20

Cool Hands, Hot World

When president barack obama entered the White House in January 2009, the world and the nation were in disarray. An economy in crisis, a revanchist Russia occupying parts of Georgian territory, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: it was beginning to look as if the end of the Cold War might not have ushered in a post-historical liberal millennium of peace and democracy after all. Could it be that history with all its tyranny and bloodshed was shambling back onto the stage?

The incoming Obama administration’s answer to that question was a resounding No. George W. Bush had misled the nation into unnecessary wars, and the laxly regulated economy favored by Sun Belt Republicans and conservative Democrats had crashed, but those errors could be reversed. With the right policies and the right leader, the economy could be restored, peace and democracy could flourish, America’s own sins of racism and problems of inequality could be addressed, climate change could be countered. Coolheaded technocratic skill informed by the values of providential progressive nationalism could undo the errors of the Bush administration and bend the arc of history back onto its proper course.

The new administration embraced a complicated and even paradoxical approach to foreign policy. In part, the Obama administration accepted the realist restrainer critique of Bush-era policy. Under Bush, the United States had both overextended and overmilitarized its international commitments. A sensible foreign policy would involve a certain amount of retrenchment.

But at the same time, many in the new administration believed that fighting climate change, moving toward the abolition of nuclear weapons, and the promotion of human rights were objectives that the United States could not afford to ignore. To achieve these ambitious goals would require a significant expansion of American commitments and an even deeper entanglement in a complex world situation.

The balance between realist restraint and Wilsonian ambition would shift during the Obama administration as the limits to American power weighed more heavily on White House thinking, but the tension between an essentially realist strategy and the determined pursuit of transformational goals would endure. This gap between the outsized goals Americans wanted to achieve and the limited means they were willing to employ was, of course, the characteristic and bipartisan problem of post-historical consensus foreign policy—as it had been for the Lodge consensus almost a century before. This new consensus was built on the belief that the arc of history was a double rainbow; technological progress and liberal order arched across the heavens on parallel tracks. And like its predecessors, the Obama administration would address any discrepancies between its hopeful projections and the actual state of the world with the traditional American tool of magical thinking: basing American national strategy on unrealistic assumptions about the short-term transformational power of American ideals.

That said, the global strategy that the Obama administration put forward was more realist than the aggressive democracy promotion of George W. Bush’s second term and more modest than many of the administration’s critics were prepared to acknowledge, and it had more than a little in common with the strategy Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger employed to wind down American commitments.

Nixon and Kissinger combined withdrawal from Indochina, détente with the Soviet Union, the abandonment of Bretton Woods, and the outreach to China to put American policy on a more sustainable footing. President Obama hoped to combine a reduction in America’s Middle East presence and commitments with a better relationship with Russia, an increased focus on global governance issues like disarmament and climate change, and a “pivot to Asia” to better balance American commitments with American interests.

It was a clear design and success would have brought significant benefits to the United States. But things did not go as planned. Vladimir Putin saw more advantages in scoring points against the Americans than in reaching an arrangement with them. The “pivot to Asia” had such a modest military component that it did more to reinforce than to counter the Chinese belief that the United States was locked in an irreversible process of decline. The global governance objectives attracted too little support at home and too much opposition abroad to achieve the hoped-for success. And developing a coherent strategy for reducing American commitments in the Middle East proved much harder on the ground and more contentious in American politics than perhaps the administration had expected—a not uncommon problem when foreign policy conceptions move from the briefing books into the real world.

On its realist restrainer side, the administration seemed ready to accept and even to celebrate the end of unipolarity and the arrival of a new, multipolar world. But on its aspirational, Wilsonian side, the administration appeared to believe that the ideals that inspired American liberals were driving world history.

This conviction is easily caricatured, but there are reasons why serious people with long experience in international affairs embrace a Wilsonian stance. They argue that Wilsonian principles will not prevail because they are morally beautiful or because people are basically good but because they reflect realities to which political leaders must ultimately conform.

Reflecting on the consequences of nuclear weapons for international politics can help us appreciate the power of this idea. By all the logic of geopolitical thinking, the United States and the Soviet Union should have settled their differences in the traditional way: a great power war. That never happened in forty years of bitter global rivalry because both sides understood that a nuclear war between them was not just immoral but pointless. Self-interest not idealism kept American presidents and Soviet leaders from pushing the button. More than that, the existence of nuclear weapons and the impossibility of great power war led the two sides into disarmament talks and drove them to manage their conflict peacefully.

Wilsonians observe that nuclear weapons are only one of the means by which technological progress is gradually and progressively imposing a new kind of logic on geopolitics. As the world becomes more advanced technologically and integrated economically, the reality of interdependence will force national governments toward new forms of cooperation whether they like it or not. Problems like climate change, pandemics, financial regulation, and cybersecurity cannot be solved by national governments acting alone. Those problems are so important, and the consequences of failing to address them adequately are so grave, that regardless of culture, ideology, and geopolitical rivalries, liberal internationalists believe, countries have no choice but to work together on them.

The necessity of deepening cooperation across a growing number of issues changes the nature of geopolitical rivalry just as the existence of nuclear weapons imposed a new shape on the U.S.-Soviet rivalry and kept the Cold War cold. Different countries will continue to compete, but that competition will take place in a framework increasingly defined by the common interests that no country can afford to ignore. Those interests, liberal internationalist ideology maintains, will drive even bitter geopolitical rivals into long-term arrangements and binding institutions, and that development in turn will further limit the scope and intensity of their competition.

Confusion often creeps in, and creep it did in the Obama administration, whenever American liberals conflate the forces driving countries into more far-reaching and durable forms of international cooperation with the hoped-for triumph of the values and ideals that American liberals care most about. In practice, things aren’t that simple.

If the United States, Russia, and China among others must cooperate to address urgent problems, that does not necessarily mean that Russia and China must convert their political systems to match the United States. Quite possibly, in order to achieve the necessary cooperation, the United States might have to accept their illiberal regimes as legitimate and permanent partners—as co-pillars of a world order that would be something other than liberal. This might not simply involve an “authoritarian carve-out” that accepted that foreign great powers could maintain their own systems at home. It might well require an acceptance of spheres of interest beyond their frontiers. Perhaps ideological competition is one of the forms of international competition that must be discarded if humanity is to survive.

President Richard Nixon’s foreign policy of détente with the Soviet Union and opening to Maoist China was based on the belief that the United States did not have the ability to produce a global liberal order, and that compromises would have to be made. Those compromises were moral and ideological as well as geopolitical, and in the interests of its global strategy the Nixon administration moderated its criticism of the rampant suppression of dissenters in the Soviet Union and the unspeakable cruelties of China’s Cultural Revolution. In Nixon’s judgment, the United States needed an orderly world more than it needed a liberal order.

The intellectual essence of the post-historical consensus was a firm conviction that the processes of globalization and liberalization were connected. The same forces that drove the great powers toward closer cooperation on issues like climate change were also driving them toward ideological convergence around liberal values.

In some ways the Obama administration had a more sophisticated view of world politics than its immediate predecessors. It understood that the cultural arrogance inherent in Euro-Atlantic societies and the resentment of that arrogance by nonwestern countries were significant factors in international life. The administration hoped that the president’s life story and racial background would help bridge this divide, and also believed that less American chest-thumping about their exceptionalism and more reliance on patient diplomacy would smooth the path of the emergent world order.

Like most Americans (and certainly like the Bush administration that preceded it), the Obama administration overestimated the role that admiration for American ideology plays in global attitudes toward the United States. Because it was so firmly convinced that American ideas are both universally valid and universally shared, the administration failed to grasp the degree to which America’s “soft power” was tied less to admiration for the inspirational qualities of American values than to perceptions of American economic success and military prowess.

