Israel and China in a year ‘gone to waste’

Israel understands that when America sends a hall monitor to do the job of a diplomat, there will be advantages. Was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton really shocked at the announcement of new building in East Jerusalem, “accidentally” announced during Biden’s visit? Fool her twice. She and President Obama were played the same way in Copenhagen by the Chinese. Anyone who reads the journals (or my blog these past three weeks) is aware of new awakenings in Israel. Did the State Department forget to renew Secretary Clinton’s library card again?

Diplomacy is fatally flawed with Secretary Clinton at the helm. She is not a stateswoman, but a cultural emissary for Global Clintonism. As she said she would be in her campaign. To paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, “I am my husband’s scold.” The season has long passed.

Israel is a small country living on the knife’s edge, says Aaron David Miller in a Washington Post survey of experts this past Saturday. And any American who doesn’t understand this doesn’t get very far. Kissinger, Carter and James A. Baker, secretary of State in the George H.W. Bush administration, each “made clear that there was a cost to saying no to a superpower.”

But this administration has shown itself to be vulnerable in Copenhagen. Hillary was shocked and called the Israeli announcement “insulting.” As she and Obama were shocked at Copenhagen when the Chinese took the initiative in talks without even inviting them to the table. It strategically put the opponent (us) at a psychological disadvantage (the object of war, says Sun Tzu) and began to establish a new Chinese relationship in world authority and a new global paradigm.

Only Joe and Hillary would actually believe that the announcement of the settlements during Biden’s visit was completely accidental. Like the Chinese, the Israelis judge the strengths and weaknesses of the “superpower” — a phrase we don’t hear that much now — by its performance and personnel. Real Superpowers have real State Departments.

America has both hindered and advanced the progress of Israel and China these past 50 years. But in spite of what Bill and Hillary think of themselves, they are not existential necessities to Israel and China. And when they and the America they represent become historically irrelevant, the world moves on. But a flaky State Department — and one with political patronage rather than a diplomat at the top — presents opportunities (Sun Tzu 101). The Israelis and the Chinese have three more years to take advantage.

As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote this Sunday, what the Israelis did “played right into a question a lot of people are asking about the Obama team: how tough are these guys?” Not tough.

Relations with China entered a breach at Copenhagen. I am convinced that we are seeing a similar breach with Israel. There are two primary attitudes toward Israel in the U.S.: Tom Friedman’s out of New York and Pastor Hagee’s out of Texas. Success in the war in Iraq may have made the generally sympathetic New York state of mind hostile to Israel and world Jewry, as scholars and writers like Alan Dershowitz, Yechiel Eckstein, Malcolm Hoenlein and many others suggested in a conference on world Jewry at Queens College in 2007. Comparisons to Nazi Germany are common; rampant, said Dershowitz. This week, reflecting on Biden’s visit, the L.A. Times referred to Israel as an “apartheid” state.

Israel may be thinking of going alone. Both the Chinese and the Israelis seem to have correctly sized up this administration in, as Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) said this weekend, an entire year that “has gone to waste.”

Visit Mr. Quigley's website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.