I keep teasing Aaron David Miller’s pessimistic talk at AIPAC last week on how far off a solution to the I/P problem is, notwithstanding the enthusiasm for Obama. I have to relisten to it. Meantime, here is a piece by realist Leon Hadar that explains a key part of Miller’s pessimism. From the Daily Star, in Lebanon, saying The US Is No Longer a Global Hegemon:
The conventional wisdom is that a more visionary and competent Obama administration will be able to reassert America’s global leadership role – especially in the Middle East.
According to that logic, a charismatic and cosmopolitan President Barack Obama, by re-energizing the United States’ diplomatic influence and emphasizing Washington’s commitment to play the role of an honest broker, will revive the dormant Israeli-Palestinian peace process, overcome the many obstacles to a political settlement, and help bring peace to the Holy Land. (Some pundits seem to assume a similar peacemaking model can be implemented in other troubled regions as well, such as South Asia and the Caucasus.) All that is lacking, supposedly, is enlightened leadership and American willpower.
Such assumptions about US omnipotence are woefully out of touch with reality. The mess the Bush administration made in the Middle East, where US military power was overstretched to the maximum, coupled with the dramatic loss of American financial resources, has produced a long-term transformation in the balance of power in the region and worldwide. The confluence of these negative factors has significantly eroded Washington’s diplomatic and political clout. The increasing wariness of the American public regarding new US military interventions, as a consequence of the Iraq war, will reinforce this trend.