Conventional liberal opinion in the United States drew a sharp distinction between “hard power,” usually military, and “soft power” approaches grounded in ideology, values, and the promotion of international institutions and the liberal world order. Hard power was seen as likely to lead to confrontational relations with other countries, while a greater reliance on soft power would lead to a more peaceful international system and wider support for American initiatives. Hard power was about win-lose international competition, while soft power, seeking win-win solutions, was more likely to lead to consensus and cooperation. For the Obama administration, therefore, rebalancing American foreign policy away from hard power toward the promotion of values and norms would lead to more harmonious relations with other powers even as the United States would make more progress on promoting its democratic values.

This is not how Beijing and Moscow saw matters. America’s moral and political support for “color revolutions” (democratic revolutions in previously authoritarian countries) looked like a dangerous and relentless policy of ideological aggression aimed ultimately at overthrowing Putin in Moscow and the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing. Promoting a “liberal world order” and human rights might seem innocent and peaceful to American liberals, but this soft power diplomacy both attacked the legitimacy of nonliberal governments and attempted to restrict their sovereign independence in a web of liberal norms and law-driven international institutions.

America’s opponents, even though they saw what they considered an ambitious ideological offensive aimed at destabilizing and endangering them, still noted that the Obama administration was largely unprepared to withstand any pushback. Washington might welcome an anti-Russian revolution in Ukraine and hail the new government’s desire to turn toward the West, but neither the United States nor the European Union was prepared for a vigorous Russian response.

The Obama administration was slow to understand both the degree of Chinese and Russian opposition and the dramatic growth in their ability to frustrate American designs. Whether occupying Crimea, dispatching troops to Syria, or building artificial islands in the South China Sea, the two adversarial powers consistently wrong-footed the Obama administration, eroding the prestige and influence of the administration and of the United States as a whole. Rather than witnessing a return to the post–Cold War democratic euphoria, the Obama years would see a further decline in the power of liberal ideology—within the United States as well as globally—and the return of full-fledged geopolitical competition between the United States and an emerging, revisionist, and illiberal Sino-Russian entente.

It was the unhappy fate of the Obama administration to take office at a time when the optimistic post-historical consensus encountered a rising tide of illiberalism in world politics. Faced with political and intellectual challenges for which it was largely unprepared, the administration would oscillate between engagement and retreat.

The Unicorn Hunt

The Middle East, President Obama and his team believed, was not America’s highest priority for the long or even medium term, but initially at least no region of the world mattered more to the Obama strategy. It was his early, eloquent, and unceasing opposition to the Iraq War that made the young Illinois senator a national figure, and that record contributed mightily to his ability to mobilize liberal Democrats against what had once appeared to be the inevitable 2008 nomination of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential candidate. Obama also understood that, despite qualms among some human rights activists in the Democratic coalition, his administration needed to remain vigilant against terrorism. Successful terrorist attacks emerging from the Middle East or clearly linked to groups operating there had the potential to turn the political climate back to the incandescent conditions of the first eighteen months after 9/11, a development that might well prove fatal to the Obama presidency and to any hopes of setting American foreign policy on what the incoming president considered a more sustainable and sensible path.

The Bush administration might have left the Middle East in a chaotic condition and awash in anti-American sentiment, but the Obama team saw some hopeful signs in 2009. Bush’s policies had been so unpopular in the Arab world that any kind of change would buy goodwill. And Obama’s biography and race made him, potentially, a much more attractive figure in the region than other presidents had been. Add to this Obama’s genuine understanding of some of the grievances that formerly colonized peoples and people of color felt toward the West, and it seemed possible, even likely, that the new president could calm the relationship between the United States and the Arab world.

Even better, it appeared that a reaction to terrorism among moderate Islamist political forces offered the possibility of a dramatic new opening. In Iraq, the courageous leadership of the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani contributed decisively to the establishment of a weak but real democratic system in that troubled country. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then prime minister of Turkey, seemed to be pointing the way to “democratic Islamism.” Many figures in the Muslim Brotherhood also spoke of reaching Islamist goals through democratic methods.[1] For American liberals, this appeared to be a welcome reprise of the Cold War dynamic in which social democrats, who supported many ideals claimed by communist parties but shunned their calls for violent revolution and the installation of autocratic regimes, became indispensable allies. The Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, many hoped, would promote democratization and blunt the appeal of radical groups like Al-Qaeda in much the same way. Iranian exiles and expatriates described a generation of moderates yearning to end the confrontation with the West if only the United States would open the door. To take advantage of this opportunity, American foreign policy should have focused on creating conditions in which the more democratically minded elements in Islamic society, religious and secular, could partner with the United States to remake the region.

To reach a position in which this kind of outreach was possible, the United States needed to shift its approach on some important regional issues. In the first place, to appeal to moderate Muslim opinion the United States would need to achieve something on the Palestinian issue. Israeli policies on settlements and intransigence in negotiations, the Obama administration believed, were not just bad for Israel (endangering its future status as a Jewish and democratic state by preventing the emergence of a Palestinian state on the Occupied Territories), but so exacerbated the feelings of Arab Muslims that radical anti-Americanism prospered among them and even moderates would not or could not side with an American government seen as too indulgent toward Israel.[2]

But the relationship with Israel was only part of the American problem in the Middle East. America’s cozy relationships with Arab monarchs and dictatorships also needed to change. These so-called American allies were the chief obstacle to democratic progress in the Middle East. Their secret police relentlessly suppressed all democratic opposition, and America’s long-standing alliance with these rulers helped them cling to power.[3]

In effect, the Obama administration saw Israel the way John Foster Dulles and the Arabists saw it and saw the Arab leaders the way Eleanor Roosevelt and the pro-Israel liberals saw them. Like the Arabists, the Obama administration thought that the Israeli alliance made the natural and necessary warm U.S. relationship with other Muslim Middle East countries more difficult if not impossible and carried a heavy cost that the U.S. needed to work to offset. And like the pro-Israel liberals in the 1940s, an important group of officials in the Obama administration thought that the existing monarchies and autocracies of the Arab world were about to be swept away by rising democratic tides, and that basing American policy on close alliances with nondemocratic Middle East governments was immoral, shortsighted, and costly.

There were two new elements in the Obama approach. First, while both the Arabists and the Cold War liberals had seen the Middle East as a critical theater for American world policy and wanted to entrench the United States more deeply in it, the Obama administration accepted the realist restrainer view that the United States was overextended and needed to reduce its commitments and entanglements in the Middle East. Second, the Obama administration embraced the idea, increasingly dominant among Democratic liberals in general and liberal American Jews in particular, that what Israel needed from the United States was tough love. To permit Israel to drift toward settlement and annexation policies that made the two-state solution impossible was to undermine Israel, not to support it. The United States needed to rescue Israel from itself.

Yet dissolving the special relationship was not part of Obama’s agenda. Obama’s approach to Israel was more sophisticated and realistic as well as more sympathetic than the prescriptions of many realist restrainer policy intellectuals because it acknowledged the power of political facts. The deep American political attachment to Israel, still strongly felt in both parties, was a reality that Obama was ready to accept, even as he sought to limit the constraints this attachment imposed on American policymaking.

Some of the perceptions shaping the Obama administration’s approach had the merit of being true, but building an effective or even a coherent foreign policy on this basis proved unexpectedly hard. Showing tough love to the Arabs by pushing democratic reforms on monarchies and dictatorships might be moral, but it would not smooth relationships with Arab governments. To offer Israel tough love on the occupation might serve Israeli and American interests better in the long run than the alternative but would lead to difficult relations and policy clashes from day one. And to appeal to both Arab and Israeli governments to support American positions and assist American projects when the prospect of a reduction of American commitments in the region undermined American influence was not an easy lift.

The plan was to begin by reaching out to Arab and Muslim public opinion directly with a new message about the relationship between the United States and Islam. President Obama’s eloquent speeches in Cairo and Ankara launched this process,[4] and despite his courageous defense of American support for Israel’s right to exist, the speeches, and the new president, were warmly received.

