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On June 4, U.S. President Barack Obama delivered a much-anticipated address to the world’s Muslims, from a podium at Cairo University. (If you cannot see the embedded video above, click here. The text is here.) The following MESH members responded to an invitation to comment on the speech: Alan Dowty, Michele Dunne, Chuck Freilich, Bernard Heykal, Bruce Jentelson, Josef Joffe, Mark N. Katz, Mark T. Kimmitt, Martin Kramer, Walter Laqueur, Michael Mandelbaum, Michael Reynolds, Michael Rubin, Harvey Sicherman, Philip Carl Salzman, Raymond Tanter, and Michael Young.

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Michele Dunne :: What President Obama had going for him in this speech was at least the appearance of frankness, laying on the table the areas of difference—terrorism (repackaged as “violent extremism”), Afghanistan, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nuclear proliferation, democracy, religious freedom, women’s rights, economic development—and giving his view of each one. That approach, along with the requisite expressions of support for Islam as a religion and a civilization, will get him some points.

What the speech did not do was tell us anything much about how his administration will follow up on these issues. The list of deliverables was exceedingly short. The only firm promise was to a pursue a two-state solution to the Palestine issue—which will be extremely difficult to achieve. There were hints of a softer approach to Hamas (now it’s an organization with “support” and “responsibilities” instead of a terrorist group) and perhaps to Hezbollah (”we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments”), but it was unclear how serious that was and whether it would be sustainable in Washington.

If Obama considered “terrorism” a toxic word to be discarded, at least he did not do the same with “democracy.” He stayed on the plane of theory but addressed the issue squarely, not ducking its political aspects, and this was the part of the address that got the most positive reaction from the Egyptian audience. It was the only part of the speech where he actually lectured a bit, issuing a series of “you musts” when it came to what “government of the people and by the people” meant. Frankly it was more than I expected. It was a good start to articulate principles for which the United States stands, but then again, there was no promise of follow-up. What, if anything, will the Obama administration do when the Egyptian government excludes most of the opposition from the next parliamentary elections or when Syria throws a bunch of democracy activists in jail? Obama told us nothing about that. Privately, administration people are saying that Bush promised much on democracy and delivered little, and that Obama plans to do the reverse. Let’s see. We won’t have long to wait.

The women’s rights and economic development sections near the end had a cut-and-paste feel. These are Secretary Clinton’s pet issues, and apparently she is inclined to try to substitute them for democracy and human rights overall in policy and assistance programs. At least that didn’t happen in this speech. But the smallish economic and women’s rights initiatives mentioned created a sort of imbalance. It would have been better either to have Obama say what he was going to do in each of the major areas of the speech or none of them, perhaps saving the microloans for announcement in a fact sheet.

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Bernard Haykel :: I am writing from Riyadh where President Obama was cordially received but has left a bitter aftertaste among many here. His visit is seen as an attempt to get, not to say bully, the Saudi leadership to make concrete and positive gestures toward Israel, over and above the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative of 2002. Saudis have little desire or willingness to do this because of a widely held view that Israel, especially under its present Likud leadership and after the brutal war in Gaza earlier this year, does not deserve this. A number of Saudis have asked the following question: Why should the Kingdom reward an Israeli leadership that is not even willing to acknowledge the Palestinians’ right to a state? Granting something additional now to Israel for nothing can only help make the Saudi leadership look weak-kneed.

As for Obama’s speech in Cairo, all the Saudis I have spoken to have acknowledged its rhetorical power, but they insist that only facts will make a difference to their assessment of the President’s true intentions.

My own view is that the speech was remarkable for its relative candor on a number of important issues (and for some notable omissions), but I am troubled by its framing which juxtaposes the United States and Islam as two equivalent entities, which they are not. In doing this, Obama has adopted unwittingly the framing of Al Qaeda’s ideology, and this in turn might grant a degree of legitimacy to discussing Islam as a political reality rather than a faith. Surely, it is certain forms of Islamism and not Islam that pose the problem.

The second notable point in the speech is Obama’s analogy between the plight of Palestinians and that of African-Americans under slavery and Jim Crow. The context here is Obama’s advice to Palestinians to adopt non-violent means in resisting Israeli occupation. As before, Obama has taken a page from Al Qaeda’s book, in which the alleged humiliation and oppression of Muslims are compared to the tribulations of African-Americans. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s number two leader, often invokes this same history by drawing on the examples of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers to argue that only violence and rejection can lead to political change, and to convince African-American soldiers to desert the U.S. armed forces.

In short, the framing of the United States’ relationship with the Muslim world as one based on friendship rather than enmity, while superficially and rhetorically laudable, is fraught with difficulties and pitfalls, not least because it can unwittingly give credence to the idea that there might in fact be a clash between the United States and Islam. I can imagine a long-bearded man now smiling in a cave on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

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Josef Joffe :: The problem laid out by President Obama in Cairo is an old one in America’s international relations. It is foreign policy as psychotherapy. The diplomatist/strategist deals with conflicts of interest and the “correlation of forces,” as our Soviet friends used to say. The therapist knows no such clashes, certainly no tragedies—only misunderstandings, fears, and neuroses. Obama-in-Cairo was Esalen-amidst-the-Pyramids. Or as he himself put it: “This cycle of suspicion and discord must end.” It is an imaginary conflict, in other words.

There are several issues here. The first is that the therapist does not speak truth but reassurance. Obama recounts how Morocco was the first to recognize the United States in the Treaty of Tripoli of 1796. Unfortunately, the larger, though unmentioned, truth is less reassuring: that the first wars America fought after independence were with the “Barbary Pirates,” the potentates of the Maghreb. To break their nasty habit of selling American hostages for money, the young republic fought intermittently from 1801 to 1815. No misunderstandings here, just the naked clash of our interests against theirs.

A larger untruth is the (implicit) idea that America is at war with Islam, as uttered in the e contrario phrase: “America is not—and never will be—at war with Islam.” Of course not. Who ever said so? Only Al Qaeda et al. did—copiously and tirelessly. These folks also keep saying as insistently that they are at war with the “Jews and crusaders,” with the West, and above all, America. Before the President reached Cairo, AQ’s No. 2, Aymal al-Zawahiri, let it be known that Obama’s speech would not at all change the “bloody messages” he was sending to Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Therapists make no judgments on truth and falsehood; for them, the process is the purpose. But a process that does not correctly unearth the roots of conflict will invariably run afoul of the realities. Islamist terror will not go away because Obama softly, softly establishes a kind of moral equivalence between the Holocaust and what Palestinians call the Nakba, their loss and flight in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.

Nor will the Arab world flock to America’s cause because of all the niceties Obama has bestowed on it. Let it be said, though, that the harsh rhetoric on Israel plus slaps like no-state-dinner for Mr. Netanyahu at the White House have been replaced by the balanced cadences of the Cairo speech: The Israelis have to do this, the Palestinians and Arabs have to do that.

But the chickens have already come home to roost. The hope, a perennial one, obviously is that the Arabs will be so overjoyed by the U.S. manhandling Israel that they will rally to Old Glory en masse, doing America’s bidding throughout the Greater Middle East. This is not how the Mideast works. To make the point, the spokesman of the Egyptian foreign ministry told the New York Times: “We will judge everything by the degree of Israeli commitments, and measures that are taken.”

In so many words: “Mr. President, now that you have pressured the Israelis, we want to see more of it. And more. And then, perhaps, we’ll do you a favor on other matters.” We are back at the oldest game of the Middle East. It is called “Let the U.S. Deliver Israel, Then We Might Start Acting in Our Own Interest.” Obviously, if it were in the Arab interest to push the Palestinians toward peace, and to engage in an alliance of containment and deterrence against Iran, they would have done so. But for lots of reasons, good and bad, the Arabs are not interested. And so the United States will keep weakening its only true ally in the Middle East without reaping any geopolitical fruit from its courtship of Araby.

Alas, a lot of damage will have been done before the United States learns that therapy is not grand strategy and changes course. But one bit of therapeutic advice remains apropos: Never treat your opponents and detractors better than your friends.

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Mark N. Katz :: President Obama gave a powerful speech in Cairo setting forth his vision of how the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world can be improved. In it, he called for change both in how the United States and its allies view and act toward the Muslim world. But he also called for change in how the Muslim world views and acts toward America and its allies.

Early on in the speech, he pledged “to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” In the very next sentence, though, he insisted that, “the same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America.”

His remarks about how the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq began and about Guantanamo were obviously critical of Bush administration policies. His saying that, “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements… It is time for these settlements to stop,” is an unmistakable call for change in Israeli policy. At the same time, however, Obama made clear that America’s bonds with Israel are “unbreakable.”

And in one of the most important passages of the speech, Obama called for a change in Palestinian behavior toward Israel. “Palestinians must abandon violence,” he stated bluntly. He noted that black people had suffered in America, but that, “it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding.” He noted that non-violent resistance had overcome oppression elsewhere too. Non-violent resistance, he implied, would help the Palestinians achieve their goal of an independent state while violent resistance would not.

Later, Obama called for improved Iranian-American relations, but made clear that Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons is unacceptable.

Regarding the democratization of the Muslim world, Obama stated that this was not something that “can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.” On the other hand, he made clear that America wants to see progress toward democracy in the Muslim world, and that this is in the interests of Muslim governments since “governments that protect…rights are ultimately more stable, successful and secure.”

Those in the Muslim world who do not want to cooperate with the United States will find—indeed, have already found—reasons to dismiss Obama’s speech. Osama bin Laden dismissed it even before Obama gave it. However, those in the Muslim world who did not like American foreign policy in the past but would like to cooperate with America in the future can find in Obama’s speech an American president who acknowledges their concerns and is willing to work with them.

Obama’s Cairo speech represents a good faith effort to improve America’s relations with the Muslim world. If this does not occur, it will not be for lack of trying on Obama’s part.

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Mark T. Kimmitt :: OK. The long-anticipated “major speech to the Muslim world” is over, and it is being parsed for messages, inferences, policy directions and reactions. The “let me tell you what the President should say next week” crowd is reviewing the text to see if their recommendations were embraced, rejected or reversed. The analysts and pundits on Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya and a thousand broadsheets in the region are assessing it to see how it aligns with editorial policy. The President is moving on, rhetorically and physically, to the next key administration challenge, be it North Korea, the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, General Motors, Afghanistan-Pakistan or a host of other high-priority national security issues.

As for the speech, all the right messages were sent out. America is not at war with Islam, we have common interests in fighting violent extremism, Palestine is a problem, a nuclear-armed Iran is a threat, and democracy is a form of human rights. So, let’s push the reset button. Good, practical sound bites that reaffirm U.S. policy and increase our appeal on the street, but there was little in the way of tangible new initiatives or promises of outcomes. Perhaps it was too much to expect, but the speech seemed more of a conversation rather than a commitment.

It’s fine to have a conversation. Perhaps it’s helpful to tell the Muslim world that we will get out of Afghanistan when the job is done, and get out of Iraq by 2012 regardless. Helpful to note that the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. Important to clarify that Iran should have nuclear power, but not nuclear weapons. But what is the administration going to do about this? The only tangible “we shalls” in the speech were easy and low-hanging fruit on education, science and technology, economic development and fighting violent extremists. No specific “we shalls” on Iran, on Palestine, on Gaza, on Syria. Only aspirations and “we seek.” Fine speech, but what’s next?

Was this a speech to guide U.S. policy or enhance U.S. popularity? Will the speech prove to be the catalyst for reform, for moderation, for diplomatic breakthrough or simply words to calm the street? If nothing else, the speech has built up expectations, and expectations are that the United States wants to reset the relationship—and that there will be tangible results from that new relationship. The Muslim world will be looking for outcomes, for a change to the status quo, for breakthroughs in long-standing grievances. The speech raised expectations and the street is looking for results.

Among the billion or so who listened carefully to a well-crafted speech, many are sitting in taxis, sipping coffee in cafes, praying in mosques and arguing in universities. Many if not all of them are applauding the speech and many (if not all) are asking the same question: what’s next?

So, congratulations on a great speech, well-written and well-delivered. It is certain to change more than a few minds about American intentions. But good words and good intentions have a rapidly depreciating value, and will make things worse if these words turn out to be false promises. Time will tell.

It’s not what you say, it’s what you do.

