With all the talk about the need for change, there’s an awful lot in foreign policy that stays the same.
Some, including James Baker have been urging, President-elect Obama not to wait until the last minute to be engaged in Arab-Israeli peace.
Daled Amos strings together posts by Emanuele Ottolenghi and Rick Richman to argue that neither Bill Clinton or George W. Bush exactly waited until the last minute or their respective terms to engage in the Middle East peace process. Daled Amos with this from Rick:
During the entire 14-year process, not a single terrorist organization was dismantled. The problem was most certainly not U.S. presidents who “waited too long.â€
and adds his own, very worthwhile two cents:
Of course, to admit such a thing would be to hold the Palestinian Arabs actually responsible for something in this mess–ant that is just not going to happen.
On a more general note, Bret Stephens observes that President-elect Obama’s foreign policy team is looking more and more like a third term of George W. Bush’s. (Or, at least, a continuation of the incumbent’s second term.)
Instead, Mr. Obama has assembled a team of intellectual clones. Not only that, it’s one that neatly conforms to the same foreign-policy consensus that typified much of President Bush’s second term: revival of the Arab-Israeli “peace process”; a diplomatic approach toward Iran; concessions to North Korea (with no serious expectation of genuine reciprocity); abandonment of what was once called the freedom agenda. As for Iraq, whatever differences there might have been are now moot, thanks to the surge and the passage last week of the status-of-forces agreement.
Stephens expects that Presdient Obama’s will be just like the past four years, but faster. And he doesn’t mean that in a positive way.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