But the applause faded away, and the next steps were not clear. Ironically, and tragically, while the Obama administration was initially more cautious than its immediate predecessor about the prospects for a democratic transformation of the Middle East, the intoxicating excitement of the series of protests and upheavals known collectively if misleadingly as the Arab Spring would persuade the administration to discard its caution and reserve. The idea that the region was on the verge of a liberal political transformation was a dazzling daydream produced by an American policy community intoxicated on liberal ideology and post-historical triumphalism. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and, despite his skepticism, Barack Obama were all influenced by this optimism, their appointees and advisors perhaps even more so. It was an age of miracles when magical dancing democracy unicorns would appear in country after country, shattering autocracies and installing democratic and pro-American regimes. Perhaps the next manifestation of democracy unicorns would take place in the Middle East.

The vision of a transformed Middle East that haunted post–Cold War American thinking had two fundamental problems. In the first place, it was impossible to achieve—there was simply no short- or even medium-term prospect for the kind of transformation Americans sought. Second, poorly conceived efforts to promote democratic change weakened American alliances, reduced American prestige, and scrambled what order the Middle East had managed to cobble together.

President Obama understood that American assistance for democratic and opposition movements in the Arab world was inevitably constrained. Washington’s ability and willingness to support democracy movements always had to be conditioned and limited by the pressing need to do business with the governments in power. Bahrain, where a Sunni dynasty ruled a predominantly Shi’a population, was not a very democratic country, but it was the site of an American base that the Obama administration did not wish to close. The United States government did not want to see the Kingdom of Jordan destabilized in any way. Regardless of how many Palestinians voted for Hamas, its authorities in Gaza were hated and detested not only by Israel, but by Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, and most of the Gulf monarchies. American policy could not long ignore facts as powerful as these.

If the constraints on American support were one factor limiting the potential for a Middle East transition to liberal order, the limits of Middle East democracy movements were another. The democratic moderate Islamists for whose sake the administration was pursuing this challenging policy mix were either unwilling (as in the case of Turkey’s Erdoğan) or unable (as in the case of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood) to do in the Middle East what democratic socialists had done in Cold War Europe. This does not mean that democracy has no future in the Middle East. But the democratic and proto-democratic forces at work in the region were not strong enough or well developed enough to steer the region toward the kind of order Americans hoped to see. There were fewer unicorns than optimistic American policymakers expected, and the unicorns that did exist were clumsier dancers and less magical than the ambitious American timetable required.

The Unicorns Miss the Bus

The Arab Spring, as the 2011 wave of pro-reform demonstrations and movements stretching from Morocco to Iraq became known, seemed to vindicate those in the American government who believed that American foreign policy should work for the establishment of democratic governance across the Middle East.

When protests exploded in Cairo, more credulous and less seasoned western observers, tragically including a number of prominent White House staffers, were exhilarated beyond measure by pro-democracy demonstrations. Here was the democratic revolution Wilsonian foreign policy aimed to promote, and it was breaking out in the very city where Obama launched his policy of outreach and reconciliation with moderate Arab opinion. The arc of history was bending at last! The United States needed to break with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and support Egypt’s emerging democracy before it was too late.

More experienced and knowledgeable aides and observers, including the secretaries of state and defense, were more cautious, but the enthusiasm of the younger folks prevailed with the normally skeptical president, and with high hopes that the Democracy Train was making a Cairo stop, the United States used its influence to force Mubarak out.[5]

Events failed to follow the American script. Egypt’s liberals were politically isolated and organizationally weak. The largest opposition force in the country, the Muslim Brotherhood, broke earlier pledges to refrain from offering a candidate in the presidential race and ran the undistinguished Mohamed Morsi for the presidency.[6] Morsi was elected, but between the ineptitude of the Muslim Brotherhood, the resistance of the Egyptian bureaucracy, and the hostility of the military, the government floundered. Tourists fled, both foreign and Egyptian investors sent their money to safer havens, and the economy stumbled toward collapse. In 2013, mass demonstrations against the failing Morsi government swept the country leading to a military coup with, initially at least, broad popular support.[7]

What the unicorn spotters had missed was the historical and political context around the Egyptian events. Egypt has been a military republic since Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Egyptian military leaders aligned with him overthrew the pro-British King Farouk in 1952. During those seventy years, Egypt has been ruled by a succession of powerful presidents, all coming from the military. There are reasons why this is the case. Fundamentally, while Egyptian liberals and the business community dislike the corruption, stagnation, and repression that accompany military government, they prefer military rule to the risks of majoritarian and populist governance that, they fear, will inevitably be heavily influenced by conservative interpretations of Islamic ideas.

The Egyptian military was not happy with Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Mubarak was promoting his second son, Gamal Mubarak, as his successor, much as Syrian president Hafez al-Assad groomed his son as his political heir. This was a direct threat to the basis of the Egyptian status quo, and to the interests of those in and around the military who expected to benefit when the time came to replace Mubarak with another military figure. A republic whose presidency is hereditary can no longer be called a republic, and the Egyptian military did not welcome the conversion of the Egyptian state into the dynastic possession of the Mubarak family.

Egyptian security forces did not refrain from crushing the democracy demonstrations because they thought an irresistible tide of democracy was sweeping their country. The military let the protests continue as a way of forcing Mubarak to abandon his dynastic ambitions.

Over the following months, the military seems to have explored what might be called the Pakistan model of military governance in which real power would remain in the hands of the generals while civilian politicians managed the daily business of government and took the blame when scapegoats were required. This kind of fraudulent pseudo-democracy was the only real alternative in Egypt to the historical Nasser model, but Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were both unwilling to play the inglorious role this scenario offered them and unable to capture and hold real power on their own.

As the ineptitude of the Morsi government became increasingly evident, the liberal and business preference for military rule over Islamism reasserted itself. As the passive resistance of the civil service bureaucracy combined with capital flight driven by jumpy investors threatened the stability and even the solvency of the national economy, the government could do little but wring its hands as its popularity waned. When the time was right, military authorities overthrew the elected government, drove the Muslim Brotherhood underground, and imposed the most severe crackdown on civil liberties in modern Egyptian history. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a career military officer who had served as head of Egyptian intelligence and was defense minister at the time of the coup against Morsi, was elected to the presidency in a vote conducted under strict limits by the post-coup government as much of the country hoped that stability even at the cost of political oppression might improve their economic conditions.[8] The old military republic was back in business.

American policy during this period dismayed and alienated virtually every political tendency and every ally in the Middle East. The unceremonious dumping of President Mubarak, a longtime American ally who more than once had provided critical assistance to the United States, horrified and appalled Gulf rulers. The United States was a reliable ally until you needed help, they concluded, but when you needed help most, the Americans would betray you without a qualm.

American policies during the Egyptian crisis brought no discernible benefits to the United States or to anyone else. The cause of democracy was not advanced. The Egyptian political opposition had less space under el-Sisi than ever before. America’s reputation was significantly degraded as the weakness of the intellectual foundations and the ineptitude of the practitioners of American-style democracy promotion were indecorously revealed. But if the United States lost points with autocrats and the protectors of the status quo, did its role in the Egyptian Arab Spring at least win it points with the democrats?

Sadly, the answer here, too, is no. Many in the Muslim Brotherhood blamed America’s weak support and dithering, to say nothing of its failure to offer robust opposition to the anti-Morsi coup, for the failure of their experiment. That after all its talk about democracy Washington ended by accepting if not loving the coup only demonstrated to Muslim Brotherhood activists and other moderate Islamists how weak the United States was and how untrustworthy its support.

