Obama’s hoped for “Grand Bargain”.

By Ted Belman

I just received this email from Allen Hertz (Allen Z. Hertz was senior adviser in the Privy Council Office serving Canada’s Prime Minister and the federal cabinet. He formerly worked in Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department and earlier taught history and law at universities in New York, Montreal, Toronto and Hong Kong. He studied European history and languages at McGill University (B.A.) and then East European and Ottoman history at Columbia University (M.A., Ph.D.). He also has international law degrees from Cambridge University (LL.B.) and the University of Toronto (LL.M.).).

I have no doubt that his thesis is correct. But that is not to say that Obama will succeed in achieving his “Grand Bargain”. My response is below his email.

Dear Ted,

Mideast “linkage” is that peculiar notion that more distant issues like the Syrian civil war and/or Iran’s race to nuclear weapons might in some meaningful sense be related to the local question of Israel’s relations with the Palestinians.

In regard to such linkage, I have just finished reading Aaron David Miller’s recent Wilson Center essay entitled: “It’s Iran, Stupid:The real, unspoken reason America won’t get involved in Syria.” Miller’s piece turns on an insight offered by President Obama in a Jan. 27, 2014 New Yorker article by David Remnick.

The problem is that Miller’s use of the Remnick material is only partial. There, President Obama refers not to linkage between matters involving Iran and Syria, but explicitly to the connection among the three big Mideast issues, namely those relating to Israel, Syria and Iran.

This should cause us to believe that President Obama does indeed have a strategy, and one that perhaps has a fair chance of “success.” It might work principally because Russia, China and Iran would probably perceive that his plan would enhance their own interests — including by weakening the USA, which President Obama wants out of the Mideast.

President Obama remarkably told David Remnick that there’s less than a 50% chance for success of the three separate current negotiations about Iran, Israel and Syria respectively. President Obama has also curiously opined that all three negotiations are connected.

Really?

Are they substantially connected? If so, how are they connected? Or is it that President Obama is significantly telling us that he will take steps to connect them? The likely link is that, in each of the three instances, President Obama will soon try to make Israel foot the bill.

My reading is that, with respect to Iran, President Obama is planning for an imminent crisis which he wants to coincide with the collapse of the bilateral peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Specifically, President Obama wants the three different issues of Iran, Israel and Syria to align in the short term, and in any event well before the Nov. 2014 USA elections, after which Congress might perhaps have more power to block him.

With references to “peace in our time” and also some empty threats to use force against Iran, President Obama will soon posture dramatically, but then exploit the perceived crisis to convince Iran to solemnly “agree” to go no further than “threshold nuclear state,” just like Japan.

To get this (perhaps worthless) commitment from Iran, he will probably seek to pay in gold coin, i.e. denuclearizing Israel’s defense. Namely, President Obama is likely planning to trade off Israel’s nuclear weapons for little more than a piece of paper bearing an Iranian promise to stop short of actually building a nuclear bomb. This would dovetail with the President’s strong emphasis on gradually creating “a world without nuclear weapons.”

Shafting Israel in the cause of world peace? Sounds like something that would be wildly popular with Muslims and left-liberals. Prima facie, it also has that element of peace-loving plausibility that might snow independents in the USA. To some extent, it also has the “virtue” of likely alienating many Jewish Americans from Israelis. And, it could even win President Obama a second Nobel Prize!

In the same way, President Obama will probably try to force Israel to withdraw from the Golan to buy Iran’s consent to a peaceful outcome in Syria. This would likely be proposed by the USA and agreed by the rest of the P5+1.

Part of this big package would also be creation of a new Palestinian State in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This result would likely also be imposed by Iran together with the P5+1, as part of the aforementioned diplomatic bargain“to preserve the peace of the world.”

President Obama has several times specifically promised a“contiguous”  Palestine. Therefore, this new Arab country might also include a land bridge linking Gaza with the West Bank; or Israel might even lose all the Negev. Once the fate of the Jewish State is to be decided without Israel’s consent, who knows what would happen and where it would end?

President Obama is making every effort to do to Israel in 2014, what was done to Czechoslovakia in 1938. As suggested by the structure of the June 2009 Cairo speech, President Obama has from the beginning been targeting Israel not Iran. In essence, President Obama plans to use the coming Iran crisis as a way to render Israel virtually defenseless, just as in 1938 Czechoslovakia was strategically crippled by the cession of the Sudetenland.

Do you have a better explanation for President Obama’s stunning admission that all three current processes are likely to fail and for his highly peculiar contention that the matters of Syria, Iran and Israel are all interconnected? If so, please tell me. If not, a word to the wise should suffice.

I replied:

I believe your thesis is quite correct and was very well argued.

In the last couple of days I read that Obama changed his mind about attacking Syria because Iran asked him not to. Obama preferred to negotiate with Iran.

When he first came into office he was for World Nuclear Disarmament and we all felt that Israel was the target.

It has always been American policy to get Israel to withdraw to the ’67 lines and to divide Jerusalem. In that, Obama is no different except that he is prepared to play hardball more than the others did. But in this, I may be overstating the matter. Consider Eisenhower and Bush Sr.

In the past 5 years there has been much discussion on linkage between the Iran issue and the Israel/Palestine issue. Linkage has always been part of diplomacy as you well know. As for Syria, before the war, Kerry was talking about giving up the Golan to his new friend. American policy has always been to buy concessions from Israel’s enemies with Israel coin.

As for your suggested “grand bargain”, I see it as attempted but not finalized.