Mere Rhetoric
28 November '10
It didn’t get nearly as much play as it should have, but Obama’s June 2009 meeting with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah ended with the monarch flying into a tirade and more or less telling the President to get a grip. This was the Riyadh meeting that Obama took on his way to his insulting and failed Cairo Speech, the better to prepare himself by visiting “the place where Islam began.” The sit-down was such a disaster that Dennis Ross was hurriedly brought into the White House and given a broader role, yielding the impression that the President wanted a Middle East adviser who kind of understood something about the Middle East – and didn’t think he had one.
There were two theories on why the meeting went so badly.
On one side you had typical left-leaning foreign policy experts, the ones who had been advising Obama from the beginning and who now needed to explain why things turned out the opposite of how they predicted. Their approach to the Middle East is grounded in the two dogmas of anti-Israel foreign policy sophistication: (a) linkage, according to which Middle East pathologies are a result of the unresolved Arab/Israeli conflict rather than vice versa and (b) “if only Israel would…,” according to which the Arab/Israel conflict could be resolved were Israel to offer more concessions. They had promised that an “even-handed approach” to the Middle East that “put daylight” between the US and Israel would lead to Israeli gestures, at which point Arab regimes would reciprocate. Nothing of the sort came out of the Riyadh meeting. Instead of admitting that they had somehow gotten Saudi priorities or intentions wrong, that crowd doubled down and insisted that the Saudis cared so much about the Palestinians that Obama needed to put even more pressure on Israel to bring around Arab countries.
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