Reinforcing the disagreeable impression Obama’s Egypt policy left across the region was the shortsighted and destructive Libyan intervention. The Egyptian “revolution” of January 2011 came as Libya, long ruled by the erratic Muammar Qaddafi, was about to descend into a state of civil war. In February, protests escalated into rebellion and in March, with Libyan government forces on the offensive and Qaddafi uttering bloodcurdling threats against the population of rebel-controlled cities, the United States, Britain, and France obtained a resolution from the U.N. Security Council authorizing operations to protect civilians and a NATO air campaign got under way.[9] Under NATO air cover rebel forces rallied, and Qaddafi fled the capital of Tripoli in August and was killed two months later.[10]

To the more optimistic officials in the Obama administration, this initially looked like a triumph for international law and the campaign to transform the Middle East. The American-led multilateral world order was working. NATO and the United Nations were preventing mass civilian atrocities. An evil despot had met a just reward and a new, more representative government appeared to be taking shape in Libya. The idea that grave abuses of human rights could justify international intervention had gained credibility, strengthening the framework of international law. Russia and China had abstained on the Security Council resolution authorizing force, allowing the resolution to pass and suggesting to hopeful internationalists that with sufficient patience and wise diplomacy those powers could still become responsible stakeholders in a world order built around American ideas.[11]

The disillusionment process was gradual but thorough. The National Transition Council, created in Benghazi in February 2011, handed power over to an elected government in August of 2012, but militias continued to fight for control of much of the country. The collapse of centralized control allowed various militias, warlords, and radical Islamists to seize the weaponry stockpiled over decades by the Qaddafi government. Libyan weapons and fighters would spread across northern Africa, into the Sahel and beyond, fueling substantial increases in civil conflict and jihadi violence well beyond Libya’s frontiers. Inside the country, the prospect of controlling Libya’s rich hydrocarbon resources drew neighboring countries like Egypt, Algeria, Italy, and France as well as more distant powers including Qatar, the UAE, Turkey, and Russia into the conflict.

The devolution of Libya into a continual state of civil war and the increasingly thuggish behavior of every participant in the conflict made it progressively harder to see the NATO intervention as either a humanitarian or a democratization success. Further consequences unfolded as the instability spread from Libya across the region. Desperate Africans streamed across Libya’s unpatrolled frontiers for the coast where they hoped to board ships for Europe. Libyan warlords were not slow to capitalize on the opportunity represented by hundreds of thousands of migrants. Between people-smuggling operations and extortion schemes (migrants were held in work camps and beaten and tortured while begging their relatives over cell phones to send ransoms), post-NATO Libya became the locus for what were some of the most horrific abuses taking place on the planet.[12]

On September 11, 2012, an armed attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi and a CIA facility nearby led to a firefight whose casualties included Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador to Libya, along with foreign service and CIA employees and contractors.[13] The attack set off a political firestorm in the United States, and while Republican allegations of wrongdoing against senior administration officials ultimately fell short, it was clear following Benghazi that neither democracy nor liberal order was coming to the Middle East anytime soon.

For eleven years since the 9/11 attacks, two American presidents had built Middle East policy around the idea that the United States could best defend itself from terror attacks by engineering a political and economic transformation of the Middle East. In 2012 that era was coming to an end.

The disaster in Libya would shape the American response to the Syria crisis in ways that lost all the ground gained by the administration’s earlier attempts to build bridges to the Sunni world. The spectacle of American passivity regarding Syria when confronted with the greatest human catastrophe in the Middle East in living memory, and the appearance that American policy was tilting toward Shi’a Iran when the Sunni world felt beleaguered as never before, blanketed the region in a toxic cloud of suspicion and hate.

Past supporters of the place of values in foreign policy—for example FDR and Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state George Shultz—had been able to combine rights advocacy with effective power diplomacy. This was an accomplishment that, for different reasons, neither President Obama nor his Republican predecessor were able to match. In Washington, the result was frustration as democratic transformations failed to appear or, as in Iraq where democratic institutions took hold, their impact fell well short of Washington’s hopes. In the region and in the wider world, the result was a precipitous and continuing loss of confidence in the United States. Viewed from the region, whether from Cairo, Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh, or Jerusalem, the United States looked less formidable, less wise, less dependable, and less competent in 2012 than in 2001. This unhappy trend has continued up through the time in 2022 that I write these words.

The Unicorns Go Under the Bus

In its second term, the Obama administration carried out a momentous and even a historic shift in America’s Middle East policy. Since the Truman administration, American engagement in the Middle East had steadily deepened. The strategic requirements of the Cold War, the growing importance of Middle East oil, and, after 9/11, the threat of fanatical terror attacks led successive American presidents to devote an ever-increasing share of attention and resources to the region.

That long-established pattern changed in President Obama’s second term and his successors would follow his lead. From the death of Ambassador Stevens in 2012 to the present day, the dominant theme in America’s Middle East policy has been to reduce our regional footprint to the greatest degree compatible with American security. The more visionary goals associated with George W. Bush and President Obama’s first term have been set aside. Since 2012, the United States has been more interested in reducing its commitments than in transforming the region.

The disappointing results of American democracy promotion played an important role in persuading President Obama to shift his focus, but it is misleading to think of the decision to pivot away from the Middle East as solely a consequence of failure.

Both Obama and Trump saw something else. In part, they agreed that the rise of China meant that the United States needed to turn its attention away from the Middle East toward the Indo-Pacific. But while so many high-profile American initiatives in the region had been failing spectacularly, some less obvious but highly successful policies were creating new realities that significantly enhanced the American position. Not for the first time, American soldiers, scientists, and entrepreneurs were renewing the country’s strength even as intellectuals, political leaders, and diplomats failed to comprehend the forces at work.

The first success was against the jihadi terror threat. Since 9/11, American counterintelligence and counterterror operations had become far more effective. Fanatical terror attacks remained a concern, and occasional “lone wolf” attacks succeeded, but in the twenty years following 9/11 no attack on a similar scale had succeeded against the United States. The increased sophistication and power of drones added another formidable weapon to the American arsenal, a weapon that could be guided remotely by “pilots” sitting comfortably in facilities back in the United States.

The second success was connected to the first. Continuing advances in the development of the electronic battlefield and information warfare allowed a very small American presence to make an enormous difference in the fighting ability of a motivated force. Their ability to link local forces to the torrents of information coursing through American intelligence, targeting, and surveillance systems meant that a very light American footprint could turn the tide of battle on the ground. When the resurgence of radical Islamism in the ISIS revolt against Syria and Iraq briefly drew attention in the United States toward the horrors of fanaticism, only a modest American military presence sufficed to help turn the tide against the “Caliphate.”

Third, after the disaster of the failed attempt to rescue the American diplomats held hostage by Iranian revolutionaries following the fall of the Shah, the military vowed to give future presidents better tools for future emergencies. That would require enhancing the training of Special Forces to new levels of effectiveness as well as developing better and more reliable equipment for action in challenging environments. The operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden demonstrated the success of these efforts.

Finally, the Obama and later the Trump and Biden administrations would reap the rewards of yet another major American policy success with its roots in the 1970s. The energy crises of the 1970s made a deep impression on the American public. It was bad enough that sudden swings in a manipulated oil market could plunge the United States into years of stagflation (high unemployment, high interest rates, and high inflation); it was worse that shortfalls in foreign production could force the United States to ration energy supplies.

The shock led to a range of initiatives in government, the academy, and the private sector. Fuel efficiency standards for cars were increased, and new requirements for energy efficiency in appliances and industrial processes were introduced. Long before concerns about climate change, Americans invested in renewable energy sources like solar power, wind power, and ethanol to reduce dependence on imported fuel. Every American household and enterprise looked for ways to cut fuel consumption. Well before climate change activism began to reshape the politics of energy, the American economy was beginning to decouple from hydrocarbons in response to the high prices and political uncertainties associated with Middle East oil supplies.

A second set of initiatives aimed to diversify the nation’s oil supply. Some of this involved a search for new domestic sources of oil—in Alaska, in deep water wells in the Gulf of Mexico, and in other remote locations. But the search was also worldwide. Deep water technology developed in the United States could be used off the coast of West Africa and elsewhere; over time, the dependence of the United States on Middle East oil steadily declined.

Finally, the government, universities, and private energy companies sought to unlock previously unavailable energy resources. The most prominent of these were known as shale oil and gas. New techniques of drilling collectively known as “fracking” were developed and first in a trickle and then in a flood, new sources of energy began to flow.[14] American domestic oil production fell as low as four million barrels a day in 2008. By the time President Obama left office production was at 8.88 million barrels per day and still rising. In 2019, domestic American production would reach 13 million barrels a day, well above the production of Saudi Arabia.[15]

In environmental terms these new techniques could be problematic, unleashing earthquakes in some places and leading to groundwater contamination in others. And for climate activists, who previously believed that the inevitable exhaustion of the world’s fossil fuel resources would help drive the transition to renewable energy, the news that the world’s fossil fuel reserves were vastly greater than expected was a deeply unwelcome development.

