sit around the same table? Do they make presentations? And if the Iranians, as they’ve said, refuse to discuss the nuclear issue, what is the reaction? Does everybody else get up and walk out?

MR. CROWLEY: . . . I think leading the effort will be Javier Solana. So many of the mechanics of the meeting, both in terms of the setting, the duration, et cetera, will be up to him. I think that we will welcome whatever opportunity presents itself for discussion, both as the P5+1, and then if it goes well, you can probably anticipate one or more plenary discussions, perhaps the opportunity for lunch and further discussion.

Okay, Mr. Solana’s handling all that — mechanics, duration, lunch. But at the end of the meeting, will Crowley provide a “readout,” giving a sense of whether it’s “worth continuing with this at all”? Or will there be just a “thumbs-up or thumbs-down that it’s a useful engagement”?

MR. CROWLEY: I mean, I would put it this way. The President has said clearly that we’re interested in a process. We don’t think that these issues will be solved in one meeting. I don’t think that we’ll get the full perspective of Iran’s willingness to engage in one meeting. But clearly, once we are at the table, we hear from them, we see the tone, we’ll know some things.

And then the real question is, are they willing to engage in a process. . . .

So Thursday’s meeting will start a process without preconditions and, apparently, without a lot of preparation either. If the meeting makes it through lunch, however, expect a “readout” suggesting it was a “useful” start, although one requiring a lot more meetings to meet the tough Western demands.

After Benjamin Netanyahu delivered his remarkable address to the UN, he appeared late in the afternoon at the 92nd Street Y to address a group assembled by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Israeli consulate.

The ovation he received when he arrived, the extraordinary introduction by Elie Wiesel, and Netanyahu’s own captivating speech–by turns personal, autobiographical, firm, and inspirational–are all on this video, which is worth watching in its entirety.

And as the New Year begins, it is worth reading Anne Lieberman’s eloquent and impassioned essay about Netanyahu’s moment at the UN.

The Honduras situation is described in this morning’s New York Times as “this most unconventional international saga”–a “most atypical coup” that has “stuck to no script” and has left “veteran diplomats [and] foreign policy experts . . . scratching their heads.” But the situation is actually considerably clearer than the Times suggests.

Time magazine reports on former President Manuel Zelaya’s strategy:

After Zelaya told the Miami Herald earlier this week that the Micheletti government was “threatening me with death” and that “Israeli mercenaries” were trying to zap him with high-frequency radiation, Brazil admonished him to soften his rhetoric. . . . Micheletti supporters, however, suggest that’s part of Zelaya’s strategy. The only way he can win, they say, is if his demonstrators can prevent the country’s Nov. 29 presidential election from taking place, or provoke security forces into atrocities that would force the U.S. or the U.N. to intervene more forcefully.

The crisis began in June, when the Honduran Supreme Court ordered Zelaya removed from office after he disregarded its order prohibiting a Chavez-like referendum designed to keep him in office. Revising the Honduran constitution before the November election was the only way he could “win” back then, and stopping the election remains the only way he can “win” now.

The obvious way out of the crisis–especially for someone whose guiding principle is “we always want to stand with democracy”–is to endorse the November election as the best means of resolving the situation in a democratic fashion; send international observers to ensure that the election is free and fair; and then respect the people’s choice. Not only is the best way to end a “most untypical coup” an election (particularly since the former president’s term ends shortly anyway), but, as luck would have it, there is already one scheduled.

But the Obama strategy has been preemptively refusing to recognize an election, in favor of restoring to office the president who tried to steal it while also ignoring the stolen presidential election in Iran. There must be a coherent foreign policy in there somewhere.