Whither America after the Gaza fiasco?

As Israel stumbles to limit the fallout from its foolish, violent handling of the Gaza flotilla incident, a larger question is what the fiasco means for the United States in the Middle East. Beyond the negative impact on peace negotiations, Washington must determine how to defend its interests amid the current transmutations in the region.

The “peace process” is very nearly dead. It’s almost impossible to imagine that Israelis and Palestinians will conclude a settlement in the foreseeable future, and the problem goes beyond the negotiators on each side. The obstacles are structural: There is no will or trust in Israel to make the concessions a settlement requires, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not jeopardize his coalition to pursue an uncertain peace. And Hamas has the ability to undermine any agreement with Israel reached by the Palestinian Authority, while the Arab states are too bankrupt politically to prevent this.

Efforts by the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, to establish the foundations of a state are laudable, but frail. However, the Israelis cannot and will not see that the success of his endeavor would help define a more promising outlook for them. Today, Israel is devoid of any vision, of any sense of how the country might integrate into the Middle East. And across the aisle is a Palestinian partner who, unless it can produce an advantageous end-game soon, will see its standing disintegrate to the advantage of Hamas and its allies.

As the United States watches this shipwreck, it seems helpless to prevent it and has no backup plan to defend its own aims in the region. Palestinian-Israeli peace is desirable, and President Barack Obama was right to explore ways to restart negotiations; but now is the time to reassess, events in recent days bringing home the reason why. What is Obama’s Plan B? Israel is becoming more isolated internationally by the day; America’s Arab allies, particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are weaker than ever; and even the United States itself is losing its primacy in the Middle East by pursuing an elusive victory in Afghanistan and abandoning a rare success in Iraq.

If one had to wager on the shape of the region in the coming years, it would be reasonable to put money on America’s enemies. Iran, Syria, armed Islamist groups such as Hizbullah and Hamas, even American allies such as Turkey that have chosen to fundamentally overhaul their connection with Washington and Israel, are showing themselves to be far more adept at playing to Middle Eastern vicissitudes than the Obama administration. A new regional order is taking shape, and Washington is still using weapons from the old order.

One of those weapons, the peace process, is almost worthless. Engagement of Iran and Syria, for a moment Barack Obama’s illusory silver bullet, has backfired. The cretinous American obsession with being loved by Arabs and Muslims, expressed through the president’s Ankara and Cairo speeches, has prompted no discernible response. And even international cooperation to contain Iran and its nuclear program has, until now, only bought Tehran more time.

So what is Washington to do? For starters, it has to reach realistic conclusions about where Palestinian-Israeli negotiations are heading. If a settlement is a strategic imperative, then Obama must use all the tools at his disposal to bring about an agreement, including withholding credit guarantees to Israel. But if he won’t do so (and such a step would probably just harden Israeli rejection of American conditions while provoking outrage in Congress), then it’s time to put peace negotiations on the backburner and focus on consolidating American power elsewhere to address the main threat to the status quo in the Middle East: the emergence of a nuclear Iran.

And the only conceivable way of doing that is to reevaluate the relationship with Iraq and develop a strategic relationship with Baghdad that takes priority over Washington’s ties with its other Arab allies. This does not mean Obama will need to discontinue the American military withdrawal from Iraq. On the contrary. The point is to build up an alliance with an Iraq not dependant on the United States, that can defend itself against Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, that is also pluralistic and can put to good use its vast oil wealth. Such an ally, located at the heart of the Middle East, would be valuable to Washington and represent the only serious Arab counterweight to Iran.

For some reason this proposal is considered bizarre for being so different from what we have today. Yet it is no more bizarre than the Syrian decision to develop a strategic relationship with Iran against its Arab brethren; or than Turkey’s determination to strengthen its regional bona fides by becoming a loud defender of the Palestinian cause and a harsh critic of Israel – moves partly designed by the ruling AKP party to place its domestic Turkish rivals, above all the army (the principal guardian of the Israel affiliation), on the defensive. What is so peculiar about grasping that regional dynamics are shifting, therefore that Washington must reinvent itself in the Middle East?

The United States must also prepare to abandon Afghanistan. Obama’s “right war” is every day proving to be a wrongheaded war, an expensive, all-consuming conflict that is distracting Washington from the more important task of neutralizing Iran’s expanding power in the Gulf and the Levant; worse, a conflict that Iran can use to bleed the United States in defense of its objectives in those regions.

The American approach to the Middle East, based as it is on familiar, static policies that have failed to accommodate to new regional forces, is only marginalizing Washington. Barack Obama the much-vaunted visionary is showing himself to be perilously myopic.