Nevertheless, from the standpoint of American foreign policy, the country’s new energy wealth was a game changer. OPEC could no longer threaten the United States with an energy boycott. Better still from a foreign policy standpoint, the shift in pricing power from OPEC to North America (Canada had even larger reserves of unconventional hydrocarbons than the United States) meant that the global oil market was less sensitive to political developments in the Middle East. In the past, at a time of tight supplies, any sign of instability or conflict in the Middle East could set oil prices soaring worldwide. As long as this was true, American foreign policy was in a sense glued to the Middle East; American presidents could not ignore regional instability for fear of the economic upheaval that could result. Thanks to shale oil and gas, American foreign policy was less closely tied to the region.

There were other benefits as well. The surge in American oil production represented a significant transfer of income away from OPEC producers and Russia to oil consumers worldwide and especially to the United States. Putin’s Russia was a less formidable adversary when oil was at $50 a barrel than at $150. At structurally lower oil prices, Iran had less money for foreign adventures and Saudi Arabia needed to think more about domestic economic development and less about funding radical mosques around the world.

When President Obama saw that his Middle East policies of reconciliation and engagement had ground to a halt, he had an option that none of his predecessors had enjoyed. He could significantly reduce the American footprint in the Middle East without abandoning vital American economic and security interests. In the second phase of Obama Middle East policy, the goals of Arab democratization and Sunni outreach were largely set to one side as the administration’s attention shifted to the effort to extricate the United States from an inhospitable arena.

In 2004 George W. Bush called the overthrow of Saddam Hussein a “catastrophic success.”[16] By contrast, President Obama’s second term in the Middle East was a successful catastrophe. On the ground in the Middle East, the second phase of Obama policy would be a succession of failures and setbacks without precedent in American diplomatic history. By the end of his administration many Middle Easterners were longing for the good old days of George W. Bush. Alienated allies, weakened order, mass death and displacement on a scale that eclipsed the Iraq War, and displaced Palestinians on the greatest scale since 1948–49; not since World War I had the Middle East seen this kind of destruction. As American prestige, favorability, and credibility dropped in most of the region, a hostile Russia reestablished itself as a Middle East power for the first time since the Cold War.

Yet in American politics President Obama’s Middle East policy was a success. The administration not only achieved its primary diplomatic objective, the negotiation of a nuclear agreement with Iran, it also rolled over determined opposition by the allegedly omnipotent Israel lobby. And although no previous president feuded so often or so publicly with Israel, like so many of his predecessors, President Obama was able to use Israel policy to unify and energize his own supporters.

In fact, the administration’s new goal of extricating the United States from unrewarding and expensive conflicts in the Middle East was more politically popular at home than the old policy of regional transformation. With terrorism fading into the rearview mirror as an urgent danger in many American minds and with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq looking more pointless and less brilliantly strategized as time went on, Americans were ready to move on. With the Republican establishment still pinned to a defense of Bush administration war policy, Obama’s evident desire to disengage was more popular than neoconservative calls to stay the course.

As President Obama and the new secretary of state, John Kerry, looked at their options, they saw two major problems that limited American freedom of action: the danger to American security posed by the Iranian drive for nuclear weapons, and the constraints and obligations flowing from the American commitments to, and support for, the Jewish state. The two were related, in that the Iranian nuclear program represented the only real threat to Israeli security. If that threat could be addressed, then concern for Israel’s security would diminish as a factor in American politics, allowing the United States to reduce its engagement with the Middle East without a bruising domestic battle over Israel policy.

The focus on a nuclear agreement with Iran was understandable. As the Obama administration looked to reduce America’s exposure to new conflicts in the Middle East, Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons was a contingency, perhaps the only contingency, that could force the United States into another war. Concern over this issue wasn’t a new preoccupation for the second term. During the 2008 campaign, Obama had been criticized for saying that he was willing to meet the Iranians without preconditions,[17] but the desire to find a diplomatic alternative to war with Iran was a long-standing and, frankly, justifiable concern. Such a war would almost certainly be bloodier, more expensive, and more prolonged than the Iraq War, and the potential for an endless cycle of insurgencies by Iran and its proxies inside and outside the country was a strategic and political nightmare. The consequences at home and on the Democratic Party of a third unpopular Middle East war would be almost equally grave and would certainly doom any hopes the Obama administration had for enacting a wave of progressive reforms.

To make matters worse, the United States could easily lose control of events. As Iran approached the threshold of nuclear capability, Israel or possibly one of the Arab countries could launch preemptive attacks on Iran, setting off a spiral of retaliation that would draw the United States into an escalating conflict.

There were other reasons that made the goal of a nuclear agreement with Iran attractive. A successful Iranian nuclear test would likely set off a “proliferation cascade” as neighboring countries including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Turkey developed bombs of their own. Such a cascade would effectively end any real hope of stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. This was a development that any American administration would view as a grave danger. For President Obama, for whom nuclear disarmament was a primary long-term goal,[18] the specter of a proliferation cascade in the volatile Middle East was unacceptable.

Iran was already a disruptive power in the region. While thanks to deterrence it would be extremely unlikely to use nuclear weapons, its ownership of these weapons would deter the United States and other countries from retaliating against Iran and its proxies. The need to establish a security umbrella capable of protecting shipping in the Gulf and important allies (like Saudi Arabia) from a nuclear Iran would drive the United States into a much deeper engagement in the region, one likely to feature a perpetual cycle of crisis and retaliation.

Finally, some in the administration believed that a nuclear agreement with Iran could be the first step toward a genuine U.S.-Iranian détente. Based on encounters with Iranian diplomats and well-connected members of the Iranian diaspora, there was a widespread belief among American liberals that the “real” Iran—a complex, cosmopolitan, tolerant, and pro-Western society—was being held back by a diminishing reactionary group of regime loyalists and hardliners. The confrontation with the United States empowered the hardliners, and the sanctions against Iran gave great economic power to the government and its hardline allies. If the United States could bring the hostility to an end, Iranian society would begin to thaw, the hardliners would retreat, and this vibrant and sophisticated society could finally emerge. In that case the United States could reduce its commitments and presence in the Middle East even as the region became more stable, more peaceful, and, who knows, perhaps more democratic. The magical dancing democracy unicorns might have proven inconveniently elusive in the Sunni Arab world, but there was no shortage of optimists in the administration who heard the heavenly hoofbeats echo across the stony mountains of Iran.

Improving relations with Iran had been high on the incoming Obama administration’s wish list in 2009, and when protests broke out across Iran following charges that its 2009 presidential election had been fraudulent, the Obama administration refrained from supporting the demonstrations, or criticizing Iran for the harsh measures taken to suppress them. This silence, and accompanying attempts to establish a dialogue, initially met with a hostile response, but by 2012 secret talks between Iranian and American officials had begun.[19] The quest to negotiate an agreement with Iran that would eliminate or at least postpone the development of Iranian nuclear weapons and then to get that agreement through a skeptical Congress would become the defining Middle East initiative of the second Obama term.

The search for this agreement would define the Obama second term with major implications for U.S. relations with the Sunni Arab states and with Israel. On the one hand, fear that the United States was tilting away from its old regional allies to reach an understanding with Iran helped drive Arab-Israeli reconciliation that would lead ultimately to the Abraham Accords between Israel and a number of Arab states during the Trump years. On the other hand, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, already fading during the first Obama term, flickered and died during the second, a casualty of the new turn in American foreign policy.

