NYT: Obama rebuffed as American influence wanes

[Jefferson23]

By Helene Cooper and Steven Lee Myers

updated 9/22/2011 9:00:10 AM ET 2011-09-22T13:00:10

-UNITED NATIONS — A last-ditch American effort to head off a Palestinian bid for membership in the United Nations faltered. President Obama tried to qualify his own call, just a year ago, for a Palestinian state. And President Nicolas Sarkozy of France stepped forcefully into the void, with a proposal that pointedly repudiated Mr. Obama’s approach.

The extraordinary tableau Wednesday at the United Nations underscored a stark new reality: the United States is facing the prospect of having to share, or even cede, its decades-long role as the architect of Middle East peacemaking.

Even before Mr. Obama walked up to the General Assembly podium to make his difficult address, where he declared that “Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the U.N.,” American officials acknowledged that their various last-minute attempts to jump-start Israeli-Palestinian negotiations with help from European allies and Russia had collapsed.

American diplomats turned their attention to how to navigate a new era in which questions of Palestinian statehood are squarely on the global diplomatic agenda. There used to be three relevant players in any Middle East peace effort: the Palestinians, Israel and the United States. But expansions of settlements in the West Bank and a hardening of Israeli attitudes have isolated Israel and its main backer, the United States. Dissension among Palestinian factions has undermined the prospect for a new accord as well.


in full: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44624040/ns/world_news-the_new_york_times/t/nyt-obama-rebuffed-american-influence-wanes/

[Enrique]

1. not necessarily a bad development

:shrug:

[dtexdem]

2. To be a peacemaker for Palestine/Israel, the U.S. would need to be an honest broker.

And it never has been, although it has come closer in the past than it is now.

[Jefferson23]

3. Is the ‘special relationship’ becoming too expensive?

Now I know, that I had to borrow,
Beg and steal and lie and cheat.
Trying to keep ya, trying to please ya.
‘Cause being in love with yo ass ain’t cheap.”

- Cee Lo Green

The wave of popular uprisings across the Middle East created many new spaces for popular political participation. Even where those new spaces are now coming under counterrevolutionary attack, as in Egypt, many Arab governments have had to modify their policies to better reflect the views of an increasingly assertive public.

From the beginning it was clear that this shift would come at the expense of “the US-Israeli-Saudi system” in the region. The militant assertion of popular will in Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan, Tunisia, and elsewhere has made it much more difficult for Arab regimes to collaborate with Israel and the U.S., the latter not least because of its role in supporting the former. Israel’s two most important allies in the region have both been forced to take steps against it in an attempt to accommodate public opinion. In Egypt, the not-so-new regime is still very much in bed with both the U.S. and Israel, and continues to value both American aid and security cooperation with its neighbour. But the revolution did make a difference, and the government is having to take public opinion into account to a much greater extent than before.

The Turkish Prime Minister, meanwhile, has ridden the wave of protest to become the most popular leader in the region by, inter alia, expelling Israel’s ambassador, suspending military ties, threatening to refer the Gaza closure to the International Court of Justice, and promising to escort future aid ships to Gaza with Turkish warships. The substance-to-bluster ratio in these measures remains to be seen, and a good argument can be made that Erdogan’s moves in fact represent a successful cooptation of Arab protest, reflecting anti-Israel and anti-American sentiment but channelling it in ways that don’t threaten the regional order. Certainly his agreement, concluded just days before his diplomatic moves against Israel, to host an American missile defence system suggests that he has no intention of distancing Turkey from the U.S.

Even so, the gravity of the split should not be underestimated. At the very least, it reflects the fact that Arab public opinion can no longer be dismissed as irrelevant. This is a big problem for U.S. and Israeli policy, which has been based on the premise that regional public opinion can be safely contained by force, and hence ignored. With that premise undermined, the U.S. and Israel are scrambling to adapt to the new climate. “The region has come unglued,” the International Crisis Group’s Robert Malley reports, “ all the tools the United States has marshalled in the past are no longer as effective.”

in full: http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/blog_comments/is_the_special_relationship_becoming_too_expensive

[oberliner]

4. Who is Jamie?

She really seems to be good at collecting links!