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Martin Kramer :: “Peoples of Egypt, you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion; do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights, to punish the usurpers, and that I respect more than the Mamluks God, His Prophet, and the Quran.” So spoke Bonaparte when he arrived in Egypt, in a proclamation of July 2, 1798. Substitute “Islam” for Egypt, “we Americans” for I, and “violent extremists” for the Mamluks, and you’ve got the core message of President Obama’s speech.

It’s a very old drill in the annals of “public diplomacy.” Supplementary gestures help. Obama was careful to pronounce the word Quran with the guttural qaf of the Arabic. (Too bad, though, he botched the word hijab.) Unless you’re converting, you can’t say Ich bin ein Muslim, so you come as close as you can. (Barack Hussein Obama—can we finally use his middle name now?—gets closer than most.) Some Muslims are wise to this, and so presumably they will discount it. But the great majority? Who doesn’t love pandering?

I leave it to others to parse the sparse policy pointers in the speech. (Rob Satloff does a nice job of it.) Some of the influences on Obama bubble to the surface. There is the Third Worldism: Muslims are victims of our colonialism (Obama has read Fanon) and the Cold War (has he been reading Khalidi again?) The primacy of the West is over: “Any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.” There is the implicit comparison of the Palestinians to black Americans during segregation, a familiar trope (Carter and Condi went for it too). Israel comes across as an anomaly. There is no appreciation of Israel as a strategic asset—its ties to the United States are “cultural and historical,” and thus not entirely rational. (That validates Obama’s other former Chicago colleague, Mearsheimer.) All of this has the ring of conviction—and of a Third Worldist sensibility.

Maybe the most disconcerting line is this one: “We can’t disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretense of liberalism.” The pretense? This discrediting of liberalism and its universal humanism is the classic stance of the Third Worldist radical. And did you know that the job description of the nation’s leader now includes “my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear”? Perhaps it’s possible to disband CAIR. America now has a president who knows “what Islam is, [and] what it isn’t,” and who even has a mandate to insist on closing “the divisions between Sunni and Shia.” Perhaps an emissary should be sent from Washington to the pertinent muftis and mullahs: the mission would certainly be more congenial than closing divisions of General Motors.

Indeed, not since Bonaparte has a foreigner landed on Egyptian soil and delivered a message of such overbearing hubris. Were I a Muslim, this 6,000-word manifesto would have me worried stiff. This man wants to be my president as much as he is America’s.

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Walter Laqueur :: An excellent speech. Even before it was delivered, Wikipedia included it its list of the greatest speeches ever, a list beginning with the Pericles funeral oration. If a religion has 1.3 billion followers, it was only natural that the emphasis had to be on a new beginning, on mutual interest and mutual trust, on partnership, on peace, on not being prisoners of the past, on breaking the cycle of suspicion, on Muslims having enriched America, on doing away with crude stereotypes, on diplomacy and international consensus, on all of us sharing common aspirations, on listening and learning from each other, on Andalus, algebra and on the 1,200 mosques in America, on all of us being the children of Abraham, on “any world order that elevates one people over another will inevitably fail,” on education and innovation being the currency of the 21st century.

How much of this is genuinely believed? How candid can one (should one) be? I am sure that when the Prince of Wales said a few years ago that the Muslim critique of materialism helped him to rediscover sacred Islamic spirituality, he had never even heard about taqiya and kitman. I do not know the answer to the question; perhaps it was a mixture of the two.

Dissimulation may not be an admirable practice, but it could save lives. I recommend Macaulay’s 1850 essay on Machiavelli, a strong believer in Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare which, freely translated, means that he who does not know to dissimulate has no business to be in politics.

What of the impact of the speech? An unfair question: soft power, however desirable, has its limits. Pericles’ funeral oration did not lead to the resurrection of the dead and there is still much sin in the world despite the Sermon on the Mount.

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Michael Mandelbaum :: President Obama’s Cairo speech continues two venerable traditions of American public life. One arises from the electoral politics of foreign policy. It is customary for the presidential candidate of the out-party to promise more skillful conduct of the country’s relations with the rest of the world, either by adopting different positions—as with candidate Barack Obama’s promise to end American participation in the Iraq war—or by doing better in pursuit of a goal on which all agree.

During the Cold War the standard version of this second tactic was the charge that the incumbent had, through crass insensitivity, botched relations with America’s European allies, which the challenger promised to repair with more adept diplomacy. America’s relations with Muslims served this electoral purpose in the 2008 presidential election, with the challenger promising to improve them by dint not so much of his policies as of his identity. The purpose of the Cairo speech was presumably to deliver on that promise.

Unfortunately, it will not do so. Muslims’ attitudes to the United States will depend on Obama’s policies—that is, on what he does—not on who his father was. Whatever the uses of identity politics within the United States, there is no good reason to suppose that they have any significant effect beyond the country’s borders. As Anne Mandelbaum has observed, Dwight Eisenhower’s German background did not win him approval among Germans during the years, from 1942 to 1945, when he had extensive dealings with them. Nor is it clear why people in Muslim-majority countries should be favorably impressed with the fact that the United States has a president one of whose parents shared their faith. They live, after all, in countries governed, for the most part, by men who by that standard qualify as twice as Islamic as Obama, and whose performances in office have been, to put it generously, unimpressive.

The second political tradition that the speech continues is the perennial overconfidence of all presidents of the United States in the power of their own oratory. Such overconfidence is not surprising. In the United States an individual becomes the most powerful person in the world through his speeches. It is one of the glories of the American political system that a presidential election is, in part, a debating contest. Foreign policy, however, is not. Here again, what is relevant is the fact that what Obama does will shape Muslims’ (and others’) opinion of him and his country, while what he says will not. His impact on Muslims and the countries in which they live will therefore come from the policies affecting them that he devises after words fail him.

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Michael Rubin :: Obama is a gifted orator, one in a generation. By nature of Obama’s background—and the fact that he is not George W. Bush—he has a real chance to change the tone of discussion in the Middle East and among Islamic states. That said, rhetoric isn’t enough. Policy matters. Here, there is cause for concern. The Obama doctrine appears to rest on twin pillars: One is a decision to dispense with demands for accountability, and the second seems to be moral equivalency or cultural relativism.

Both Bush and Obama spoke of Palestine and their desire to see the creation of a state for Palestinian Arabs to live beside Israel. But Bush conditioned U.S. support for Palestine’s independence on a cessation of terrorism. Obama does not. And while he certainly condemned “violence” (perhaps terrorism is too loaded a term for Obama), he implied equivalence between this and the dislocation felt by some Palestinian Arabs.

Obama also cast aside demands for accountability when discussing elections, declaring “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election.” This appears to be an allusion to the lack of U.S. support for the Hamas-led government in Gaza. The United States should be under no obligation, however, to befriend or assist governments which run counter to its interests. After all, U.S. foreign aid is not an entitlement. Hamas scrapped—and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt demands the scrapping of—agreements to which their entity and state have already obligated themselves. We should hold them accountable, not say we will embrace everyone.

As for cultural equivalency, I must object to his statement: “Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.” Time and time again, however, it has been the superpower status of the United States which has prevented a far worse world order from taking root, be it in Europe, Asia, or even Latin America. The United States is not equal to Libya, nor should it ever be.

The cultural equivalency also permeated Obama’s discussion of democracy. Backtracking away from democratization as a pillar of policy, Obama said: “No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation by any other. That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people.” But there are certain norms of good governance. On the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, for example, we should not say, “Oh, well: That’s just the way Chinese democracy works.”

Let’s hope for the best but, absent a clear articulation of what the United States stands for and what our vision is, rhetoric will not be enough to make a better, more secure world or build a solid foundation for U.S. relations with Muslim-majority states.

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Harvey Sicherman :: President Obama’s Cairo speech was Wilsonian. The lofty moral tone, keen detachment (all claims treated equally), and leap-of-faith rhetoric are all there. So is the religious overlay. And as befits the shorter attention span of the 21st century, Obama proposes to remake the world in seven points instead of fourteen, in 55 minutes instead of Wilson’s 99-plus.

As president of a secular democracy, Obama’s choice of location (Mubarak’s Egypt) and audience (a “world” identified only by religion) offered minefields aplenty. He negotiated most of these with admirable dexterity but not always. One paragraph invoked “a partnership between America and Islam,” and then declared that “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” This was a bit much. Probably, as Theodore Roosevelt once said about a Wilsonian elocution, “as a matter of fact, the words mean nothing whatsoever.”

Some of the other words do mean something. Obama vigorously asserted the dignity of America’s civil religion, especially freedom of speech, religion, democracy, and women’s rights. He refuted dangerous nonsense about 9/11 and the Holocaust; explained policy in Iraq and Afghanistan; and justified the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Coming from Saudi Arabia the day before, he instructed the Arab oil producers not to rely on “what comes out of the ground,” and instead educate their people. Good luck!

Obama’s “no sticks in sight” approach to Iran, including his apology on the Mossadegh affair (Madeleine Albright did this in 1998) was all open hand to which the Iranians thus far have responded with the middle finger. But the President’s framework ought to alarm the Israelis: will a U.S.-Iranian “dialogue” produce a demand that Israel yield its nuclear weapons in exchange for international guarantees that Iran, under international supervision, will not build one?

Obama, as he told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman before the speech, wanted to “speak directly” to the Arab street and persuade them of America’s “straightforward manner. Then at the margins, both they and their leadership are more inclined and able to work with us.” But this is more than a margin call. Obama has straightforwardly distanced himself from Israel, the better to cultivate the Arab coalition, whose leaders are his real target. Can they deliver the Palestinians to a compromise acceptable to Israel? Can they do much to alter the Iranian course? Or is the Arab coalition’s influence, like that of the Arab street, or the world of Islam, only a shadow of its reputation? A historian might say of the Cairo speech that it was a triumph—of hope over experience.

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Philip Carl Salzman :: President Obama uses his bully pulpit in Cairo to urge his vision to the people of the Middle East. That vision is one of commonality based on common traditions and common humanity. The driving force that would motivate this commonality is teleological: a desire for progress. We all want the same things, he argues and urges: peace, prosperity, dignity, education, family, community. If we only look ahead, we shall get along with one another, and go along the path of progress. This is a remarkable post-postmodern rebirth of the 19th-century concept of progress.

But the President does not address the people of the Middle East, but instead addresses Muslims. In doing so, he validates the argument by Islamists that Islam should be the primary identity of the people of the Middle East, and implicitly validates the vision of a new Caliphate. And in focusing on Islam, he must over-communicate virtues and commonalities, and under-communicate problems and differences. Islam, he tells us, is a religion of “tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.” He goes on to say that “throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.”

This seems to me rather a whitewash of a dark history. Why, it’s déjà Bush, all over again: Islam is the religion of peace. Indeed, he argues that “one rule… lies at the heart of every religion—that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.” I suppose we should not be surprised that these formulations are geared to generate positive sentiments, rather than to summarize our knowledge of actual Islamic history, theology, or law.

Several times the President urges listeners to stop looking backward, to leave past grievances aside: “If we choose to be bound by the past, we will never move forward.” This is a difficult message for Muslims, given their understanding that the golden age of Islam was under Muhammad, who should for all eternity be the model for every believer. Islam under Muhammad is the life to be emulated. A good Muslim always looks back.

The specifics are mixed. The President is strong on “unbreakable” bonds with Israel, and that “Palestinians must abandon violence.” Definite on favoring two states. Strong on condemning Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism, but in the abstract only. Strong on democracy generally speaking. Strong denouncing Iran’s bomb. Weak on Palestinians still in camps in Arab countries. Very mild on women’s rights. Ambiguous on Jerusalem. Wishes a nuclear-free world, but no special emphasis on a nuclear-free Middle East.

Shall the good intentions of the President pave the path to progress?

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Raymond Tanter :: President Obama’s Cairo speech was replete with soaring rhetoric designed to reach out to Muslims around the globe, and particularly those in the Arab world. The President remarked that now is “a time of great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world,” but added:

We have a responsibility to join together on behalf of the world we seek. A world where extremists no longer threaten our people, and American troops have come home; a world where Israelis and Palestinians are each secure in a state of their own, and nuclear energy is used for peaceful purposes; a world where governments serve their citizens, and the rights of all God’s children are respected.

