The Geek bets that Mr Obama wishes that diplomacy required no more than that.
The major difficulty in diplomacy is not that it requires the meshing of disjunctive national interests. That can be the easy part. What makes the game of diplomacy a very hard one to master is that at root it demands the harmonizing of very different views of the world. The basic orientation of a government's, a people's, a culture's understanding of what is central to existence, central to the defining of a national identity is typically in play when countries disagree over specific policies or actions.
Different countries will also differ, even take antipodal positions, on the real nature of the historical trajectories at work or brought into sharp relief by a conflict. For the country most directly involved, the understanding of history and its effects is necessarily subjective. For the other country, the outsider in the matter, history is something else again. It is either a cold, dead objective set of past events of little moment in the current issue or it is something that should be, in effect, outgrown or set aside.
Americans in their formulation of foreign policy and execution of diplomacy see history as being both irrelevant and an influence to be outgrown. Mr Obama likes to mouth history (usually with remarkable and easily avoidable errors) while sponsoring diplomatic demarches which run counter to the historical trajectories governing the interlocutor's behavior.
Take, for example, the current contretemps over the issue of "natural growth" in the assorted towns and cities created as "facts on the ground" by the Government of Israel (GOI) on land seized from Jordan during the Six Day War of 1967. There is a background to the Great Land Grab of 1967. And, this background was and is a powerful determinate to the current disagreement between the Obama Administration and the GOI.
As has been mentioned in a recent post, representatives of the emerging state of Israel came to an understanding with the King of Jordan, Abdullah I, regarding the way in which the Jewish armed forces would cooperate with the Arab Legion of Jordan. The Israelis would not oppose the Arab Legion as long as it moved into those areas of Palestine which had been given over to the Arabs by the UN Partition Plan. In return the Arab Legion would not enter territory assigned to the Jewish state by the partition plan.
Both sides would fight it out in Jerusalem as the UN had kept the city separate from the partition. The result was the Arab Legion could concentrate its efforts on holding the Old City and the Israelis could have the new sections of Jerusalem.
During the run-up to the Six Day War, GOI warned Jordan to stay out of the affray. The clear message passed through numerous channels to King Hussein was that the IDF would not attack Jordanian territory either in the West Bank or the Old City.
The US was completely aware of the warnings. The Johnson administration not only conveyed them to King Hussein but reinforced them as well. As the documents in the LBJ archives demonstrate clearly, the US both believed the honesty of GOI's warning but was ready to back them.
(Note to the Obama administration, the LBJ archives are at the University of Texas in Austin. You would do well to take a look at them.)
For reasons having to do with both the internal political climate of Jordan as well as the pressures long exerted on King Hussein by Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, it was seemingly impossible for the King to take the warning and act on it. As numerous post-hostility writings both governmental and historical show, King Hussein did not believe his throne would survive if Jordan did not enter the war.
There can be little if any doubt but GOI fully anticipated this and issued the warning simply to protect their collective hind ends from American disapproval. Israeli intelligence regarding the political dynamics in Amman was simply too comprehensive for GOI not to have known that Jordan would not and could not sit on its hands.
As both GOI and King Hussein well knew, the Hashemite Kingdom's army was no match for the IDF. Israeli troops gobbled up the West Bank and the Old City. The fighting was intense, far more so than in the IDF walkover in the Sinai, but the end was never in doubt.
The long-standing Israeli desire for the West Bank and, far more so, the Old City with the final relic of the Temple, the West Wall, was accomplished at a cost quite acceptable to Israel. They had stolen the land fair and square. By all past customs and usages of post-war diplomacy, this land was now their land. The West Bank and Old City were by all past standards available for whatsoever use GOI might wish to make of them.
However, the "international community" or at least the UN tossed a big curve ball at GOI. In previous hostilities, provided the country stealing the land at gunpoint had not been the aggressor, it was customary for nation-states generally to accept the verdict of war, the old "right of conquest."
