Obama’s Whiplash Diplomacy

Rick Richman
Contentions/Commentary
13 July '10

The executive director of the Arab American Institute, James Zogby, writes that the Obama-Netanyahu press conference last week gave him “a bad case of whiplash”:

I had fair warning that this visit would be different than the last, reportedly testy, encounter between these two leaders. And so I should have been prepared for the fact that tough love would be replaced by just plain love. I just wasn’t prepared for how much love. And so I confess that I found the apparent public pass Netanyahu received on settlements, the U.S. threat to boycott a summit on Middle East non-proliferation, and all the “unwaverings” and “unbreakables” to be a bit too much to ingest.

Wait until Zogby finds out that the “testy” meeting last March (the one held after-hours, with no photos and no press, with Netanyahu leaving the White House unescorted late at night, having been ambushed by Obama) was actually a “terrific” meeting. That is the description Obama used in his interview with Israeli TV last week — the first he has given to Israeli media in the 18 months of his administration.

It is in fact all a bit whiplash-producing and somewhat reminiscent of the old saying about history in the Soviet Union — there the future was always known; it was the past that kept changing. In Obama’s new narrative, relations with Netanyahu are not only currently excellent but retroactively terrific as well.

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