An Obama Inspired Rant

Me, responding to somebody else:

"...The local Jewish press I read is replete with accounts of Israel’s appreciation for Stephen Harper and his government’s unflinching support, a government which in its Mid East brief has never come close—albeit in its entirely more limited role— to making Obama’s rookie mistakes, which, at a minimum, did not advance the peace process, and, arguably, hampered it."

bl462:

"...I'd put it even stronger. (warning: rant follows).

I think Obama has been, on the foreign policy file, in the immortal words of Clint Eastwood, incapable of knowing his own limitations, one of them being his inexperience, a second one being his narcissism, a third being his solipsism.

I posted last year that Obama's strategy of using sticks with no carrots on the Israelis, and carrots with no sticks on everyone else in the region was dangerously counterproductive. In addition to his offensive Cairo Speech revisionist narrative of the rationale for the State of Israel, he conditioned US support for Israel on Iran's nuclear weapons program to settling the Palestinian problem.

I think that all that it has accomplished was to result in a rational conclusion by the Palestinians (all two proto-countries of them - Gaza and the West Bank - how can there be a two state solution when de facto there are three?), Arab countries and Iran that they don't need concede anything to the Israelis...or to the US.

For Israel, whether it relates to the Palestinians or to the Iranians, why would any Israeli government sell or even want to sell any Obama-branded process or outcome to the Israeli electorate if as per a poll last year, 96% of Jews in the country understandably don't trust Obama?

Guided by his naive solipsism through own narrative and reinforced by his narcissism, I think that his foreign policy mistakes continue and compound - i.e., his refusal to support meaningful unilateral US sanctions being considered by Congress against Iran if they would harm Iranian civilians - as if Iranian civilians are incapable of understanding cause and effect).

I think his foreign policy decisions actions to date in the Middle East and elsewhere have succeeded in the near inconceivable task of making himself nearly a geopolitical irrelevancy - in Israeli politics on the good guys side, and, on the bad guys side, in Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and on the strategic rivals side, in Russia, China, etc. In my view, he speaks softly and carries no stick at all..."