The President can certainly talk the talk regarding outreach to Muslims, but will he walk the walk that the Muslim street wishes to see?

Doing so would require a number of U.S. policy changes to appease the Muslim street, such as pressuring Israel to make unilateral concessions, expanding engagement with Syria without preconditions, accepting an Iranian regime with a uranium enrichment capability, withdrawing forces more quickly from Iraq, halting drone attacks of Al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Pakistan, and reversing U.S. escalation in Afghanistan.

President Obama was careful to signal that such unrealistic policies would not be forthcoming. He indicated an evenhanded policy on the Arab-Israeli dispute, reaffirmed his commitment to keep Iran from getting the bomb, held to his Iraq timetable, and justified escalation in Afghanistan.

The President’s indications that no major policy reversals would occur clashed with his eloquent rhetoric about a “new beginning” between Muslims and non-Muslims. Without any dramatic policy changes, President Obama’s speech is likely to unfairly raise expectations in the Muslim world, leading to inevitable disappointment.

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Michael Young :: President Obama’s homily in Cairo had much that was interesting in it and much that was vague. That’s the nature of these communications, but several things suggested that Obama wanted to have his cake and eat it too.

In referring to the war in Iraq, the President remarked:

Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world. Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible.

Indeed. But if Iraqis are better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, what does that tell us about U.S. policy when it comes to supporting democracy and human rights in the Middle East? After all, neither diplomacy nor an international consensus would have ever freed Iraqis from under Saddam’s thumb. So did the United States do the right thing in getting rid of the Baath regime by force? Obama didn’t address this prickly question.

That fuzziness, however, permeated his later discussion of democracy in the region. Obama pointed out: “So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.” But then he went on to say that this did not lessen his commitment to governments that reflect the will of the people. Except that “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone.”

But hadn’t Obama just presumed to know that the Iraq war was ultimately beneficial for the Iraqi people, since he felt that they were better off without Saddam? And weren’t they better off without Saddam because the new system they are living under was imposed on them? And weren’t Obama’s bromides in favor of democracy and democratization not also statements implying that he presumed to know what was best for everyone?

If so, then why did he not just come out and state the obvious: that democracy, openness and pluralism are indeed better for all states, as is respect for human rights. Why did Obama prefer to avoid rocking the boat when it came to autocratic regimes in the region? Not a word was uttered on actual cases of human rights abuses, whether in Egypt, which was hosting him, or in any other part of the Middle East. Clearly, the realist aversion to involving the United States in the domestic policy of the region’s states was on display.

Finally, I was interested in what Obama had to say about the Maronites and the Copts, given my weakness for minorities in the region: “Among some Muslims, there is a disturbing tendency to measure one’s own faith by the rejection of another’s. The richness of religious diversity must be upheld—whether it is for Maronites in Lebanon or the Copts in Egypt.”

Yet this advice Obama placed under the rubric of “religious freedom.” Odd, because the problem of minorities in the Middle East is usually more political than religious. What the Copts would like more of is political power, not the freedom to exercise their religion. As for the Maronites, their sense of decline is attached not to the fact that they cannot practice their religion, which they can do without any objection from their Muslim compatriots, but that they feel political power is escaping them.

What do these issues have in common? They lead me to a disconcerting conclusion that Obama has no coherent view of political freedom in the Middle East. He tended to overemphasize religion, while underemphasizing how the United States might address political matters, such as what to do about dictatorial regimes, the major cause of the great trauma he described, namely 9/11; or how to reverse the absence of democracy in the Middle East, in illegitimate states that fail to fulfill the aspirations of their citizens; or what to do about minorities denied political power, Muslim and non-Muslim.

Obama submerged his speech in the holy water of religion, but it is freedom, the failure of the Arab state, and the lack of accountability of regional regimes that are far more central to the dilemmas the Middle East face today. In one word, it is mostly about politics, and on this Obama was too busy being polite to his listeners to raise the difficult questions he promised to raise.

Go to the comments for more from Alan Dowty, Chuck Freilich, Bruce Jentleson, and Michael Reynolds.

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On April 6, U.S. President Barack Obama gave an address to the Turkish parliament in Ankara, on the occasion of his first visit to a Middle Eastern country as president. (If you cannot see the embedded video above, click here. The text is here.) In his speech, the President touched on a range of issues related to U.S.-Turkish and U.S.-Muslim relations. The following MESH members responded to an invitation to comment on the speech: J. Scott Carpenter, Michele Dunne, Hillel Fradkin, Adam Garfinkle, Bruce Jentleson, Josef Joffe, Mark N. Katz, Michael Reynolds, Michael Rubin, Philip Carl Salzman, Harvey Sicherman, Raymond Tanter, and Michael Young. Soner Cagaptay’s assessment is added in the comments.

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J. Scott Carpenter :: There were many, including me, who were worried that President Obama’s speech before the Turkish parliament would send the wrong signal to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development (AKP) government, by embracing Erdoğan’s conceit that Turkey is somehow a leader of the “Muslim World” and a major player in the Middle East. Our worry, it turns out, was unjustified—for the most part.

In the speech, the President struck mostly high notes. Symbolically he linked Turkey strongly to Europe by traveling there as part of his European trip. He spoke of Turkey as the secular, democratic nation-state that it is, even as he challenged it to move forward on religious freedom and minority rights. His formulation that Turkey is a country where the Muslim faith is practiced was merely… accurate. When the President mentioned Turkey’s desire to play a role in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, he did so only after referencing the more proximate conflicts of Nagorno-Karabakh and still-divided Cyprus. Importantly, in a thinly-veiled reference to Hamas, the President called on the Turkish government to “reject the use of terror, and recognize that Israel’s security concerns are legitimate.”

There were a couple sour notes, however. When the President delivered the requisite reminder that the United States is not, I repeat, not at war with Islam, he once again invoked the tired bromide of the so-called “Muslim World.” When will senior U.S. policy makers stop reinforcing Al Qaeda’s narrative about a mythical Muslim world? The President also continued to avoid the “D” word (democracy). Prosperity, instead, is the word of the day. Finding ways to improve education expand healthcare, boost trade and investment without improved transparency and accountability will be a neat trick which I look forward to hearing more about. The President promised more detail in “coming months.”

Whatever the Turkish people might have thought about the speech, Erdoğan’s body language suggested he did not like it. At all. The fact that Obama tracked substantively with President Bush on Iran and the Palestinian issue was clearly painful for him to hear. More painful still probably was the President’s wise decision to skip the Khatami-inspired Alliance of Civilizations meeting in Istanbul. The AKP were desperately hoping to rope the President into this muddleheaded effort to divide “civilizations” into religious camps. Actions always speak louder than words.

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Michele Dunne :: In President Obama’s address to the Turkish parliament, he made a few basic statements—inter alia, “The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam,” “The United States strongly supports the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security,” and “The United States strongly supports Turkey’s bid to become a member of the European union”—that were, if not revolutionary, at least useful in their clarity. I will leave the evaluation of what Obama said on internal Turkish affairs to those who specialize in that, but what he said about specific reforms inside Turkey seemed to reach a satisfying level of detail, and he made several general statements—e.g., “freedom of religion and expression lead to a strong and vibrant civil society that only strengthens the state,” and “an enduring commitment to the rule of law is the only way to achieve the security that comes from justice for all people”—that encouraged further movement on these issues.

What was peculiar about Obama’s speech, however, was his strong emphasis on democracy (mentioned at least eight times) as the tie that binds the United States and Turkey in friendship, and yet his unwillingness to apply the same principle in the latter part of the speech to U.S. relations with the Muslim world. There, the “D” word was banned. Aside from the usual platitudes about “mutual interest and mutual respect,” Obama promised to promote the welfare of people in the Muslim world only in socioeconomic terms: education, health care, trade and investment. No objections to that, Mr. President, but what’s the plan for working with countries where the state stands squarely in the way of citizens getting those things? And that would apply to quite a few states in the Muslim world.

The President and Secretary Clinton can only go around the world apologizing for the Bush administration for so long. The Obama administration needs its own foreign policy—one that is neither Clinton-warmed-over nor anything-but-Bush—and one that takes account of current conditions. Those conditions include much more political ferment and stronger demands for civil and human rights than existed in the Middle East a decade ago. So promoting democracy and human rights will need to be part of that foreign policy, including in the Muslim world. It’s getting to be about time to face that, and Turkey would have been an excellent place to start.

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Hillel Fradkin :: Towards the close of his speech to the Turkish parliament, President Obama declared “as clearly as I can” that the “United States is not at war with Islam.” He sought to reinforce that message by implying that our military actions within the Muslim world, in past and future, have only the object of “rolling back a fringe ideology” and the terrorism represented most prominently by Al Qaeda—an effort he regards as shared by Muslims themselves.

Much attention has and will be paid to this declaration—it is already being referred to as an “olive branch”—even if it stated the obvious. The United States is not in fact at war with Islam and never has been, as President Bush made clear by declaring Islam to be a religion of peace but a few hours after the attacks of September 11, 2001. For after all, why would we Americans be at war with a peaceful religion? Moreover, although our soldiers are presently engaged in fighting some Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, we are fighting side by side with other Muslims. A statement of these facts would have enhanced Obama’s declaration.

But perhaps the obvious must sometimes be stated, and Obama is perhaps in a better position to make it clear by virtue of a fact he mentioned in his speech: he is among those Americans “who have Muslims in their family, or have lived in a Muslim-majority country.” Perhaps this will put this issue to rest so long as such misunderstanding as exists is not willful. At all events, and as Obama implied, the future of peaceful and fruitful relations between the United States and the Muslim world may depend less on the United States than on the approach that the Muslim world takes to terrorism of all varieties—including anti-Israeli terrorism—and the ideologies which inform them.

But Obama’s speech was not primarily addressed to the Muslim world, but to the Turkish people and its government. In the long run, it is the substance of his remarks to them which is likely to be more important than his declaration—and not only for U.S.-Turkish relations but for the wider Muslim world. Here he placed less stress on Turkey’s Muslim heritage than its republican heritage as the first and so far the most successful Muslim-majority republic.

As Obama almost indicated directly, this emphasis comes against the background of recent concerns that Turkey under the present leadership of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) might be weakening in its fidelity to that heritage, turning away from its long-standing alliances with Western countries—including the United States—and even moving closer to radical Islamic actors such as Sudan and Hamas. Obama’s remarks, although gently stated, essentially urged Turkey to renew its historic commitment to republican democracy and reaffirm its role as the place where East and West “come together.”

Obama referred explicitly to the heroic statesmanship of Atatürk, George Washington and perhaps above all of Abraham Lincoln. In light of his appeal to Lincoln, one might say that Obama invited Americans, Turks and Europeans to listen to the “better angels of our nature,” and urged Turks in particular to rededicate themselves to the propositions upon which modern Turkish history and success have been built. This was an important message to deliver, and it can only be hoped that it will be well received. That hope may however embrace not only Turkey but the wider Muslim world, which might profit from the example of Turkish republican success both now and hopefully in the future. In the long run, the reception of that message will be more important to American-Muslim relations than the declaration that the United States is not at war with Islam.

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Adam Garfinkle :: President Obama’s speech to the Turkish parliament yesterday was, to my way of thinking, an anti-climactic event. For months now we have been tantalized by the promise that Obama would go to a majority-Muslim country and tell it like it is. And this is what we get? This was a box-checking speech, full of duck-billed platitudes and not a single deliverable. The only things noteworthy about it were that: a) it happened; b) there was no quid pro quo protocol equilibration to Greece; and c) the speech abjured the old language that Turkey is a “moderate Muslim nation.” Turkey, we learn, is a secular democracy, just as Atatürk and his secular fundamentalist followers have insisted ever since 1924. This comes at a time when Turkey has a government, and a fairly popular one, that makes that description less resonant politically than ever. Why go talk to a Muslim-majority society only to pretend, sort of, that you’re not?

As for the “key” line—that we are not at war with Islam—well, Obama buried his lead four-fifths the way down the text, and of course that statement is nothing Bush administration principals, including the President, did not say dozens of times. If it suits your interests not to believe that statement, it’s not going to matter much which U.S. president says it. If it suits your interests now to stop saying you don’t believe it, then any president who is not George W. will do. If some Muslims now have heard this statement for the first time, just because it was delivered in Turkey by Barack Obama, fine: better eventually than not at all. But no, that statement in and of itself is not a game-changer, not with more U.S. soldiers headed to Afghanistan, more missiles fired into Pakistan’s border areas, more violence inevitable in Iraq over the next two years. Those of the conspiratorial persuasion seeking evidence that Obama is a liar will be able to find it just as easily as those who were sure George W. was a liar.

