President Obama and John Kerry, in their attacks on Israel in the United Nations and at the State Department, have — presumably unwittingly — undercut an argument that Democrats and many others have made against Donald Trump: the argument that he is overly trusting of, and willing to make concessions to, Russia. Trump’s refusal to say just about anything negative about Vladimir Putin and Russia have led some to fear that he is somehow collusive with the Russian leadership. More are just puzzled at what seems to be his bland acquiescence in Russian moves.
Republicans who remember the 2012 presidential debate where Mitt Romney identified Russia as America’s No. 1 geopolitical foe, and Democrats who have airbrushed any memory of Barack Obama’s ridicule of this notion, both share some apprehension about Trump’s apparent russophilia. He seems to be breaking away from what has been traditional American foreign policy in pursuit of what seems to be an impossible alliance.
But isn’t that what Obama has spent the last eight years doing in the Middle East? He has spurned America’s traditional friends — Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states as well as Israel — and has embraced Iran’s mullah regime, which has been America’s persistent enemy since 1979. Some of this is arguably trivial: Obama’s repeated apologies for U.S. support of the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh and U.S. support for the next 26 years of the shah, whose regime was less tyrannical and not as long-lasting as the regime of the mullahs to whom he has repeatedly apologized.
And then there is Obama’s major reversal, the Iran nuclear agreement which, despite administration denials and outight lies, authorizes and aids the mullah regime’s drive to obtain nuclear weapons. Previous American administrations have tried to find some common ground with Iran’s leaders, and have always failed. But none has gone as far as the Obama administration, nor has any other administration seemed to cherish the vision of a Middle East pacified and patrolled by an American-Iranian quasi-alliance. Obama has pursued this policy successfully despite opposition from majorities in Congress and majority public opinion.
Obama’s and Kerry’s lame-duck rebukes of Israel are surely opposed by majorities in Congress and among the public, as well as by the president-elect and his major foreign policy and defense appointees. As Obama abandons and attacks longtime friends in pursuit of plainly unachievable goals (an Israel-Palestinian agreement, quasi-alliance with terrorism-supporting Iran), they obscure the fears of many on both sides of the partisan divide that his successor may abandon longtime friends in pursuit of some kind of quasi-alliance with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
