The Romney-Netanyahu Friendship

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The New York Sun

One of the things to think about in respect the current political campaign is the impact that would be felt were the president of America and the prime minister of Israel on the same page. We were put in mind of this by Michael Barbaro’s illuminating dispatch in today’s New York Times, describing the friendship that sprang up in the late 1970s between Benjamin Netanyahu and Mitt Romney. At the time the future prime minister of Israel and the future front runner for the Republican nomination for president were both working for the same company, the Boston Consulting Group, and honing their analytical abilities in the same weekly brainstorming sessions, “absorbing,” Mr. Barbaro reports, “the same profoundly analytical view of the world.”

We will never forget how America’s relationship with Israel descended into acrimony during the latter years of President Clinton’s administration. That was when Secretary Albright was hectoring the new premier in Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu, over the so-called peace process. It wasn’t, at least not then, a problem of the Democratic Party. We also watched President Reagan’s near magical relationship with Israel fall off during the accession of George H.W. Bush as the 41st president. That was the period of feuding over loan guarantees that America was giving to enable the Jewish state to build the housing it needed, partly because so many thousands of Jews were fleeing the Soviet Union.

We didn’t see a return to relationship that was both warm and successful until the rise, here, of President Bush’s son, George W. Bush, and, in Israel, of Ariel Sharon. The two had bonded when the former defense minister of Israel gave the future American president a tour of the Samarian hills, from which the logic of Israel’s strategic choices becomes so clear. Under the leadership of George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon, the acrimony disappeared from the relations between the two governments. No doubt this was helped by the degree to which their common interests became so evident in the war on Islamist terror.

That President Obama permitted that warmth to evaporate is one of the errors of his presidency. We would not say that there has been no working relationship, but the political warmth has gone. Instead we have had a roller-coaster of ups and downs in the two administrations, even while both sides have protested that everything is in fine shape. The tension between the two has loosed a cataract of leaks on what might, or might not, be the plan for Iran. It has returned us to the days when the secretary of state — in this case Mrs. Clinton — exhibits an Albrightian disdain for the way the Israelis are handling what is left of the peace process.

We would not want to suggest that relations between any two countries, leastwise those between Israel and America, are merely a matter of personalities. Relations are ultimately governed by national interest. But neither would we want to suggest that leadership doesn’t matter. We learned this in, among other moments, the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Golda Meir’s envoy in Washington, Yitzhak Rabin, swung behind President Nixon. This helped sideline the peace plan hatched in the state department and advanced by Secretary of State Rogers. The plan was recognized as short-sighted by Henry Kissinger, who encouraged Mr. Rabin not to blame, indeed to appreciate, President Nixon. Rabin’s sagacity led to the breakthrough understanding that Republicans could be the party more sympathetic to Israel.

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The rise of Mr. Romney, in any event, holds out the promises of a new, less suspicious, more analytical, more practical relationship between Jerusalem and Washington. This newspaper is not greatly enamored of the analytical process in foreign affairs. One can wrestle with questions too much, which is one of the things that may be happening now in respect of Iran. It can lead to a danger like the one we face today, which is that while everyone has been analyzing the question, Iran has been working on it’s a-bomb. Our foreign policy types may discover one day that, for all their chin pulling, Iran’s a-bomb has become a fait accompli. Our preferred method of dealing with problems relies less on analytics and more on judgment and principles. Either way, though, Americans and Israelis can be encouraged by at least the possibility that we could have, in Messrs. Romney and Netanyahu, two leaders who, at a deep level, think alike.


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