President Obama will speak in Cairo tomorrow in a speech that the White House bills as evidence of a major outreach to Arab and Islamic states. At the same time, the Obama administration is privately threatening Israel with a host of political and diplomatic sanctions should it not acquiesce fully to President Obama’s demands on the peace process. In recent days, for example, the Obama administration has declined Israeli requests to allow it to purchase AH-64D Apache Longbow attack helicopters that the Israel Defense Force uses in its counterterrorism operations. However, the White House has informed Congress that it intends to sell Egypt these helicopters.
Realists of the Stephen Walt–John Mearsheimer school, and ideologues of its corollary Pat Buchanan–Chas Freeman camp, argue that support for Israel is not a U.S. interest. It’s a popular argument in Obama’s circles, but previous administrations have learned it to be a false one; Arab states, historically, have been, at best, unreliable allies to the United States.
An examination of Arab and Islamic state voting practices just last year at the United Nations General Assembly illustrates this. The vote tallies include all votes, and not just those related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel voted with the United States not only more than any Arab or Islamic country, but also more than any other country in the world, including Australia and countries in Europe, South America, and Africa.
Source: U.S. State Department, Voting Practices in the United Nations, 2008.
What we basically see, then, is President Obama pandering to a block of countries that finds little common ground with the United States on any number of issues that the United States defines as its interests. In contrast, we see punitive action taken against a country that has been a more loyal ally than any other in recent decades. What we don’t see is any demand by President Obama for Arab and Islamic states to reciprocate support. In recent years, the United States has learned that it has too few true friends in the world. Rather than show adversarial states that bilateral support is the benefit of friendship with the United States, we sacrifice friends to the demands of adversarial states on the theory that it begets goodwill when both history and metric charts show the opposite. Funny how realism works.