When the establishment is at the guns, Obama will always retreat

Dilip Hiro at TomDispatch says that Obama is adept at pressuring a foreign leader and then backing off. And that when it comes to Netanyahu, the tail has wagged the dog.Oh and I like David Bromwich's assessment of Obama's character at LRB:

Obama’s besetting political fault is his automatic adoption of the tone of command, accompanied by a persistent reluctance to be seen as the source of the policy he commandeers...

The American establishment as a whole, rather than the leaders of a party, became Obama’s tutor in statesmanship. It was not an adequate substitute. Obama when he entered the presidency had seen more of the world than most people but less of America than many Americans. What he knew were the academic, the liberal-political and the corporate milieux, where doors swung open in gratitude and wonder at a man of his qualities. Fellow students at Harvard Law School and colleagues at the University of Chicago Law School knew him as a ‘mediator’ without marked opinions of his own. He left almost no trail of position papers – nothing substantial, quotable or quoted – though he cast votes and made decisions after listening to others make their case. He led a charmed life and aroused few suspicions. Two decades of ambitious but unadventurous apprenticeship on this pattern left him baffled at the first strong signs of resistance in 2009. Until that year, it is only a slight exaggeration to say the Republicans whom Obama had met were judges, lawyers, corporate leaders and academics. He had never encountered a determined man in the black hat quite like John Boehner, the congressional minority leader; as for Fox Radio, it was a distant island, heard of in chuckling rumours at dinner parties, its noises dissipated by the ocean of seminars and think-tanks in between. Obama is still mystified by the idea that there are people who don’t like him.

His sense of personal invincibility was always accompanied by an extreme cautiousness. Many people think this has served him well at a time of crisis. I don’t agree; I wish Obama had acted more boldly, and think he could have done so...

There were opportunities for [foreign policy ]reform of a sort that comes less often than once in a generation. Yet Obama acted on the assumption that the establishment is one and irreplaceable, and must be served in roughly its present form. This assumption he seems to have acquired between the summer of 2008 – the time of his capitulation on domestic surveillance and his Aipac speech affirming support for Israel – and the National Archives Speech on security a year later... If one were to compile an Obama Retreat Checklist – composed of the advisers whom he cut away when under pressure, or persons he nominated to important posts but withdrew from consideration – the names would include Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Malley, Rashid Khalidi and the anti-war Republican senator Chuck Hagel, whose leaked note to George W. Bush may have saved the US from a war with Iran in 2007. If one made it a list of incidents as well as persons, one would have to count the snub to Jimmy Carter that denied him a prominent part at the Democratic Convention of 2008 – a graceless as well as a gutless omission.