The Death of the Peace Process

In the ambitious first term, reviving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process had been one of President Obama’s top priorities. Signaling a new, more sympathetic stance on Palestinian aspirations was both popular with Obama’s liberal political base and a vital component of his strategy to reset the relationship between the United States and the Islamic world. On his second full day in office, President Obama attended a State Department ceremony where newly minted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton introduced former senator George Mitchell as the administration’s special envoy for Middle East peace.[20]

The new envoy got to work immediately, and within months Israelis and Palestinians were communicating through U.S. officials. This was not, yet, direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, but the administration could argue that progress was being made. The next month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv in which he declared support for the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian state.[21]

In November the process took another step forward as Israel announced a ten-month partial settlement freeze. For the Palestinians, however, this was not enough, as Netanyahu’s freeze excluded new construction in East Jerusalem and Israel had not accepted the 1949 cease-fire line as the basis for negotiations on the boundary between Israel and the Palestinian state. The United States continued to press both sides to resume direct talks, but the freeze had almost expired by the time the two sides finally met in September 2010. Progress was desultory, and nobody was surprised when Israel refused to extend the construction freeze and the Palestinians refused to continue direct talks without it.[22]

Even by the standards of past failed negotiations, the 2009–10 talks were uninspiring, failing to reach the intensity of the Olmert-Abbas talks during the Bush presidency, to say nothing of the Arafat-Barak negotiations under Clinton’s sponsorship. Many things had changed between the dramatic Clinton era talks and the anticlimactic negotiations of the Obama years. Israeli politics had moved to the right, in part because many Israelis no longer believed that the Palestinian leadership could ever accept or enforce an agreement that the Israelis could live with.

On top of all this, by 2010 Israel had become a much more secure, powerful, and self-confident country. Palestinian violence had been essentially contained. The intifadas had failed, the Wall effectively stopped suicide bombers and other terrorists from entering Israel proper, and the hostility between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank kept the Palestinian movement divided. Jerusalem’s cooperation with neighboring Arab states had never been stronger. Israel’s investment in tech was beginning to pay off and Israel’s economy continued to power ahead.

Under these circumstances, the expectation that the United States could wring large concessions from Israel to jump-start a peace process was as unrealistic as the belief that the United States could promote a democratic transition across the Middle East. That the Obama administration failed either to anticipate or to accommodate this fact of life did not promote respect for the intellectual acuity of American policymakers in either Jerusalem or the region at large.

For different reasons, the situation among Palestinians was equally unfavorable. If the Israelis were too strong to feel the need for concessions, the Palestinians were too weak to bear the political costs of what, from the standpoint either of Islamist or secular Palestinian nationalism, was certain to be an imperfect and unsatisfactory peace. The Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007 left the Palestinian movement divided, and no Palestinian leader or organization had the power or the legitimacy to sign a peace agreement that would, at best, be little better than the agreement Arafat had rejected in 2001.

By the start of his second term, President Obama seemed to have grasped the changing dynamics around the disintegrating peace process, but overcame his skepticism to allow Secretary of State John Kerry to embark on one last quest for the Grail in 2013.[23] Whether Washington was trying to transform the Middle East or to reduce its commitments there, settling the Israeli-Palestinian dispute retained its allure.

Given that nothing could be done to break the alliance with Israel, the question was how to manage the relationship to minimize its potential to keep the United States tied to the conflicts and concerns of a region it wished to escape. There were two key problems. One, as noted, was the prospect of a war between Iran and Israel. Such a war would be a nightmare for both countries and could embroil the United States. And if Iran should get a nuclear weapon, the potential for escalation could not be ruled out.

There was also the problem of the Palestinians. The Obama administration might have deferred its hopes for solving the problem of religious fanaticism by transforming the Middle East, but establishing a Palestinian state through a negotiated agreement with Israel would still be good for the United States—and the cost of yet another attempt would not be high.

Sympathy for Palestinians trapped under occupation was one factor in the administration’s continued engagement in peace process diplomacy, but hardly the only or even the leading one. For Washington, the unresolved Palestinian question posed a political problem, a diplomatic problem, and a Zionist problem. From a political standpoint, the unresolved conflict meant a continuing series of Palestinian-Israeli disputes that would force the administration to stand either with Jerusalem or with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. To side with Jerusalem would enrage progressives; to side with Ramallah risked angering centrists and offered opportunities for Republicans to attack the president’s popularity among voters at large.

In diplomacy, Israeli-Palestinian controversies continually led to disputes in venues ranging from the United Nations Security Council to the International Criminal Court. As Israel’s chief international supporter, the United States found itself continually forced to expend energy and political capital managing these various issues. From President Obama’s standpoint, the United States had too much real work to do in the world of international institutions to be continually at odds with key partners in Europe and beyond over disputes about Israel. In December 2016, as the clock ran down on his second term, Obama would order the American delegation not to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem as illegal.[24]

On the positive side, for President Obama and many of his associates and supporters, liberating Israel from the moral and political burdens of occupation and establishing a Palestinian state was the best and perhaps the only way to ensure that Zionism could achieve its historic goal: the establishment of a democratic Jewish state at peace with its neighbors. President Obama did not expect Kerry to succeed, and he was unwilling to plunge himself into the process with the enthusiasm of his predecessors, but on balance the domestic political calculus seemed to favor another round of talks.

As the driving force behind the second term peace process, Secretary Kerry relied on the traditional ham-and-eggs negotiating pattern: if only we had some ham, then we could have ham and eggs once we get some eggs. Like generations of negotiators wrestling over the decades with this intractable problem, the Americans would attempt to push the Israelis toward positions that they would then press the Palestinians to accept, and repeat the same process in reverse, hoping eventually to get the two sides to meet somewhere in the middle. During the nine months of the Kerry-led peace process, he would meet more than one hundred times with Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas. The process collapsed with little to show for this effort, an ignominious setback that revealed just how far American prestige in the Middle East had fallen from the 1990s.[25]

The Kerry process was not wholly barren. In the opinion of Martin Indyk, who served as President Obama’s special Middle East envoy in the second term, Netanyahu eventually responded to intense American efforts by moving into what Indyk called a “zone of potential agreement”—that is, within a range of positions with which, in the Americans’ opinion, the Palestinians could work.[26] Netanyahu, after much poking and prodding, was ready to offer something that at least looked like ham. But the process of getting Netanyahu to these positions was so difficult and drawn out and involved so many steps on his part that angered Palestinian opinion (like issuing permits for settlement expansion), that by the time Netanyahu had moved, the Palestinians were no longer interested. As the clock wound down on the nine-month negotiation period, Kerry tried for one last late-night meeting with Abbas. Aides responded that Abbas was tired and preferred to go to bed. Despite continued frantic American efforts to get an agreement for an extension of the negotiations, the Palestinians crossed an Israeli red line by opening national unity talks with Hamas, and the Israelis announced the negotiations at an end.[27]

With that failure, the long post–Cold War American effort to broker an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians essentially came to an end. Indyk, who worked with presidents from Bill Clinton through Barack Obama, published an essay in The Wall Street Journal in January 2020 declaring that although “Arab-Israeli peacemaking has captivated me for my entire professional life…the task is now clearly hopeless.”[28]

Strikingly, many in the administration seemed unaware of the damage American policy failures around the region had done to their country’s prestige and to the reputation of its policy class for analytic competence. After the string of American Middle East fiascos commencing with the disastrous Iraq War and continuing under Obama with one failed call after another, nobody thought the Americans understood the region particularly well or had a coherent policy for addressing its problems. Like many others around the world at this point, both Israelis and Palestinians tended to regard the United States as a very large beast with a very small brain—an impression that the subsequent Trump administration would do little to erase.

The Middle East was not the only topic over which the gulf between American assumptions and global reality was widening. The sunny assumptions of Clintonian America about the course of post–Cold War history were looking less plausible. The framework of international law, deep peace, and sustained multilateral cooperation that Americans expected to deepen and develop was beginning to fray and the Obama administration appeared unable to reverse the trend. The Obama administration’s steady shift toward a Middle East strategy of disengagement looked to regional observers like another step in the disorienting American retreat from its post–Cold War effort to build a new world order.