As for the speech itself as a form of the “black arts” (as Peggy Noonan once put it about speechwriting), it’s the worst major presentation the President has given (or delivered) so far. Judging from the official transcript pulled off the White House website, I counted at least two dozen mild infelicities, bona fide clunkers and grammatical errors that never should have made it past a second draft. One of these days people will stop comparing Obama to the hopeless George W. Marblemouth and recognize how mediocre this stuff really is.

Am I saying I could have written a better speech for this occasion? Yes, I actually believe that. There were oh-so-many missed opportunities in that speech—so many ways to have better concretized U.S.-Turkish friendship, and so many ways to have recognized that tolerance, hospitality, rule of law and other virtues (not to exclude democracy) which apply to Turkey, historically and at present, do not have to be expressed in an American idiom to be real and worthy of sincere admiration.

Maybe the lack of a unifying theme and anything remotely resembling a deliverable is the good news here. Some people had been hoping that Obama would use this occasion to launch a Presidential initiative on Israel/Palestine, stating U.S. parameters for a settlement, inviting the world to sign up to them, and implying muscular suasion on all engaged sides to make it happen. That we did not hear. Though I am skeptical that such a policy is wise, I’m almost sad it didn’t happen: that, at least, would have made the speech memorable.

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Bruce Jentleson :: Good speech. Got both the music and the words right. Doesn’t solve all problems in U.S.-Turkish relations, or all issues on the U.S. agenda of which Turkey is part, but does amount to a good start on both separating from the most counterproductive parts of the Bush policy and defining the key elements of an Obama policy.

Obama struck two key notes in getting the music right. One was his emphasis on mutual respect. This is the same phrasing he used in his inaugural address and in his video message to Iran. True, the respect mantra often gets invoked in the Muslim world as cover for less defensible positions. But its genuine resonance is even truer. Meeting people where they are, rather than where one may think they should be, is more likely to lead to being able “to build on our mutual interests, and rise above our differences,” as Obama put it, than lecturing and hectoring. Those self-styled hard-headed powerites who like to deride this sense of mutuality would do well to remember how the strength of anti-Bush sentiment in the Turkish parliament blocked Turkish military cooperation with the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The other was the line about not being at war with Islam. This needed to be said. Sure, Bush made any number of disclaimers of his own. But they didn’t stick. In saying that trust was strained “in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced,” Obama was recognizing reality. That’s strategic, not self-flagellatory as some neo-cons would have it.

On the substance he also got much right. He spoke to Turkey’s multi-faceted role as an ally, not just on terrorism or any one particular issue but more broadly on a range of global, regional and bilateral issues. He gave Turkey credit for its diplomacy in the Israel-Syria talks, while stressing active U.S. re-engagement in the Arab-Israeli peace process. He supported Turkey’s accession to the European Union. He also pushed a bit on internal democratic reform and rule of law. He approached the Armenia issue with more of an eye to what the two countries need to do together than what the lobby back home expects of him.

Much remains to be done. Music and words are fine, but action must follow. But not bad for a start.

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Josef Joffe :: “The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.” This is one of those sentences which are so right that nobody could disagree—like “I love jamocca ice cream” or “The sun sets in the west.” Of course the United States is not at war with Islam, and never will be. If you want to push it, you might say: a part of Islam is at war with America, and for that there is plenty of evidence—from 9/11 to an endless slew of statements made by Bin Laden or al-Zawahiri or a bunch of lesser imams and mullahs or by various leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas, not to speak of those representatives of the “Arab street” we get to see on Al-Jazeera.

Why would the president affirm what was undeniable in the first place? To make a gesture, of course. As he did with this sentence: “I also want to be clear that America’s relationship with the Muslim community, the Muslim world, cannot, and will not, just be based upon opposition to terrorism. We seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”

Again, this is as “surprising” (or if you want to be catty: vacuous) as the “we are not at war” sentence. Whoever based America’s relationship with the umma on “opposition to terrorism?” Not Bush ‘43—not, he, the coddler of Saudi Arabia, the financier of Egypt, the ally of Jordan’s Abdullah, the guarantor of the Gulfies. How patient, to the point of self-effacement, was W. with Turkey, after Ankara betrayed him in the run-up to the Iraq war? And who saved the Muslim Bosnians from the rage of the Serbs? The U.S. Air Force in the days of Clinton.

“We will listen carefully, we will bridge misunderstandings, and we will seek common ground.” Does this mean we did not listen carefully to our Arab allies, paying over-sensitive respect to their fence-sitting and their mumbly caveats? Here Obama resorts not to belaboring the obvious, but to the oldest (liberal) tradition of American foreign policy. There are no clashes, no interests, no conflicts—just “misunderstandings.” And if we listen hard and patiently enough, these “conflicts” will just go poof.

Of course, these are not the ways of international politics, where collisions and conflicts are real, where the measure is not goodness or careful listening, but the power and the will that—sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly—backs up diplomacy.

Especially in the Hobbesian universe that is the Islamic Middle East—say, from the Levant to the Hindu Kush—homily will get you nowhere. Let’s hope the 44th president of the United States is not like Jimmy Carter who took four years to learn about the nasty ways of the world—who preached in the beginning that we should lose our “inordinate fear of communism” only to be rewarded by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and who let Khomeini come to power only to be repaid with the 444-day humiliation of the embassy hostage crisis.

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Mark N. Katz :: President Obama’s speech to the Turkish parliament was designed to appeal not just to the Turkish public, but also to the broader Muslim world. In it, Obama certainly struck many positive notes. His administration is for improved Turkish-American and Muslim-American relations. His administration also seeks peace or improved relations between Turkey and Armenia, Greek and Turkish Cypriots, Israel and the Palestinians, and Israel and Syria, among others. His administration supports Turkey’s admission to the European Union.

Indeed, Obama signaled that America is willing to work with all parties in the Muslim world except the terrorists. He called for the United States to work with Muslims and non-Muslims alike against them. The only two terrorist movements that he mentioned by name, though, were the PKK and Al Qaeda. He made no mention of the Taliban, Hamas, and Hezbollah, among others. By not describing them as terrorist, Obama has certainly opened the door—and perhaps even raised the expectation—that he is willing to work with them.

The audience applauded when Obama said, “The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.” His next sentence—”In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical not just in rolling back the violent ideologies that people of all faiths reject, but also to strengthen opportunity for all its people”—appears to be more an expression of hope than a statement of fact. For unfortunately, there is widespread support in the Muslim world for non-democratic movements that engage in terrorism. Many Muslims instead see groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and even the Taliban as legitimate “national liberation” movements.

What Obama may soon find is that it is going to be extremely difficult for the United States to appeal to the broader Muslim world and to fight terrorist groups within it simultaneously. The Bush administration at least recognized that this was a dilemma and attempted to resolve it by recognizing the need for democratization (even if it did not push very hard for this in many Muslim countries). But Obama’s statement that “Turkey’s democracy is your own achievement. It was not forced upon you by any outside power,” appears to be a strong signal that his administration does not share even the Bush administration’s recognition that the United States can and should do something to promote democratization in the Middle East.

Obama’s hopes for improved relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world are laudable. But unless public opinion in the Muslim world stops supporting non-democratic political movements, or these movements undergo a democratic transformation, it is doubtful that the improved relations he hopes for can be achieved.

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Michael Reynolds :: President Obama demonstrated in Turkey the talent that has distinguished him at least since his tenure as head of Harvard’s Law Review: namely, the ability to play the role of reconciler between otherwise seemingly irreconcilable sides. The best example of this was his ability to touch on the question of the Armenian genocide in his speech to the Turkish parliament in such a way as to win applause from the parliamentarians as well as praise from one of the leading advocates of Turkish recognition of genocide.

Obama’s charisma extended beyond the parliament. Even the thousands of leftist protesters who declared Obama to be merely a new face for an old American imperialism felt compelled in interviews to concede that, yes, Obama himself comes across as intelligent, affable, and appealing. Posters showing a cartoon Uncle Sam with Obama’s face superimposed recalled the famous New Yorker magazine’s spoof of Obama dressed in a turban, albeit with precisely the opposite point: far from being a secret Al Qaeda sympathizer, Obama represents merely a new face for an old American imperialism.

Obama’s message of humility, patience, and charity thus left a generally positive impression in Turkey. Needless to say, however, articulating a vision wherein conflicts are resolved through mutual and sincere compromise is easier said than achieving that vision. Obama has not yet indicated publicly to what extent he is willing to use American power, positive as well as negative, to push the resolution of the Middle East’s multiple conflicts.

Another thing that that struck me was this statement made by Obama in support of Turkey’s EU candidacy: “Europe gains by diversity of ethnicity, tradition and faith—it is not diminished by it.” It is a quintessentially American assertion. The sentiment behind it is, indisputably, appealing on the most obvious level. But one has to wonder what citizens of the European Union, regardless of their stance on Turkey’s EU candidacy, think when the President of the United States of America makes declarations about what constitutes Europe’s fundamental interests.

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Michael Rubin :: There are certain points every U.S. official should make upon visiting Turkey. President Obama did his homework and delivered them. He is correct when he declares, “Turkey is a critical ally. Turkey is an important part of Europe. And Turkey and the United States must stand together—and work together.” Obama is right to highlight Turkey’s EU accession ambitions as well as the reforms accomplished over the past several years. And he successfully tiptoed through the political minefield of the Armenian genocide debate.

However, Obama also broke new ground, not all of it positive. For example, Obama stated, “The United States will continue to support your central role as an East-West corridor for oil and natural gas.” But how can Obama expect to pressure Iran to accede to its international obligations when Turkey’s State Minister Kürşad Tüzman seeks to raise bilateral trade with the Islamic Republic to $20 billion? (It was just $1.3 billion when the AKP took power.)

And while diplomatic nicety is the bread-and-butter of speechwriters, in the case of Obama’s reference to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, it can have cost. Here his comments were infused with moral equivalency which is especially dangerous given Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s embrace and, indeed, endorsement of Hamas. Obama could have sent a positive message, especially in a country like Turkey which has suffered so much terrorism, had he reinforced that idea explicitly that democracies must stand against terrorism and that no political agendas can legitimize terrorism. Obama drew equivalence between Al Qaeda and the PKK; he should have added Hamas to the mix. Let us hope that, before Obama embraces Erdoğan as a true partner, he becomes aware of the Turkish Prime Minister’s endorsement of Al Qaeda financier Yasin al-Qadi.

Rhetoric is easy, but can be ephemeral. It is easy to say “We will be respectful, even when we do not agree,” but the President of the United States should never sacrifice the values of free speech or expression in order to protect the sensitivity of anyone who might take insult. To compromise fundamental values is a slippery slope; we should not go down the path of Europe. Nor should Obama speak of the Islamic world. He should recognize the true diversity of Muslim peoples, and not seek to impose a unitary identity upon them.

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Philip Carl Salzman :: Will President Obama, even with his Muslim middle name, have any greater luck than President George W. Bush reassuring the Muslim world of the good will and good intentions of the United States? He goes farther, saying that “we will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better.” Along the same line, addressing Turkey’s application to the EU, he argues that “Europe gains by diversity of ethnicity, tradition and faith.” In fact, the benefits of Islam, both in history and prospectively in the EU, are highly contested, but the Turks and Muslims more broadly probably welcomed these sentiments.

The President says that the United States is not and can never be at war against Islam, that “our partnership with the Muslim world is critical in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject.” Here the President asserts a division between the moderate majority of Muslims and the minority “fringe” of jihadis—oops, I mean “terrorists”—not to be specified further. This may be a distinction without as much of a difference as we, and the President, might hope. If the President says it enough, maybe his Muslim audience will come to believe it.

The President’s approbation of Turkey and its recent legal measures was clear, while he urged its leaders to continue along the line of diversity and pluralism, particularly in regard to the Kurds (but not the PKK), and the Orthodox Christians, as well as to resolve differences and improve relations with Armenians. At the same time, he stressed the secular nature of the Turkish constitution, and made no mention of the Islamist—I mean Islamic—party in government.

