What Kerry and Obama Were Thinking

Why did Secretary of State John Kerry originally present a cease-fire plan that acceded to some of Hamas’s demands and none of Israel’s? Michael Doran of the Brookings Institution tried to answer that question in a Mosaic article this week. Kerry, Doran argues, did not offer such a deal—a deal that made even the pro-Obama Israeli left scratch their heads—out of simple incompetency, rather, concessions to Hamas and its supporters is consistent with President Obama’s larger strategic goals in the Middle East. That goal is to pull America back from the Middle East and leave a stable equilibrium of powers. Those powers seen as defensive and therefore dug-in—Iran and the terrorists it supports—need to be accommodated, because if they are accommodated, Obama seems to believe, they will moderate.

All across the Middle East, the traditional allies of the United States, just like the Israeli Left, feel that Obama has betrayed them. Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians, Emiratis, and Turks, despite the very real differences among them, nurture grievances similar in kind to those expressed on the pages of Haaretz. Ravid’s question—“What was Kerry thinking?”—deserves to be recast. It would get closer to the heart of the matter to ask what the president was thinking.

The answer is as simple as it is surprising: the president is dreaming of an historical accommodation with Iran. The pursuit of that accommodation is the great white whale of Obama’s Middle East strategy, and capturing it is all that matters; everything else is insignificant by comparison. The goal looms so large as to influence every other facet of American policy, even so seemingly unrelated a matter as a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

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Two key assumptions inform this line of reasoning. First, the president posits that Iran is now a defensive power. Holding on for dear life in the volatile Middle East, it has no sustained interest in undermining the United States, which might even serve as its ally in countering Sunni extremism. Second, Hamas and Hizballah are similarly defensive—and ready, under the right circumstances, to moderate their aggressive hostility.

In brief, President Obama now thinks of the region’s politics in terms of a roundtable. Everyone seated at it is potentially equal to everyone else, and the job of the United States is to narrow the gaps among antagonists in an effort to bring the system to the desired state of “equilibrium.” It was precisely this concept that informed American diplomacy over the Gaza ceasefire. Although the administration was quickly forced to backpedal and abandon its proposal in the face of opposition from Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, the incident illustrated starkly how its Ahab-like fixation on a grand bargain with Iran has created a culture that makes stiffing American allies just a normal part of doing business.

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What Kerry and Obama Were Thinking

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