Is it fair to judge a president after only nine months in office? Fair or not, Barack Obama is coming under fire for raising expectations he cannot fulfil – especially in the Greater Middle East. His stirring speech in June at Cairo University, where he famously offered the Muslim world a new relationship with the United States based on mutual respect, is now a distant memory. It is hard to ignore the stark contrast between the soaring (and no doubt well-intentioned) rhetoric and the hard realities of a region which has been the graveyard of so many foreign-policy initiatives.
It is on the Israeli-Palestinian issue that the criticism is harshest. Those around the world who had welcomed the sense of urgency President Obama had given the issue from the moment of his inauguration in January have been dismayed that, nine months later, his efforts to breathe life into the peace process have been so fruitless. Critics differ over what went wrong. The Israeli government and its friends in Washington argue it was a mistake for Mr Obama to make such a high-profile commitment to a complete Israeli settlement freeze, thereby provoking an early and bruising collision with the Netanyahu government. The Arabs, on the other hand, were delighted at so forthright a pledge – and dismayed when, after months of arduous shuttle diplomacy by the US special envoy George Mitchell, the White House essentially backed off from it.
The persistence of an array of negative factors is scarcely President Obama’s fault – the obduracy of an Israeli government with close ties to the settler movement, the bitter feuding between the two main Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, the reluctance of important Arab states such as Saudi Arabia to take even modest steps towards normalising relations with Israel – but this cannot disguise the embarrassing gap between promise and performance. Moreover the hope that progress on the Israeli-Syrian track might compensate for immobility on the Israeli-Palestinian front has so far come to nothing. The Syrians have shown themselves eager to engage with the Americans – but not to pay any price for doing so.
The one area where engagement has, initially at least, produced results is over Iran and the nuclear issue. But even here there is a suspicion among President Obama’s critics that the Iranians have out-smarted him. Certainly they came to the Geneva talks on 1 October with a proposal – to allow inspection of a newly-revealed facility near Qum and to send low-enriched uranium to Russia for further processing – which was shrewdly designed to deflect criticism and slow down the march towards tougher sanctions. In the end, a good case may be made for reaching some sort of agreement with the Islamic Republic, since the alternatives – tougher sanctions or military conflict – are fraught with difficulty and offer no guarantee of success. But the down-side of any deal is that the West will be making life easier for a regime which has deprived itself of all legitimacy by its handling of the hotly-disputed presidential elections in June and its harsh suppression of dissent.
All in all, the Obama administration has had a rough ride during its first nine months. The president’s unpopular predecessor may have left the scene, and Mr Obama may be regarded as an open-minded multilateralist, but the deeply-rooted problems of the Greater Middle East are so far proving resistant to his intelligence and charm.
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