President Obama took a hard line on Iran, focusing not on cooperation in regard to Iraq and Af/Pak, but on Iran’s movement toward nuclear weapons. He offers a stark choice to Islamic Republic: “Iran’s leaders must choose whether they will try to build a weapon or build a better future for their people.” No hints about what may follow the manufacture of an Iranian nuclear bomb.

They say that those who ignore history are destined to repeat it, first as campaign promises, then as foreign policy. So it is with Palestine. In spite of much good advice from MESH prior to the President’s ascension, he is determined to achieve what so many, with so much effort, have failed to achieve: “In the Middle East, we share the goal of a lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors. Let me be clear: the United States strongly supports the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security. That is a goal shared by Palestinians, Israelis, and people of good will around the world.” (Emphasis added.) I do not know which Palestinians the President has been speaking to, but neither Hamas nor Fatah will recognize Israel, and the preferred goal of most Palestinians appears to be a different two-state solution: Palestine and Jordan.

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Harvey Sicherman :: President Obama’s speech at the Turkish parliament gave ample evidence of his gift for allowing his audience to see themselves in him. Thus, he spoke winning words to those advocating the democratic Kemalist Turkey of the West. But those who wanted to “reorient” (literally) Turkey toward the East could also find comfort in references to Ankara’s mediation of regional conflicts and imperial Muslim past. Kemalism, of course, burns the bridge to the East. And the current Turkish government is suspected by its opponents of seeking to burn the bridge to the West. Nevermind; Obama levitated above this contradiction with the crowd-pleasing conclusion that “Turkey’s greatness lies in your ability to be at the center of things.” Gifted rhetoric to be sure.

In the wake of Presidential parades, a clean-up crew (usually the unfortunate Secretary of State) must collect the policy. Three specifics:

1. RESET: To use the blackberry-proficient President’s favorite phrase, he wants a renewal of U.S.-Turkish cooperation. On the most neuralgic item—the Kurds—Obama pledged “our support” against the PKK while restating that the new Iraq should not be a danger to its neighbors (i.e. no independent Kurdistan). He advocated Turkish entry to Europe (a poke at France and Germany) and swallowed whole in public his previous view of the Armenian genocide, which he consigned to the historians.
2. I’m coming your way: Obama notified Israel’s new government not to quarrel over the two-state solution, “the road map and Annapolis… a goal that I will actively pursue as President of the United States.”
3. I feel your pain: Ankara was another installment in a campaign to change the American image, this time for Muslims. Obama declared (as had Mr. Bush) that the United States was not “at war with Islam.” He tried manfully to lift the American-”Muslim World” relationship out of the terrorist focus through two devices: a respectful search for common ground and his personal experience of Muslims in the family. This, too, was cunningly designed to sway his audience: I am not one of you but I am close enough to know you, a near relative as it were. And, of course, “we will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith…” Although variations on the theme were also uttered by his predecessor, the President can count on amnesia, and his own striking example, to change the image. But does this really matter? And is Obama not raising expectations of impossible comity with a “Muslim World” at war with itself and gripped by the grievance culture besides?

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Raymond Tanter :: In tennis, when confronting a choice between hitting the ball cross-court or down the line, “Solve the riddle by going up the middle!” Like the tennis analogy, the visit of President Obama to Turkey is a search for a middle ground between opposing points of view.

One school of thought: Turkey’s harsh response to Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad should prompt the NATO alliance to reconsider Turkey’s commitment to the global struggle against radical Islam. Because such “Islamism” is priority number-one for NATO, and because Ankara holds an incompatible view of the threat, consider removing Turkey from the alliance.

When Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen rose as consensus candidate for NATO Secretary General, Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan raised objections. Rasmussen had been prime minister when the cartoons were published and refused to censor the newspapers in which they ran. Rasmussen was cleared for the NATO post after negotiating with Turkish President Abdullah Gül and stating: “I consider Turkey a very important ally and strategic partner, and I will cooperate with them in our endeavors to ensure the best cooperation with Muslim world.” Obama’s apt intervention to help devise language acceptable to the parties allowed for the appointment of Rasmussen and typifies the President’s approach of searching for a middle ground between opposing points of view.

A second school: Turkey’s strategic position—the second-largest NATO-member army; borders with Syria, Iraq, and Iran; a base for U.S. operations in Afghanistan; and Europe’s sixth-largest economy—requires greater outreach and integration of Turkey into Europe.

Accordingly, Washington should take a lead role in promoting Turkish accession to the European Union to overcome French objections. Enhanced bilateral relations would include expanding the economic component of U.S.-Turkey relations and promoting more collaboration between mid-level military officers. To overcome religious tension, the United States would no longer treat Turkey as a “Muslim country” and more as a European country.

The most prudent course for the Obama administration is the middle path between these two extremes, a road the President is beginning to take. Indeed, Turkey is too important an ally to alienate with even the suggestion that the country might be removed from NATO. But enthusiastic engagement should depend on the degree to which Turkey is on the same page as the rest of NATO regarding the threat of radical Islam.

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Michael Young :: As I read President Obama’s comments to the Turkish parliament on Monday, I couldn’t help but think of Egypt.

Under the conditions prevailing during much of the past 25 to 30 years, his speech would have been one that, in its references to the Arab-Israeli conflict but also at the highly symbolic moment of Obama’s first contact with the Middle East, would have been made before the Egyptian parliament. Instead, the U.S. president chose a non-Arab state as the venue for his first major address to the region and the Islamic world.

One wonders how Egypt’s President Husni Mubarak reacted when he heard Obama say: “The United States and Turkey can help the Palestinians and Israelis make this journey. Like the United States, Turkey has been a friend and partner in Israel’s quest for security. And like the United States, you seek a future of opportunity and statehood for the Palestinians. So now, working together, we must not give into pessimism and mistrust.”

Surely, he felt that someone had gently bumped him back into the line. Wasn’t Egypt the traditional mediator between Israelis and Palestinians? If your hunch is that this gives us a sense of the thorough marginalization of the Arab countries compared to their non-Arab periphery, particularly states like Turkey and Iran, but also Israel, then your hunch comes very late. Whether it was in his passages on Iran, Iraq, or terrorism, and even in his appeal to the Muslim world, Obama not once mentioned Egypt or Saudi Arabia, though he did mention their rival, Syria, just once.

Remember, in 1990 it was Egypt and Saudi Arabia that were the cornerstones (if you could call them that) of the Arab mobilization against Iraq when Saddam Hussein ordered his soldiers into Kuwait. When the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was extended in 1995, it was Egypt that led the Arab effort to create a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East (and failed). Throughout the 1990s, Egypt was the go-to place to talk about Palestinian-Israeli issues, and when Egyptians were the victims of Islamist violence during the 1990s, it was the go-to place to hold anti-terrorism summits, for example the one at Sharm al-Sheikh in 1996.

That Obama mentioned these topics, and others, in Ankara did not mean that it is time to write Egypt’s obituary. But with Mubarak now an old man, still sitting atop a political system seemingly incapable of renewing itself in pluralistically invigorating ways, and with no end in sight to the Saudi gerontocracy, it is not surprising that Obama should have struck his highest notes in a country that is of the region but not quite in it—and therefore untainted by its irrepressible decline. The United States will continue to ally itself with Arab states to contain Iran, but as Obama made clear in his speech, and in his diplomatic initiatives in recent weeks, he relies much more on countries like Turkey and Russia to act as hooks on which to hang any international effort to deal with Iran’s nuclear program.

Obama sent a kind word to the world’s Muslims, and surely many in the Arab world applauded his lines. But what he was really telling them, intentionally or not, is that their region is changing, and it’s changing in ways that may soon turn the Arabs into secondary characters in their own narrative, because their regimes simply seem unable to change.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

Churchill once observed that “jaw-jaw” was better than “war-war.” This advice has not been taken very often in the Middle East. Indeed, so rare is it that the very act of “jaw-jaw” has been celebrated as a breakthrough even if not very much—except a process—results from it.

March 26, however, marks the 30th anniversary of both a very successful process and an enduring agreement. The Egyptian-Israeli Treaty has survived assassination, war, and recession. This history holds important lessons as yet another American administration tries to reach for Arab-Israeli peace. The ingredients for success are easy to state: (1) two leaders who have convinced each other that they want an agreement and are capable of carrying one out; (2) an American president willing to reduce their risks in doing so and to mediate personally if necessary; and (3) reasonable expectations, rather than legal perfection, about the results.

No one would say that Egyptian-Israeli relations are the warmest. The cultural exchanges foreseen by the Treaty have never materialized. There is also plenty of diplomatic friction. But the essentials have held and, at its bare minimum, the Treaty still reflects a mutual determination to avoid war. It may sometimes look like a peace of the generals, but it is still peace.

Can this Treaty and its relative, the Israeli-Jordanian Peace (1994), be replicated with others? Israel and Syria would seem to be the best candidates if—always the “if”—the parties have really convinced each other they want a fair deal. On the Palestinian track, however, no one thinks that Abu Mazen can deliver his side of the bargain even if he wants one. And there are corrosive doubts that the risks from Iran and its surrogates can be reduced by the United States. That is where we will continue to be unless the new administration somehow curtails Tehran. And a failure on that score will have dangerous repercussions for the Egyptian-Israeli relationship as well.

I am one of more than 140 scholars and experts to sign a letter to President Obama, released today (March 10), asking him to take seriously his inaugural statement that leaders who “cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent” are “on the wrong side of history.” The question is, on which side of history will the Obama administration place itself in its policy toward the Middle East?

Early indications are for a return to traditional diplomacy and jettisoning of any serious efforts to promote democracy, freedom, and human rights. While the signatories of this letter might differ on some issues, we are joined by the belief that this early course by Obama and Secretary of State Clinton needs immediate correction. We understand that promoting Middle East peace enjoys a high priority in this administration, and we believe that it is entirely possible to cooperate with Arab governments in that endeavor while also pursuing improved human, civil, and political rights for Arab citizens. In fact, not to do so would be shortsighted and ultimately counter productive.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

The American era in the Middle East… has ended…. It is one of history’s ironies that the first war in Iraq, a war of necessity, marked the beginning of the American era in the Middle East and the second Iraq war, a war of choice, has precipitated its end…. The United States will continue to enjoy more influence in the region than any other outside power, but its influence will be reduced from what it once was.

The theme continues to reverberate in a new article by Haass on “nonpolarity,” and in Fareed Zakaria’s book The Post-American World, which announces “the end of the Pax Americana.” (”On every dimension other than military power—industrial, financial, social, cultural—the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from U.S. dominance.”)

Has the American era ended in the Middle East? Is the obituary premature? Is it all hyperbole? Or maybe there never was an American era to begin with? MESH has asked a number of distinguished authorities for their views.

Update, July 17: At the invitation of MESH, Richard Haass replies here.

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J. Scott Carpenter :: “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” So telegrammed Mark Twain in response to “news” of his passing. America could respond similarly to Fareed Zakaria and Richard Haass, the latest in an inglorious parade of hand-wringers who see the waning of American influence in the Middle East and the world.

Contrary to Fareed’s assertions, there is no sphere in which the United States is not now dominant in the region and there’s no reason to believe its influence will be eclipsed by any other power or concert of powers. In a distinction without a difference, Richard asserts the end of the American moment and the beginning of a non-polar world—in which the United States has the predominant capacity to lead. In fact, there is no substitute for American leadership in the Middle East. Does anyone really believe China or Russia or Iran present serious long-term challenges to the United States? Or worthy models of emulation? Or solutions?

Iran? Sure, a dangerous nut case with nuclear dreams threatens the region, but America is leading the coalition to contain or confront it. Not even China or Russia seriously questions its leadership or the need for it. Politically, Iran is a model for no one. Its economy deteriorates by the day as its peoples’ restiveness grows. Fed up with revolution, they would happily embrace real democracy (and the United States) if permitted. At the same time, Sunni chauvinism in the rest of the region limits Shiite influence.

Russia? Its dual Czars, Medvedev and Putin, have restored Russians’ pride in their state, but the Kremlin’s pretensions of expanding its influence in the Middle East remain anemic at best. Just look at the weakness of Russia’s earnest but ineffective participation in the Quartet.

