WarSclerotic

Much has been written about the ups and downs in the relationship between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama, but a new profile piece in The Atlantic provides a unique glimpse into the tensions between the two and gives Obama a chance to reflect on his failures in the Middle East.

The article, titled “The Obama Doctrine” and written by journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, looks to sum up Obama’s foreign policy and finds that the Middle East does not top his list of priorities.

Goldberg recalls a meeting between Netanyahu and Obama in 2011, which Obama remembers having gone poorly. According to the article, Netanyahu began the meeting with “something of a lecture” about the dangers and difficulties faced by Israel in the Middle East.

“Obama felt that Netanyahu was behaving in a condescending fashion,” Goldberg writes. At one point during the meeting, Obama interrupted Netanyahu and said, “Bibi, you have to understand something. I’m the African American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.”

According to Goldberg, Obama reached a number of conclusions about the world and America’s role in it during his time in office. “The first is that the Middle East is no longer terribly important to American interests,” he writes, adding that “the innate American desire to fix the sorts of problems that manifest themselves most drastically in the Middle East inevitably leads to warfare…”

Even the part of the article that deals with the Islamic State group states the Obama doesn’t believe in getting involved with the Middle East. “The rise of the Islamic State deepened Obama’s conviction that the Middle East could not be fixed — not on his watch, and not for a generation to come,” Goldberg writes. The article then recalls an anecdote shared by Obama’s advisers, wherein he compared Islamic State to the Joker from the 2008 Batman movie “The Dark Knight.”

According to the article, Obama said, “There’s a scene in the beginning in which the gang leaders of Gotham are meeting. These are men who had the city divided up. They were thugs, but there was a kind of order. Everyone had his turf. And then the Joker comes in and lights the whole city on fire. ISIL [Islamic State] is the Joker. It has the capacity to set the whole region on fire. That’s why we have to fight it.”

“Israel is not the problem”

If there is a country that is subject to a lot of criticism from Obama, it’s Saudi Arabia. Goldberg cites a conversation between Obama and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in which the latter asked Obama, “Aren’t the Saudis your friends?” Obama responded by saying, “It’s complicated.”

The article then quotes Obama saying that the Saudis should “share” the region with Iran: “The competition between the Saudis and the Iranians — which has helped to feed proxy wars and chaos in Syria and Iraq and Yemen — requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace.”

As the interview goes on, it seems that Obama regrets some of the decisions he has made regarding the Middle East. For example, Goldberg writes, “When I asked Obama recently what he had hoped to accomplish with his Cairo reset speech, he said that he had been trying — unsuccessfully, he acknowledged — to persuade Muslims to more closely examine the roots of their unhappiness.”

Obama is then quoted as saying, “My argument was this: Let’s all stop pretending that the cause of the Middle East’s problems is Israel.”

Regarding Syria, which takes up a significant part of the article, Obama believes that America was right not to intervene. “He was tired of watching Washington unthinkingly drift toward war in Muslim countries,” Goldberg writes.