Obama, the Juggler

With some echoes of the Cold War, the White House is holding negotiations in Palestine, Iran, Syria and Afghanistan.

Barack Obama’s first term did not meet the expectations that the president himself had unleashed; his leading project, Social Security, is still in trouble today. Regarding foreign policy, his promise of reaching out to the Arab world, announced in his Cairo speech in 2009, got lost in the everyday clamor. However, during his second term Obama wants to devote himself to the Middle East, the conflict par excellence of our time.

On Monday, Feb. 24, President Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; he is to welcome Palestinian Authority leader Mahmud Abbas soon. His goal is to convince both of them to accept a framework agreement on the distribution of the West Bank and the creation of a Palestinian state, which would extend the deadline for the conclusion of peace talks from the initially fixed date of April 29 to the end of the year.

Nonetheless, Obama is playing on several fronts at once. Washington is striving to convince Tehran to renounce nuclear weapons. Both parties have set July as the deadline for closing the deal. The process of destruction of chemical weapons in Syria is making progress by fits and starts, in return for which the West would virtually give carte blanche to Bashar al-Assad to fight against the Sunni rebellion in his country. Lastly, the effect of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, set for the end of the year, is still being discussed with Kabul. Those ongoing negotiations — Palestine, Iran, Syria and Afghanistan — are sufficiently linked to each other so as to regard them as parts of a whole: The fight against jihadi terrorism, which is taking place from the eastern basin of the Mediterranean to central Asia, is common to all the aforementioned conflicts. If these negotiations reach resolution, the participating parties would be free to battle the plague of al-Qaida and its associated groups, which are now focusing on inward-looking disputes.

However, at the core of all the negotiations is the dispute over the Holy Land, to the point that a signature of some sort of peace would allow the whole Middle East to be seen in a very different light.

Because the perfect is often the enemy of the good, the Palestinian cause would do well not to open new fronts such as the legitimate but unwise BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign, which aims to economically cut off the Zionist state. On the contrary, everything that allows Jerusalem to perceive a threat against its very existence will protect the government that demands to rise.

Today, with that laggard echo of the Cold War that is the conflict with Russia over Ukraine, Obama has all these balls in the air as if he were a juggler, aware that history’s opinion of his term may depend on that hypothetical balance.