China? China has a thirst for energy that makes it a demandeur having little interest in actively shaping events in the region. Plus, China’s vastly undervalued currency and overheating growth promise future challenges that will keep its government focused internally. Earthquakes and floods are portents in Chinese political culture that its leaders are well aware of.

Europe? Europe craves American leadership and increasingly works in cooperation if not outright collaboration on key policies. It is true the EU has influence in the Maghreb thanks to its large economic transfers. but it has little weight in the Gulf and no ability to project power. With France under Elvis-loving Sarkozy, transatlantic cooperation under U.S. leadership is poised to take off. A U.S. diplomat in Paris recently told me the relationship has never been better or the areas of cooperation more diverse.

So why the angst? The United States faces real challenges but they are hardly the heralds of the end of U.S. influence in the Middle East—or the world. We have overcome worse and will do so again. As a leading media figure in Dubai told me two weeks ago, “Many people would like to believe America is down but it’s always a mistake to underestimate its resilience and power. And dangerous.” I, for one, agree.

J. Scott Carpenter is Keston Family Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a member of MESH.

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Lawrence Freedman :: Few attempts to predict the future of U.S. power and influence in terms of the most recent trends, or as a transformational moment, have survived the events they have sought to anticipate.

Looking back, the U.S. position in the Middle East was, at different times, due to be eclipsed by the rise of a pro-Soviet pan-Arabism and then OPEC. Now it is the turn of Islamism and Iran. At the start of the 1980s the U.S. position looked poor as a result of the loss of the Shah and the debacle over Beirut. A decade later it looked good because of the successful management of the 1991 Gulf War and the effort which led to the Madrid Conference. As Saddam’s regime was toppled in 2003 for a moment U.S. power was presented as almost irresistible. As the rationale for the war was undermined by the failure to find WMD and the mismanagement of the occupation America’s reputation began to plummet. The Bush Administration appeared to have lost the plot in the war on terror, found little useful to do on the Israel-Palestine issue and kept on being wrong-footed by Iran.

For the moment the United States barely has a functioning government. Even Israel is currently conducting its regional diplomacy with barely a nod in Washington’s direction.

Does this all represent a trend or a blip? Early next year a new administration will be in place. Simply by being different to Bush, it will enjoy something of a honeymoon, though historically the first months of new administrations have been times of maximum error, so a lot will depend on how the new president responds to the first major crisis that comes his way.

Furthermore, as one of the big questions about the United States is always sticking power, continuing with the broad thrust of the current Iraqi strategy will be important, even while looking for a way to see the progressive reduction in the American role. Apart from the currently unanticipated events (Egypt? Yemen? Algeria?) that might change the political agenda dramatically, the most important known test will be Iran, as 2009 will be a critical year.

Obviously the context in which U.S. foreign policy operates changes all the time. There may be no other power in a position to displace America, but a lot will depend on the policy choices being made elsewhere in the region, including in countries with which current relations are poor. The safest bet for a historian is to observe that the future is likely to be as complex as the past.

Lawrence Freedman is Professor of War Studies, King’s College London.

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Josef Joffe :: The United States is finished, its president, a pious idealist, the laughing stock of the world. This was the take on Jimmy Carter’s America after that Keystone Kops attempt (”Desert One”) in 1980 to free the U.S. hostages in Tehran. A few months into Reagan, who had quietly threatened obliteration of Tehran, the laughter had died.

Now it’s decline time again (it tends to come in twenty-year cycles). But you wonder what the “end of the American era in the Middle East” means? Is it like the end of the French and British era when they were forced out for good by the United States, in the wake of the Suez War of 1956? Hmm, let’s see.

Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the lesser Gulf states are all security clients of the United States. Israel, the regional superpower, is America’s “continental sword.” Turkey is an American ally, and Iraq an American possession, with 130,000 U.S. troops, where the war has turned in favour of the United States since last summer. Which leaves Syria, isolated, impoverished, and mulling a return into the Western fold. And Iran, the current would-be hegemon of the region.

Influence-wise, this is not a bad line-up, especially when considering that in the 1960s and 1970s, three key Arab players, Syria, Iraq and Egypt, were firmly ensconced in the Soviet camp.

Now let’s look at more tangible sources of influence: bases. Haifa is practically homeport of the Sixth Fleet, Bahrain is where the Fifth Fleet’s forward HQ is located. Qatar hosts an American air base that is said to be the largest outside the country, supporting up to 10,000 U.S. personnel. The UAE (Dubai and Abu Dhabi plus some smaller sheikdoms) also hosts a significant U.S. presence. The ports of Jebel Ali and Fujaira supply the U.S. Navy and Air Force. Al Dhafra Airbase serves as a major intelligence hub and as a staging grounds for tankers and UAVs. Oman has been an American base since 1979.

For a has-been power, the United States simply must have forgotten all those accoutrements of American influence strewn across the region. But this is no accident, comrades, as the Soviets used to say. The Middle East is to the 21st century what Europe was in the 20th: a key strategic stake and a main battle ground for hegemonial conflict. As a result, America’s shadow there will lengthen, Obama or McCain.

Another way to approach the issue of influence is to ask: Who else? The end of Britain and France in the region was marked by the permanent intrusion of the Unites States. Who would push out the United States? Or make it more practical: Who is going to assure regime survival in Egypt, Jordan et al? Not France, Britain or Germany. Who has the convening power to bring Israel and Palestinians to the bargaining table? Not China. Who can organize sanctions against Iran? Not Russia. Come to think of it: Who disposes of the world’s largest economy, the world’s largest military spending? None of the above.

The point is this: Under Bush, the United States has suffered a vast loss in legitimacy and reputation. But it has not lost its vast physical power, nor the sources of its global influence. The United States remains the default power—the power to which everybody will turn once the United States returns to the golden rule of all leadership: pursue your own interests by taking care of those of others.

Josef Joffe is the Marc and Anita Abramowitz Fellow in International Relations at the Hoover Institution, and a member of MESH.

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Mark T. Kimmitt :: The era of Pax Americana in the Middle East is over? One has a hard time suggesting that such an era ever existed.

The post-World War Two era in Europe was, truly, Pax Americana: 60-plus years in West Germany, with over 500,000 American troops (and their families). Our security guarantees ensured that the Soviet Union was held in check, our presence ensured that American culture was predominant throughout the continent, our cross-Atlantic trade and social exchanges resulted in a continent that assimilated the American experience wholesale.

Our presence in the Middle East during this same period was a fraction of our presence in Europe. Our troop numbers never exceeded the low thousands, except for the wars of 1990-91 and 2003 to today. Our security presence was mostly “over the horizon” and provided by maritime troops and aircraft afloat. A security shield to be sure, but nothing close to Pax Americana.

Today, the globalization of commerce and the insatiable worldwide demand for hydrocarbons will ensure that the Middle East remains an open playing field for commerce and industry, and no particular actor will have a hegemonic advantage in finance, culture or diplomacy. The only area in which the United States will enjoy a competitive advantage remains in security. The regional presence of U.S. forces, even in a post-Iraq environment, will sustain regional stability. However, the model envisioned remains a rotational model. Forces will rotate in and out on a scheduled basis, their families will remain in the United States, and exercises will be held in remote areas far from population centers.

That is hardly comparable to the Pax Americana of postwar Europe, but it is a model that has worked for decades in the past, and can work for decades to come. Less an end of an era, and more a continuation of the past.

Mark T. Kimmitt is Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, and has just been confirmed as Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs.

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Martin Kramer :: America’s era in the Middle East has only just begun. Until 2003, the United States was positioned off-shore, attempting to manage the region through diplomacy, aid, arms sales, and the occasional cruise missile. Since the Iraq invasion, the United States has immersed itself in the nitty-gritty of engineering the reconstruction of a major Arab state. In the process, it has made just about every possible mistake, but it has also learned almost every possible lesson, and we see the results in gains made in Iraq. The knowledge acquired in Iraq, by trial and error, has put the United States on par with Britain and France at the height of their sway over the Middle East.

The Middle East is full of what America wants and needs: dictatorships to be broken, oil to be explored and exported, a religion in need of reformation. For Americans, the Middle East will never be analogous to southeast Asia, no matter how sticky it gets. But it probably won’t ever get that sticky: the region is sufficiently fragmented that the United States will never manage to enrage everyone at once. The United States is likely to remain on-shore in the Middle East, overtly or behind a veil, for a long time to come.

Only Americans can put an end to the American era, by talking themselves out of it. Elie Kedourie, in his famous essay “The Chatham House Version,” showed how the spread of declinism in Britain’s political elite forced the country’s total and abject abandonment of every British position in the Middle East. The drums of retreat are now being pounded by the American equivalents of Arnold Toynbee. But when Britain pulled up stakes, it knew the vacuum would be filled by America. If we leave, it will be Iran. (Haass has called Iran “a classic imperial power.”) Here is my prediction: America won’t let it happen.

Martin Kramer is Olin Institute Senior Fellow at Harvard University and a member of MESH.

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Walter Laqueur :: End of an era? This is not entirely wrong but a typical journalistic exaggeration (small earthquakes do not sell copies). Facing major economic problems and various setbacks in the foreign policy field, many Americans, including many belonging to the political class, favor retrenchment. “Measured disinvolvement” and “partial disengagement” were the terms used by the neo-isolationists in the 1970s.

But in truth there never was an “American era” and it is not over yet. (There certainly was no Pax Americana.) Had there been one, things would have happened—in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine—which did not take place. On the other hand, a certain weakening of the American position could lead to opportunities that did not exist before. Everyone is ganging up against a single superpower, whereas in future, with the appearance of new threats and the coming internal conflicts in the Middle East, America will be more needed and more in demand than before—unless it opts for isolationism and total withdrawal, which seems unlikely.

Whether these opportunities will be used depends partly on the balance of power (or its absence) in the Middle East in the years to come, on which one can only speculate. It depends above all on the political intelligence and farsightedness, will and steadfastness of the next president and his advisers and the support they will have. Sapienti sat, as the medieval monks used to conclude.

Walter Laqueur is Distinguished Scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and a member of MESH.

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Robert J. Lieber :: The proposition that “The American era in the Middle East has ended” is part of a larger declinist argument. The United States does face serious problems at home and abroad, but there is an unmistakable echo of the past in current arguments.

While there are challenges to the U.S. Middle East role, no other country has anything like its influence and impact there. As an unmistakable symbol, no other country could have convened the Annapolis Conference last November and on short notice attracted leaders from some 60 countries including China, Russia, the EU and virtually the entire Arab League. Iran does pose a severe regional danger, but Richard Haass’ claim that its “effort to become a nuclear power is a result of nonpolarity” fails to take into account that Tehran’s covert program began more than two decades ago when there was plenty of polarity. Indeed, Haass himself concedes that the U.S. “will continue to enjoy more influence in the region than any other outside power.”

Previous crises have involved challenges more daunting than those of today. For example, the 1973-80 period included the Yom Kippur War and Arab oil embargo, two oil shocks, Watergate and the Nixon resignation, a humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam, the Iranian revolution, the seizure of the U.S. embassy hostages in Tehran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a severe economic downturn at home (with figures for recession, unemployment and inflation far beyond anything likely to occur in the current period), and Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech.

Fareed Zakaria refers to the U.S. as an “enfeebled superpower.” But the idea that shifts in the distribution of power would deprive America of its world role isn’t novel, and was common in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1972 President Nixon depicted an emerging balance among five major powers: the U.S., Russia, China, Europe and Japan. But despite the rise of the “BRICs” (Brazil, Russia, India, China), the growing importance of an expanded EU and a flourishing East Asia, other powers are not balancing against the United States. No other country comes close to combining all the power attributes of the United States and none has emerged as a true peer competitor. And important regional powers (Japan, India, Indonesia, Germany, France) have even improved their relations with Washington.

In an article in the summer issue of World Affairs, I make the case that declinist arguments exhibit a-historicism, over-reaction to singular events, and a lack of appreciation for the adaptability, robustness and staying power of the United States. Declinist forecasts in previous eras have been wrong, and it is a good bet that the current crop will prove to be similarly mistaken.

Robert J. Lieber is Professor of Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University.