Yet even as their behavior telegraphed a belief that liberal order was retreating from the Middle East, the Americans continued to push both Israelis and Palestinians toward a peace that only made sense in the context of that order. For Palestinians, accepting demilitarization only made sense if treaties and legal agreements could be relied on to protect their small and weak state. Otherwise they would be giving up legal and territorial claims against Israel in exchange for a state that would only exist on Israeli sufferance—which is to say, the degree to which Israel felt constrained by the wishes of the “international community.”

For the Israelis, the chief advantage of an agreement with the Palestinians wasn’t physical security. They had achieved that already. It also wasn’t in opening doors to the Arabs. Those doors were opening on their own, in part because regional perceptions of American softness on Iran were driving Arabs and Israelis together in self-defense. The value of a peace deal to Israel was to end the Palestinian use of international institutions to harass the Jewish state at the U.N. and to bring actions against it in forums like the World Court. This was more nuisance than existential threat, and if such institutions were losing clout as the American-sponsored world order grew less robust, the price Israel was willing to pay for peace would only decline.

For both sides, the value of a peace agreement was directly connected to the probability that the quest for world order would succeed. As China and Russia began to challenge the American-led order, and as the Americans themselves despaired of imposing it in the Middle East, Israelis and Palestinians alike grew less interested in the kind of peace the Americans hoped to promote.

By 2013, while the professionalism and knowledge of many experienced American diplomats continued to impress many regional observers, neither Israelis nor Palestinians had much intellectual respect for America’s political leadership. The inability of senior American officials to understand just how ineffectual their own track record of poor decisions made them appear only further undercut their authority. Unable to pacify Iraq, unable to promote democracy in Egypt, unable to secure Libya, and capable only of grandiose rhetoric over the Syrian crisis that they signally failed to back up, America’s senior leaders did not inspire great confidence among either Israelis or Palestinians.

Kerry lectured his interlocutors tirelessly about what their true interests were. “You Palestinians can never get the f***ing big picture,” Susan Rice admonished the chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. At a White House meeting on March 17, 2014, Obama tried to persuade Abbas to sign on the dotted line, telling him “Don’t quibble with this detail or that detail. The occupation will end. You will get a Palestinian state. You will never have an administration as committed to that as this one.”

Abbas, who had heard exactly this kind of logic from American presidents in the past, was unimpressed. The day before, Kerry had asked him to accept another delay in the release of the next tranche of Palestinian prisoners to take the pressure off the Israelis. For Abbas, this was decisive. As Ben Birnbaum and Amir Tibon reported in The New Republic, this was the moment Abbas tuned the Americans out. Abbas would later tell people that if the Americans can’t convince Israel to give me twenty-six prisoners, how will they ever get them to give me East Jerusalem?[29]

Abbas was right and Obama was wrong. The gaps between the two sides were not going to close on Obama’s watch and Abbas and Erekat, to say nothing of Netanyahu, saw the big picture much better than the Americans did at this point. Besides failing to grasp their own drastically diminished authority and prestige, Obama officials failed to grasp the changing nature of Israeli society and the implications of those changes for American peace diplomacy.

The more liberal wing of the Israeli political establishment was rooted in the “Ashkenazi ascendancy” that dominated Israel in the early decades of independence as thoroughly as WASPs had dominated American life a hundred years before. But over time a mix of Sephardic and Russian immigrants along with the rapidly growing ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic populations began to challenge the old largely secular and western-minded elite. It was the surge of these groups that drove Israel’s shift to the right in economics and in security policy. The old Israeli establishment held on in institutions like the judiciary, the universities, and certain institutions in the security field, but its members were increasingly alienated from the less polished, less western, less liberal, more religious, and more Middle Eastern country into which Israel was changing. In an Israeli form of identity politics, right-leaning voters, resenting what they saw as discrimination and contempt from the establishment, banded together behind leaders like Menachem Begin and Netanyahu. These leaders were less open to American ideas and less vulnerable to American pressure than their predecessors had been. The Russian, Sephardic, and ultra-Orthodox voters who supported them did not for the most part share the feelings of guilt about the Palestinians that haunted the old Israeli establishment. Their knowledge of Arab culture, language, and attitude left them contemptuous of what they saw as fuzzy-minded Americans spouting foolish platitudes about the Arab world.

Israel’s coalition of the ascendant scoffed at the idea of a peaceful world order based on international institutions—like the reflexively anti-Israel United Nations—and shared Herzl’s belief that to trust in the power of liberal ideas and political movements was to condemn the Jewish people to extinction. Having watched the Americans chase magical dancing democracy unicorns across the Middle East, these Israelis were increasingly contemptuous of America’s ability to build, defend, or even recognize a liberal world order. There was certainly no question of making territorial concessions in exchange for American security guarantees.

They had even less respect for the opinions of American Jews. Themselves often victims or the children of refugees from Arab discrimination and persecution, they felt they owed the world and the Palestinians no apologies. When, as they saw it, pampered and affluent American Jews who had never held a gun, patrolled a Palestinian street, or crouched in the basement with their families as Palestinian missiles soared overhead lectured Israelis on where their boundaries should be, right-leaning Israelis did not stand abashed.

Neither Kerry nor Obama seems to have understood how their own personal unpopularity in Israel changed the politics of peace among Israelis. As Russian and ex-Soviet Jews watched Putin run rings around Obama on the international stage, as Mizrahi Jews from the Muslim Middle East heard the Americans echoing the flabby liberal rhetoric of a condescending Israeli establishment that despised them, and as all Israelis saw American Middle East policy floundering from one miserable mishap to the next, association with the Americans became toxic. Right-wing politicians saw no reason to conceal their disdain for the Americans and their process; on the contrary, attacking Kerry in particular brought political dividends. Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon would mock what he saw as American naïveté, messianic delusions, and arrogance to journalists. The only thing that will save Israel, he was quoted as saying, “is for John Kerry to win his Nobel Prize and leave us alone.”[30] That these criticisms were unfair did not lessen their effect.

Increasingly, some of the key arguments the Americans used to convince Israelis to move toward a two-state solution were losing traction. The most important was that high Palestinian birthrates meant that in the near future Jews would become a minority in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Many younger Palestinians were giving up on a separate Palestinian state and demanding to join Israel as citizens with equal rights. Unless a Palestinian state could be established, Israelis would face the choice between setting up an “apartheid” state that denied the Arab majority full democratic rights or watching the Jewish character of Israel disappear as Arabs took over the Knesset.

The demographic argument does not play as well among serious Zionists as many well-intentioned outsiders assume. In the 1930s and 1940s, Arabs heavily outnumbered Jews. The Jewish minority faced constant pressure from both the Arab majority and Great Britain to accept minority status in a single state. If the tiny, impoverished and almost friendless Yishuv could reject a one-state solution then surely a nuclear-armed regional superpower with technological capabilities envied and desired by the whole world could define its frontiers and chart its political course at least as successfully.

The demographic outlook is also changing. Arab birthrates have been falling and Jewish birthrates rising for most of this century. In 2015 for the first time, inside Israel, the Jewish and Arab fertility rates (at 3.1 children per woman) were equal. Driven partly though not entirely by high fertility rates among Israeli settlers and ultra-Orthodox Jews, Jewish fertility rates have continued to climb.[31] Palestinian fertility rates appear to be declining in line with trends seen elsewhere in the Arab world.

Another reason many Israelis worry less about numbers than many Americans would like them to is that when Gaza is excluded from the boundaries of a future Israeli-Arab state, the demographic outlook changes significantly. Subtract the approximately 2.1 million Gazans from the 6.8 million Palestinians who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean[32] and the numbers are less formidable.

Americans might argue that Israel would be required to incorporate Gaza or face condemnation as an apartheid state, but it is difficult to see Hamas demanding annexation by a state whose existence it refuses to recognize. The legal picture is murky. Plans by some Israelis to annex much if not all of the West Bank while excluding what would be an archipelago of Palestinian-inhabited areas raise troubling moral and practical questions. However, there are no precedents in international law for requiring a country to annex territory that it has never legally owned and from which it wishes to withdraw.

