Did Bibi win the midterms?
As a general rule, American politicians do not rally to the side of foreign leaders when those leaders directly confront the president of the United States. I don’t, for example, recall liberal Democrats cheering on French President Jacques Chirac when he defied President George W. Bush on Iraq, even though they thought he was right. ...
As a general rule, American politicians do not rally to the side of foreign leaders when those leaders directly confront the president of the United States. I don’t, for example, recall liberal Democrats cheering on French President Jacques Chirac when he defied President George W. Bush on Iraq, even though they thought he was right. Siding with France would have seemed unpatriotic — and, of course, stupid. The American people, and thus their political leaders, will instinctively line up behind the president in the face of a direct challenge from abroad. Unless the country in question is Israel.
Witness the events of recent days: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, seems to have decided that it’s open season on Barack Obama. In his speech this week in New Orleans before the general assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, Netanyahu not only repeated his longstanding view that Iran will curb its nuclear program only in the face of a credible threat of military action, but added — gratuitously, and with questionable accuracy — that the regime had stopped trying to build a bomb only in 2003, when it feared an attack by President-You-Know-Who.
James Traub is a columnist at Foreign Policy, nonresident fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, and author of the book What Was Liberalism? The Past, Present and Promise of A Noble Idea. Twitter: @jamestraub1
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