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Michael Mandelbaum :: The American role in the Middle East has been the product, since the 1950s, of three conditions. The first has been political instability there with the associated threat of regional domination by a power hostile to Western interests—variously the Soviet Union, Nasser’s Egypt, Saddam’s Iraq, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Such a threat would have been of strictly local concern but for the second condition: the location, in the Middle East, of the largest readily accessible supplies of the world’s most valuable mineral. A hostile power dominating the region would be in a position to deny oil to, and thus gravely damage, the rest of the world. It was, therefore, necessary to prevent such a circumstance, and in the absence of any other force able to perform this task, it fell to the United States—the third defining condition.

Through deterrence, proxy wars, and direct military intervention, American power has preserved a certain order in the Middle East and assured the global economy reliable access to petroleum. In this way the United States has supplied one of the several governmental services it provides to the rest of the world, which for the most part neither acknowledges nor appreciates them and contributes almost nothing to paying for them. (The full version of this argument is set out in my 2006 book The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government in the Twenty-first Century.)

The two most consequential events of recent years—the American struggles in Iraq and the skyrocketing price of oil—have not abolished the three conditions. If anything, they have aggravated the first two: Iran looms as a larger threat to the region, and the global supply of oil is more precarious because there is so little spare capacity. As for the third condition, the “realist” approach to the understanding of international relations would predict that, in the face of the Iranian threat, the Arab oil producers would band together to form an effective military bloc and make common cause with the two regional powers that are also wary of the Islamic Republic, Turkey and Israel. Readers of this blog will not need to be persuaded of the implausibility of such a scenario.

To be sure, the United States is not certain to continue as the regional gendarme, but if it fails to do so this will not be because conditions in the Middle East and the global economy no longer require one, or because some other country or group of countries has assumed the role. Rather, it will be because, frustrated by Iraq, angry at the hemorrhaging of wealth to the oil producers, and preoccupied with domestic concerns, the American public declines to continue its fifty-year pattern of engagement in the Middle East. In that case, a new era will indeed have dawned, an era all too likely to make Americans, Middle Easterners, and others nostalgic for the old one.

Michael Mandelbaum is Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and a member of MESH.

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Aaron David Miller :: The notion of an American era in the Middle East has always been an illusion, certainly if that implies American dominance over a region that, since the end of World War Two, has become too complex, too dysfunctional and too ornery ever to be controlled or shaped by a single outside power. A better way to describe American influence would be a series of “American moments” when the United States succeeded in Arab-Israeli peacemaking (1973, 1979, 1991) or war making (1991) which temporarily boosted American credibility and influence in discrete areas. Clearly since 1991, we’ve had very few of even those moments. For eight years under Bill Clinton we failed at Arab-Israeli peacemaking; and for eight years under George W. Bush we failed at making war in a region critical to our national security interests. As a result, we are neither feared nor respected to the extent we need to be.

At the same time, we need to understand that we are in an investment trap in this region; we can’t fix it and we can’t escape it. We must however do a better job of protecting our interests. If we presume to be a great power, we should start acting like one: defining policies driven by American interests, not Arab or Israeli interests; and not allowing our domestic politics or grandiose schemes of a new Middle East to substitute for smart and tough-minded policies. This region is not a land of wonderful diplomatic and foreign policy opportunities; it’s a trap, but one in which we have no choice but to compete and survive. My concluding advice: read history; see the world as it is not the way we want it to be; and above all avoid big ideas (this region hates them) and failure. In life, the world’s most compelling ideology isn’t nationalism, democracy or even capitalism. It’s success, because success generates power and constituents. Failure generates the opposite.

Aaron David Miller is a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

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Joshua Muravchik :: Seeing things that are not apparent on the surface is the essence of the analyst/pundit business. That’s why they pay us the small bucks.

It is, however, an inherently dicey business. The farther an observation is from the surface, the more impressive or exciting it is, but also often the more difficult to prove or disprove and often, also, to make any use of. Usually, the grander the generalization, the vaguer the terms.

The all-time master of this art was Karl Marx who discovered the laws of history, and although the terms were never defined clearly nor their relationship to each other, and although the specific embedded predictions have not come true, his immense influence endures even, dare I say, in the august center of learning that MESH calls home.

There is a huge audience eager to know the future which is why many times more people read the astrologers’ columns than ours.

America’s dominance of the world scene has been underway for 60-plus years, and this period has been punctuated by numerous sightings of the country’s decline. No doubt they will prove true, whether in a decade or a century or a millennium.

I didn’t know that the American era in the Middle East commenced in 1991. I ask myself what I would have done differently or advocated differently or written differently these last 17 years had I known it. I also wonder whether Saddam or Khamenei or Bashar or Nasrallah or Yassin or even Arafat, despite spending many nights at the White House, knew that that was the American era. If so, what would they have done differently had it not been? And if not, what difference does it make that it was?

As for the American era having just ended or being in the process of ending, what does that tell me? Does it mean that if we drop bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities, they will not explode? And if they do explode and we block Iran’s hopes for a bomb; and if, as now seems possible, we come away from Iraq with a win, will our era be over nonetheless? And if it is, despite our gaining our policy objectives, what difference would that make?

Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a member of MESH.

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Robert Satloff :: Cheer up, America, the doomsayers are wrong: America’s moment in the Middle East is not about to go the way of Britain’s, at least not anytime soon.

Despite all the hand-wringing of recent years, certain truths about Middle East politics and America’s role in it are enduring. These include the following:

• Militarily, from thousands of miles away, America remains the most potent force in the Middle East. While the sagacity of how it employs this force is at times open to question, the fact of America’s military superiority is beyond dispute.

• Diplomatically, America remains the party to whom both Arabs and Israelis turn as the indispensable actor in “the peace process,” the “honest broker” that can reduce risks, condition the environment, bridge gaps, subsidize agreements and oversee their implementation.

• Ideologically, America remains the lodestar for the region’s beleaguered democrats as well as the preeminent satanic foe of the region’s radical Islamists. Despite the misadventures of the “freedom agenda,” civil society groups across the Middle East continue to dismiss fashionable parlour-talk about Washington’s “kiss of death” and instead seek our support and blessing for their causes; despite our alleged weaknesses, our enemies still rank “Death to America”—and not “death to nonpolarity,” for example—as their most cherished motto.

• Culturally, America too remains the most admired, as well as the most feared, country in the Middle East. On the one hand, tens of thousands of Middle Easterners are shelling out billions of dollars for one of our principal exports—American-style education—which (depending on the actual quality) will ensure American cultural dominance for at least the next two generations. And, on the other hand, there is compelling evidence that it is Hollywood—and neither the Sixth Fleet, nor Israel’s F-15s nor the eventual fall of oil prices—that drives fear into the heart of Iran’s Supreme Leader.

Did America overreach in the Bush Administration? Well, we certainly made huge mistakes, from the execution of the post-war in Iraq to the topsy-turvy, elections-first effort on democracy promotion. But with a measure of wisdom, some of these errors are repairable while others can be overcome. In the larger sense, there is little reason to believe that they herald the impending demise of our unique role in both the minds and imaginations of Middle Easterners. On this Fourth of July, that’s something to celebrate.

Robert Satloff is executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a member of MESH.

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Harvey Sicherman :: By my count, the American era, a/k/a the American empire, has risen and fallen several times since the end of the Cold War. This is a nice little industry for some authors (similar to the “transatlantic crisis”) and, unlike other industries, it never knows a recession. So, a pox on the pax.

The real issue is whether the United States, alone or in combination, can secure its interests in the Middle East. Three have endured since the late 1940s: access to oil; security of Israel; and a region not dominated by hostile powers. Other interests have come and gone, including “modernization.” Democratic transformation, too, may soon join its predecessors on the heap of foreign-induced reform in the Middle East, always a chronicle of dashed hopes and unintended consequences. But these have not displaced the critical threesome.

Do we have access to oil? Yes. Is Israel secure? More or less. Does a hostile power dominate the region? Not now. The prolongation of this situation depends, however, on our capacity to secure Baghdad, find some solution to the Palestinian problem, and take the Iranians down a peg, possibly through (1) a reduction of their influence in Iraq, (2) financial penalties that accelerate Ahmadinejad’s wrecking of the economy, or (3) a bloody nose that brings home to them the danger of their nuclear and terrorism enterprises. Can enough of this be done to secure our interests? Of course. Will we do it? I surely hope so.

Harvey Sicherman is president and director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and a member of MESH.

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Richard N. Haass :: Is it over for America in the Middle East? Of course not. And no one to my knowledge is arguing that it is. I certainly am not; as I wrote in the November/December 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, “The United States will continue to exert more influence in the region than any other outside power….”

But this is not the end of the discussion. U.S. influence will decline from what it has been. We are at the end of one historical era (unipolarity) and the outset of another (nonpolarity). This is true generally and for the Middle East.

So what is the problem? Few of those commenting here seem to understand the distinction between an end to an era and an end to influence. What makes an era is that the character of what is being discussed (in this case, a part of the world) is both clear and enduring. There can be exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions to a prevailing pattern.

The previous era in the Middle East was dominated to an uncharacteristic degree by the United States. It was the result of the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union. But it was also the consequence of concerted American effort, be it to reverse Saddam Hussein’s conquest of Kuwait or to promote peace between Israel and its neighbors.

The era came to an end both for structural reasons—globalization, the shifting balance between energy supply and demand, the weakening of some national entities and the strengthening of other national and non-state actors alike—and for reasons related more to U.S. policy, in particular the Iraq war and the lack of priority accorded the “peace process.”

The new era will be one in which U.S. power and influence will be considerable but on balance less dominant. Other actors, including Iran, a divided but assertive Iraqi government, Hezbollah, Hamas, national oil companies and the governments behind them, sovereign wealth funds, terrorist organizations, China, Russia, the EU, political factions within Israel, religious authorities, and the Muslim Brotherhood, will count for more.

What does this mean? It means the United States will not be able to insist on what it wants or shape events as much as it would like. It is an open question whether the United States can stop Iran’s nuclear progress, cobble together a viable and independent Iraq, broker peace between Israel and Palestinians, or promote reform and guarantee stability in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. U.S. ability to do such things in the past was never total, but whatever it was then, it is less now. This is not an argument for standing aloof—to the contrary, neglect is almost always counter-productive, and how policy is designed and implemented will make a difference. But it is my judgment that American foreign policy and those making it will have to contend with a less benign environment, including more constraints and greater opposition, factors that are likely to raise costs and lower results.

Richard N. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The participation of armed groups in elections is problematic. But the lesson is not that there should not be elections. Rather, there should be standards, like the ones to which the international community has held Hamas after the fact: you can be a terrorist group or you can be a political party, but you cannot be both. As difficult as this problem is, it cannot be the case that people are denied the right to vote just because the outcome might be unpleasant to us. Although we cannot know whether politics will ultimately deradicalize violent groups, we do know that excluding them from the political process grants them power without responsibility. This is yet another challenge that the leaders and the peoples of the broader Middle East must resolve as the region turns to democratic processes and institutions to resolve differences peacefully and without repression.”

Condoleezza Rice, “Rethinking the National Interest: American Realism for a New World,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2008.

From Robert Satloff

Secretary Rice is a powerful intellect with an impressive grasp of a broad range of issues, but on the question of providing access to the democratic process for armed groups that refuse to renounce their violent goals and their violence means, she has a blind spot. In this passage, for example, she mischaracterizes the situation with respect to the Palestinian election of January 2006 and the U.S. decision to press for Hamas’ inclusion.

The facts of the situation were as follows:

• The West Bank and Gaza have been, since 1967, under Israel’s military occupation. While one can debate certain aspects of that occupation, including settlement policy, one cannot debate the fact that Israel is under no requirement to permit political activity of terrorist groups committed to its destruction.

• The Palestinian Authority and all its relevant institutions, including the Palestinian Legislative Council, were established by virtue of agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Their existence and their legitimacy derive solely from those agreements.

• Annex II, article III, paragraph 2 of the Israeli-Palestinian Agreement of 1995 states the following: “The nomination of any candidates, parties or coalitions will be refused, and such nomination or registration once made will be canceled, if such candidates, parties or coalitions: commit or advocate racism; or pursue the implementation of their aims by unlawful or non-democratic means.”

• Whatever ancillary social welfare activities Hamas may undertake, its raison d’etre is the destruction of Israel and the principal means it has chosen to achieve that objective is terrorism.