Others on the Israeli right contest both the reported numbers of Palestinians in the territories and the migration and fertility rate statistics on which they are based, offering estimates of the total Palestinian population well below those from official sources. Such numbers lack credibility with most demography experts, but there are large political constituencies in Israel who accept them—and those Israeli audiences did not trust the American politicians and Jewish leaders offering a different message.[33]

Beyond this, while some observers cite diminishing support for the two-state solution among Palestinians as a sign of heightened militancy, close observers of the Palestinian scene will privately offer a more nuanced opinion. When right-wing Israeli politician Avigdor Liberman proposed that the so-called Triangle, a group of villages on the Israeli side of the 1949 cease-fire line containing between 10 and 15 percent of the Arab population of Israel, be ceded to a Palestinian state in exchange for Israeli settlement blocs in the West Bank, Triangle residents angrily rejected the idea.[34] This was more a vote of no confidence in the Palestinian leadership and the prospects of a Palestinian state than a declaration of love for Israel.

Rising Palestinian skepticism about the value of the two-state solution represents heightened radicalization for some.[35] For others it represents demobilization, indifference, or perhaps despair. For still others it is a pragmatic calculation. In any case, American diplomats seeking to persuade Israelis to make painful compromises in Jerusalem and elsewhere by invoking the specter of an Arab majority in Israel were less persuasive to many Israelis than they hoped.

Finally, in part because important Arab states were as angered and bemused by Obama-era American policy in the Middle East as the Israelis, it was clear to informed Israelis long before the Abraham Accords of the Trump years that Israel was becoming less regionally isolated than ever before. Unable to trust American resolve or negotiating skills when it came to Iran, and eager to expand intelligence cooperation against the Muslim Brotherhood, including Hamas, Israel’s Arab neighbors increasingly saw the Jewish state as an indispensable strategic and security partner.

When Obama negotiators warned that failure to fall in line with the Kerry peace initiative would isolate Israel, Israeli officials felt that once again the Americans had lost touch with key regional dynamics. Even as Israeli settlements on the West Bank grew, Arab governments drew closer to Israel, and their impatience with the Palestinians was becoming more visible. As the Obama administration shifted from a policy of reconciliation with the Arab world to one of bridge-building with Iran, many Arabs interpreted the seeming inaction and passivity of American policy in Syria as a historic betrayal. Public opinion in the Arab world, appalled at the bloodletting in Libya and Syria (and shocked by America’s lack of any kind of positive agenda for these critical regional problems), became more tolerant of the faults of their current rulers and less willing to support dangerous movements for political change. Nobody wanted to be Syria or Libya, and everyone could see how worthless American support had been to the Egyptian democracy movement.

In a world in which Russia and Iran were prepared to brutalize Syria back into obedience to the Assad dynasty, the fate of the West Bank seemed less significant than ever before. And Israel and its Arab neighbors increasingly saw America’s new Iran policy as their gravest security threat.

The new constellation of forces debuted during the Gaza War in the summer of 2014, just after the last flickering flames of the Kerry process went out. Following a series of mutual provocations and retaliations, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched massive air strikes into Gaza. Israeli ground forces moved into Gaza after ten days of air strikes and missile launches. As negotiations for an end to the shooting dragged on in the usual way, it became clear that Egypt, Fatah, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates were quietly supporting the Israeli position in the hope that Hamas would be hit as hard as possible. American negotiators were siding with Turkey and Qatar to end the fighting more quickly, a result likely to reduce the death toll at the cost of offering Hamas a result it could spin as a victory.[36]

For Israelis one lesson seemed obvious. In a shooting conflict that saw Israelis firing on Palestinian cities, the heavyweight powers of the Arab world were backing Israel—against the United States. Unintentionally and unwittingly the Obama administration had achieved a goal that had eluded generations of American diplomats: it had laid the foundation for the integration of Israel into the Middle East.

Rolling Over the “Lobby”

Of President Obama’s two Middle East initiatives in the second term, negotiating the nuclear agreement with Iran was far more important to him than the Kerry peace process. Like many American liberals, Obama believed that American foreign policy had been too militarized for too long. Diplomacy was a frustrating pursuit and the solutions it produced were often partial and messy, but war had a greater downside.

Signing the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran, however, led to an all-out struggle between President Obama and AIPAC and its allies—the so-called Israel lobby. Despite the lobby’s reputation for almost infinite power and cunning, President Obama defeated it hands down.

As the struggle commenced, the odds did not appear to favor the president. The JCPOA was not just unpopular with AIPAC; it was broadly unpopular with the public at large. A University of Maryland poll in September 2015 found a 52 percent majority supporting the agreement, but this was something of an outlier. A Quinnipiac poll found 55 percent opposed, and a CNN-ORC poll found 52 percent of respondents wanting Congress to reject the agreement.[37] Pew found that support for the agreement was actually falling as the congressional vote approached.[38] In the end, majorities in both houses of Congress voted against the agreement, but under the terms negotiated with the White House, the agreement could only be blocked with a supermajority. Four Democratic senators joined with the entire Republican caucus, but opponents fell two votes short of the sixty-vote threshold required to block the deal.

The defeat, one of a number of high-profile defeats that the Israel lobby has sustained going back to the 1950s, was due to many factors. One was partisanship. Just as Republicans were ready to support Eisenhower against Britain, France, and Israel over the Suez Crisis, Democrats, Jewish Democrats very much included, rallied behind President Obama. The polls showed a sharp partisan split over the Iran deal, with Republicans opposing the deal and most Democrats supporting it.

Another was presidential leadership. When Ronald Reagan beat back massive opposition to sell five advanced E-3 AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia, he faced a similar array of hostile political forces. AIPAC and its allies had sprung into action. Israel was public in its opposition, the polling was terrible, and many members of his own party were concerned.[39] The Reagan administration, however, was convinced of the necessity of the sale (at the time, part of the largest single arms sale in American history), and the president and his aides were indefatigable in working Congress and the public. In the end, they prevailed.[40]

The Obama administration was equally committed to the Iran deal, and from the president on down the lobbying was intense. Knowing that the key to victory was preventing Democratic defections, the president personally contacted 125 Democratic senators and representatives between July and September 2015, many repeatedly, sometimes calling between rounds of golf on Martha’s Vineyard. As CNN reported, “The lobbying effort to back the deal was far more targeted and relentless than the public push and advertising campaigns aimed at scuttling it, according to lawmakers in both parties.”[41]

The point is not just that the Israel lobby lost the battle over the JCPOA. It had lost important battles before and no doubt will lose more in the future. What is more significant is that in this high-profile fight with AIPAC and its allies on a matter of the gravest importance to Israel, American Jews continued to support President Obama through the controversy. A Social Science Research Solutions poll of American Jews found that Jews were more supportive of the Iran deal than the population at large, even though almost half of American Jews believed that the agreement made Israel less safe.[42] President Obama fought, and won, more policy battles with Israel than any of his predecessors. Next to Bill Clinton, he was the most popular president in modern times among American Jews.

There seem to be two reasons for this. The first is that Israel policy is not the most important issue for many American Jews. A 2012 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that only 4 percent of American Jews named “Israel” as the most important factor in determining their vote.[43] A poll for the American Jewish Committee found that 7.2 percent of Jewish voters identified “U.S.-Israel relations” as their most important voting priority. Only 25.9 percent of the AJC sample identified U.S.-Israel relations as one of the three most important issues.[44]

The second reason is that President Obama’s approach to Israel and the Middle East broadly reflected the values and ideas of large numbers of American Jews. Many of Obama’s close friends and advisors were Jewish. At one point in the Kerry negotiations, Palestinians noted that his diplomatic team was overwhelmingly Jewish; The New Republic compared it to “a Bar Mitzvah guest list.”[45] Israeli Jews and American Jews have moved in very different directions in recent decades, and the debate among Jews in both countries reflected those divisions.

Those political divisions would only deepen as Donald Trump embarked on the most disruptive administration in American history.