Now, the rules were changed. Now the UN issued its resolution demanding that Israel return the lands taken during the war to their previous owners--even though a strong argument could be made that Egypt and its partners were the aggressors. (It might be noted in this context that the Geek has been convinced for a long time on the basis of the documents that Israel planned and manipulated events so that it could wage aggressive war under a plausible cover of acting in self-defense.)
The US supported a land-for-peace usage for the conquered and occupied territories of Jordan, Egypt and Syria. The political realities here at home prevented the US from pressing its case strongly with GOI. In any event, GOI and the Israeli public would have been exceptionally reluctant to see land-for-peace as a viable option. This was particularly true with regard to the West Bank and, even more, the Old City of Jerusalem.
The US tacitly or even, on occasion, openly supported the GOI creation of "facts on the ground" in the West Bank. Much of the mass of "settlements" was built directly or indirectly by US foreign aid funding.
Israel put the new real estate to work. Not only did Israel have a high total fertility rate, GOI encouraged immigration from all over the world. Including the Soviet Union.
Indeed, the US strongly supported GOI in its immigrate-all-you-Soviet-Jews policy. One need only recall the efforts of Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson to underscore the crucial nature of US support to fill the new "settlements" by Soviet Jews seeking escape from the Workers and Peasants Paradise and its new style pogroms.
US support coupled with the rise of the nationalistic Likud Party to assure the "settlements," the "facts on the ground" proliferated with startling rapidity and effect. The result was simple.
The West Bank, regardless of Fatah's terrorism or the terrorism of other groups and in total disregard of the UN Security Council's Resolution became Israeli in all but name. Stripped to its essentials, the contention of GOI and its supporters in the US government was the same as had been made in American history for the conquest and occupation of land previously held by the Native Americans.
Here it is short and brutally honest. "We make better use of the land than you did. Anyway, you are a passel of bloody minded, aggressive, primitive heathens."
Rightly or wrongly, ethically or otherwise, the West Bank "settlement" areas as well as the Old City were now Israeli. And, at least from the perspective of repeated governments, that fact was neither negotiable nor changeable.
Sinai could be traded for peace. Portions of the West Bank could be traded as well. But, not the areas which had been designated even before the Six Day War as suitable for development by Israel. Period. End of debate.
The decision was and remains so final, so completely off any table that limiting the continued growth of the developed regions is a non-starter. No Israeli government could survive consenting to a dictated ending of "natural growth." While no new towns, no new cities will be built on land which exists outside the ambit of the past development will be built, neither can the slow growth and consolidation of the previous "settlements" be ended.
It does not matter what the Arab states, the Palestinian Authority, let alone Hamas might demand. Neither does it matter that the reading of history by these entities and their citizens, subjects or members is frankly opposite to that of the Israelis. It doesn't matter that GOI may well have planned and executed a "breach of the international peace" and waged aggressive war forty-two years ago.
History is a strait jacket. Its trajectory brought forth the "settlements" and these "facts on the ground" must be recognised by all interested parties and accepted as to their power and persistence if any move toward the elusive goal of peace is to be successful. That is a hard and quite brutal truth. So is much of the history of the world. As the old cliche goes: "Read it and weep."
The Obama administration's current emphasis on ending "natural growth" as a confidence and trust building mechanism which will bring some sort of positive response from the Arab states and Palestinian population is both a wilful misunderstanding of the power of historical trajectories and doomed to fail. The reality is that the Obama crew must take the "facts on the ground" and the history which called them into existence as they are and not as the Nice Young Man From Chicago might wish them to be and have been.
The "natural growth" controversy now raising great quantities of smoke and giving no light on a complex problem is one example among many of the futility of pretending history never existed or, if it did, it should not have any influence on the present. The "natural growth" affray is an example in miniature of why diplomacy requires not simply a policy consistently followed for success.
Unless and until Mr Obama and his coterie come to understand the ongoing power of history in the affairs of nations, he is best off swatting flies on TV. It's a lot easier and far more personally rewarding than trying to swat nation-states into compliance with the American view of the perfect world.
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