Michael Gerson writes:
If there is a single day on which any real hope of success for Obama’s direct, presidential diplomacy was dashed, it was the day of the Iranian election, when that regime didn’t hesitate to perpetrate fraud on a massive scale and the Obama White House did nothing. Then the regime cracked down, and the Obama White House did nothing. Now, there’s nothing left for the White House to do. As absurd as direct, presidential diplomacy would have been before the election, it’s now inconcievable that Obama would sit across the table from these thugs. Bush sent Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns to meet with the Iranians in Geneva. I doubt Obama can even outdo that. Can he send Clinton to Tehran? If she’s willing to go, the RNC would probably be willing to pay her airfare. And on North Korea…well, the last administration tried engagement. The left was so wowed with the result that the Obama administration gave Chris Hill perhaps the most important foreign post in the diplomatic corps. But it turns out the Bush administration policy in North Korea was every bit the disaster that John Bolton and other hawks said it was at the time. So Obama still has the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which Obama has also produced zero movement from either side — not a halt to settlements, not tentative steps toward recognition, not serious efforts to form a Palestinian unity government, nothing except a few less road blocks in the West Bank (the elimination of which were, by the way, an obsession of Secretary Rice during the last administration as well). So do Obama’s most ardent supporters believe that a major breakthrough on any one of these fronts is just beyond the horizon? Will Obama keep his pledge to meet with the leaders of rogue regimes during his first year in office (and not just a bro-shake at an Americas Summit)? When does the left concede that maybe the problem wasn’t so much George W. Bush as the rogue regimes in Pyongyang, Tehran, and Gaza? (That’s a rhetorical question: they don’t call them the Blame America First Crowd for nothing.)
