That’s the phrase the Financial Times is using to describe America on the morning of the meeting between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. The FT fears the United States is “planning to hand Israel” what it characterizes as “almost all the settlement blocks colonizing Palestinian land; about three-quarters of occupied East Jerusalem; and the Jordan Valley.” Says the FT: “Perhaps Mr. Kerry is managing expectations with great acuity. If not, any such prospectus would put an end to the two-state proposition and expose the US as Israel’s crooked lawyer rather than an honest broker.”

What the FT seems to mean by ‘managing expectations with great acuity’ is what Ambrose Bierce meant when he said a diplomat is someone who is paid to lie for his country. In other words, if Mr. Kerry is lying, America is an honest broker. If Mr. Kerry is telling the truth, America is a crook. So what does that make the Financial Times? It is a newspaper whose founding (and greatest) editor, Brendan Bracken, was at one point an aide to Churchill and deputized “to maintain close contact with the Zionist leaders on his behalf,” as it is phrased in “Weizmann: A Biography by Several Hands.” How the FT moved from the goodwill at the heart of the Churchill-Zionist collaboration to such unsavory sentiments, well, it is a question for the historians of journalism.

For the rest of us, the idea that the FT respresents what passes for mainstream European sentiment today is something to think about in the Age of Obama, when we were supposed to discover that all the ill-feeling in Europe was a reaction to President Bush and that once he was gone and Mr. Obama came in, all would be made well. What malarky. We’re now nearing the three-quarters mark of the Obama presidency. All the president’s leaning on Israel — on such clear display in Washington this week — has begat nothing but more hostility. Something for Israel’s next “lawyer” to remember.