Given the above, it is a mischaracterization of the situation to suggest that excluding Hamas from the election would have meant that, as Secretary Rice argues, “people are denied the right to vote just because the outcome might be unpleasant to us.” That was never the issue. The issue was that the Bush Administration pressed Israel and the Palestinian Authority to disregard their agreed legal framework for holding elections and to permit Hamas’ participation. Indeed, there were rules—and we flouted them.

Scholars, experts and policymakers are engaged in a legitimate debate over whether Islamist parties—i.e., parties whose main objective is the imposition of Shariah law—can evolve into democratic parties. By that I mean not just parties “willing to play by democratic rules” but parties that embrace democracy, which by its very nature means that men and women, not divinity, determine the law of the land. This is the debate surrounding the PJD in Morocco, the AK Party in Turkey and other Islamist parties. A subset of that debate is whether the same evolutionary process applies to Islamist terrorist groups, such as Hamas.

However, that debate, I repeat, was never the issue in the Bush Administration’s decision to compel Hamas’ inclusion in the Palestinian elections of January 2006. At issue was whether the Administration recognized the supremacy of (to recall Al Gore’s famous words) the “controlling legal authority”—the Oslo Accords—or to urge its local partners to disregard the law. It chose the latter. To suggest otherwise is revisionist history.

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“If Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas does not get control over at least part of the West Bank soon, he will have no authority to sign any draft peace treaty with Israel. He will be totally discredited.

“But Israel cannot cede control over any part of the West Bank without being assured that someone credible is in charge. Rockets from Gaza land on the remote Israeli town of Sderot. Rockets from the West Bank could hit, and close, Israel’s international airport. That is an intolerable risk. Israel has got to start ceding control over at least part of the West Bank but in a way that doesn’t expose the Jewish state to closure of its airport.

“Radical pragmatism would say that the only way to balance the Palestinians’ need for sovereignty now with Israel’s need for a withdrawal now, but without creating a security vacuum, is to enlist a trusted third party—Jordan—to help the Palestinians control whatever West Bank land is ceded to them. Jordan does not want to rule the Palestinians, but it, too, has a vital interest in not seeing the West Bank fall under Hamas rule.

“Without a radically pragmatic new approach—one that gets Israel moving out of the West Bank, gets the Palestinian Authority real control and sovereignty, but one which also addresses the deep mistrust by bringing in Jordan as a Palestinian partner—any draft treaty will be dead on arrival.”

Thomas L. Friedman, “Time for Radical Pragmatism,” New York Times, June 4, 2008.

From Adam Garfinkle

The Jordanian option is an idea whose time never exactly comes.

When I was writing about it—urging it, as it were, as the least bad of alternatives—nearly thirty years ago, the time was not right because, as Asher Susser put it back in April, the Israeli government of the day was not sufficiently foresighted or realistic to understand the likely future of the matter. By the time later Israeli governments did understand, it was too late for the Jordanians. What Tom Friedman has been thinking all these years I can’t say, but in light of what those of us who have been following this for more than thirty years know, his column looks to be a classical example of a BFO—a blinding flash of the obvious—but too late for prime time.

About a year or so ago Abdul Salem al-Majali was in Washington, carrying with him a very delicate version of a new Jordanian option. He raised it up the flag pole in a few places around town, and seems not to have noticed many people saluting. The problem with the idea, as was pointed out a few months ago, is that the Jordanians are afraid that instead of them re-containing Palestinian nationalism, the Islamicizing Palestinian national movement will finally toss the Hashemites into the proverbial dustbin of history. Israel would then be back where it was, geostragically speaking, before June 4, 1967, except instead of a Hashemite state in both east and west banks, with which it had a range of tacit understandings and some significant shared interests, it would have to deal with a far less cooperative neighbor.

This leads me more or less to the same conclusion Rob Satloff mooted earlier: It may be possible to bring the Jordanians into a kind of relatively quiet trialogue on issues like trade, water and energy, air space and other aspects of security, medical-technical cooperation and a few other items, but only up to the carrying-capacity of the Jordanian political system which, under the current king, is still not back to where it was under an experienced and shrewd Hussein ibn Talal. If one takes the idea of path dependency seriously, as I do, then this sort of functional mix might lay the ground for a larger Jordanian role in the future, which might still end up being part of the least-bad-of-all policy alternatives for Israel, the United States, and arguably the Palestinians, too. But we’re talking years here, and Israel’s problem in the West Bank, where the collapse of Fatah has indeed created a dangerous vacuum, runs on a different, faster, timetable.

So, as I said, the Jordanian option is a idea whose time seems never to be right—Tom Friedman columns notwithstanding.

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It would be nice to think that Israeli-Syrian negotiations represent a key strategic advance. While I wouldn’t rule out such an advance in the future, this all has the whiff of tactical advantage to me.

On the one hand, the talks don’t represent a change in the Syrian position. I’ve met Bashar al-Asad twice, and both times he’s talked about his keen desire to negotiate with Israel. And he kept saying “Israel,” not “enemy forces” or the “Zionist entity” or any such circumlocution. Further, he didn’t wince and have a hitch in his voice, the way American politicians often do when they talk about Palestine. On this (and perhaps many other matters), he’s a realist. There are any number of reasons he has wanted such negotiations, the most obvious being that he’s not going to be able to re-conquer the Golan with troops. If he wants it back, it will be at the negotiating table.

But there are other, less noble reasons for wanting to open an Israel channel now. He is in a position of some strength, as he looks to consolidate his allies’ gains in Lebanon. He is also quite eager to ease his isolation—life is tough when your greatest friend in the world is Iran—and engaging with Israel presumably renders kosher a whole range of countries’ dealings with Syria. Not least, I think Syrians believe that such negotiations will protect them from attack by both Americans and Israelis, which are the two countries they fear most.

Ehud Olmert’s political troubles give him every reason to negotiate with Syria, because it makes him look like a statesman. Further, the Syrian track is less emotional and less morally difficult for Israelis than his indirect talks with Hamas, and it helps deflect attention from the very difficult choices Israel will have to make in Gaza. Also, such talks serve to light a fire under the Palestinians, who fear that the Prime Minister will lose interest in their track to concentrate on Syrian negotiations.

While each side has powerful reasons to negotiate, however, there are equally powerful reasons not to conclude a deal. Such reasons start with the political weakness of each leader, who would be hard pressed to make monumental concessions to a longstanding enemy whose ultimate intentions are disputed. The Bush Administration’s keen disinterest in engaging Syria also dims hopes, as one of the prizes the Syrians seek is U.S. acceptance. A year from now, with a new U.S. president and likely a new Israeli Prime Minister, the situation might be different, and in the interim, there are certainly common understandings that can be reached.

I wish I could say this was the beginning of the end of the Syrian-Israeli conflict, and I certainly can’t say it’s the end of the beginning. Unfortunately, it seems to me we’re still right in the middle, and I fear we’re going to stay in the middle for some time.

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So the focus shifts to deterrence. Both Charles Krauthammer (here) and Zev Chafets (here) hold out little hope for international efforts to block Iran getting the bomb, or for military action to that end (though Chafets suggests that Israel might be able “in the best case” to weaken and delay Iran’s program). As a wake-up call this is justified: the sanctions are pathetic and the military options are dismal.

It is too early to give up completely; international pressure has slowed the program down, and the Iranians are still years from possession of a significant amount of fissionable material (which is why the apparent hiatus in weapons development is meaningless). Dragging out the program gives more time for moderating trends within Iran. But it makes sense at this stage to ask how a nuclearized Iran, guided by apocalyptic notions, might be deterred.

Krauthammer offers the Berlin model of extended deterrence. Extended deterrence in the Cold War setting had two dimensions: the threat of nuclear retaliation to protect non-nuclear allies, and the threat of nuclear retaliation in response to an overwhelming conventional attack. Kennedy’s pledge on Berlin involved both. Since the United States could not actually prevent Soviet bloc forces from occupying the Berlin enclave, the answer was to threaten a “full retaliatory response” upon the Soviet Union itself. In truth, there was always an irrational side to this posture: would the United States actually sacrifice tens or hundreds of millions of American lives to defend a city that would doubtless be also destroyed in a full-scale nuclear exchange? Fortunately, this was never tested.

The suggested “Holocaust Declaration” is in some respects more credible. Krauthammer proposes that it apply only to a nuclear attack on Israel, and as he points out there is little fear—for now—of Iranian retaliation against the United States itself. On the other hand, Israel is not Berlin, and it is far from clear that any U.S. government would feel the need to reinforce a deterrence that is already in place: the certainty of a massive Israeli response to any nuclear attack. Chafets is correct: the key is deterrence by Israel.

If an Iranian government would not be deterred by the likelihood of casualties in the tens of millions (as calculated recently by Anthony Cordesman), then what additional impact would a U.S. pledge of retaliation have? The issue of vulnerability to a first strike, eliminating Israel’s retaliatory force, is raised—but it will be decades, if ever, before Iranian forces could conceivably carry out such an attack, and Israel is already moving to protect these forces.

Nor should we forget that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East is already a reality: chemical and biological weapons are already a part of the equation between Israel and Syria, for example. A Middle East “balance of terror” already exists. It is not the world that we prefer, but it may be the world we have to live with and find ways to stabilize.

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In the latest issue of The American Interest, March/April 2008, Itamar Rabinovich, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, former president of Tel Aviv University, former head of the Dayan Center, current visiting professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and a member of the The American Interest editorial board, takes on the Mearsheimer/Walt phenomenon. That is to say, he is not reviewing the book so much as the various reviews of the book, the reaction of the authors to the reviews, and so on. So if a book is a one-dimensional intellectual object, and a review is a two-dimensional intellectual object, and authors’ reactions to reviews a three-dimensional intellectual object, then what Rabinovich has done aspires to be truly Einsteinian in nature.

I will not take time here to relate or summarize his narrative. I want only to note that, of all the many reviews and discussions about this book and its precursor essay and “working paper,” Rabinovich’s is the only one to have taken the book’s argument to its logical apex, to wit: If, as Mearsheimer and Walt argue, the real variance in U.S. Middle East policy is explained by U.S. domestic politics, then a book like theirs should have a significant impact on that policy. But it isn’t, so it hasn’t. And it won’t. Point, set and match, thank you very much.

There is plenty to admire in Rabinovich’s essay, although, as its editor, I confess to a natural bias in thinking so. But the “test” he has devised for the book’s claims, relying on the book’s very own thesis, is, I think, noteworthy. Ecclesiastes tells us (more than once) that there is nothing new under the sun. At times like this, however, I’m not so sure.

MESH invites its members to comment on Rabinovich’s concluding paragraphs:

[I]t is harder to make a realist case for the U.S.-Israeli relationship today than it was during the Cold War. At that time, Israel’s role as a strategic asset was clear, if not to off-shore balancers like Mearsheimer and Walt, then to every American President since John F. Kennedy. Israel and the United States had the same enemies—the Soviet Union and its radical Arab allies—with the conservative Arab regimes stuck awkwardly in the middle. Today things are altogether more muddled, so a more plausible case can be made that Israel is a drag on U.S. security interests and that radical Muslims only hate and attack America because of its support for Israel….

Clearly, the end of the Cold War and the rise of new challenges require fresh thinking about the strategic dimension of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. By defending every aspect of the special relationship when the rationales for them no longer exist, the Israel lobby risks overloading what political realities can bear. There will always be those like Mearsheimer and Walt, as there have been since 1947–48, when the State of Israel came into being, who will argue that U.S. support for Israel and its policies harms U.S. national interests. Israel’s response must focus not only on refuting this charge but on formulating policies that will render Israel, in deed as well as in rhetoric, a valuable partner of the United States.

An opportunity to do precisely that is in the offing, for the next U.S. administration will no doubt formulate a revised comprehensive policy toward the Middle East. An Israel engaged in a peace process orchestrated by the United States and working together with Washington and its other Middle Eastern allies against radical foes will be an important strategic asset in the post-Cold War Middle East. The specific challenge for Israel and its American friends will be their ability to demonstrate how Israel can serve as a strategic asset in the Iranian and Syrian context as it once did against the Soviet Union and its radical allies in the region. The wider strategic canvas, not the vicissitudes of U.S. domestic politics, will as always make the difference.

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