"Judgment Days," David Remnick

Courtesy Daring Fireball, a pointer to a New Yorker essay by David Remnick about the unrest in Egypt. It's short, reflective, and useful for understanding the limits of what the U.S. can do. Our role is circumscribed as much by history as by the specific conditions on the ground.

Further to my entry concerning Israeli opinion of Obama on Egypt, let me quote Remnick:

In diplomacy, the tension between moral and strategic considerations is always acute and often shaming—rarely more so than in the American relationship with Egypt.

Israel's only concern is strategic, but the U.S., by virtue of the myths it has told itself and everyone else for decades, has to honor the moral sphere as well. Israel, of all nations, ought to understand this, since U.S. domestic support for it has always rested on both.

On the domestic front, and perhaps internationally as well, Obama has been well aware of the tension between morality and power politics. As Remnick puts it, "He has favored ... a double game of tempered public rhetoric and concerted diplomacy, and this has, at times, thwarted the desire for a clarion American voice."

I have a deep personal preference for underpromising and overdelivering, so I appreciate Obama's approach. Americans have a bad habit of insisting that their leaders make large promises no one could keep, and then lashing out against them when the promises go unfulfilled. I'm trying to savor the novelty of a leader who doesn't play that game (at least, not as much as most), because being the fickle and shortsighted people we are, I doubt I'll see another such leader anytime soon.

It's almost trite to end every discussion of the Middle East with some reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Remnick follows the crowd without really convincingly tying the reference to Egypt proper. However, his mention of settlement building reminded me of something I meant to mention in the last entry, that Israel's security would be greatly enhanced if its government were not beholden to the most aggressively expansionist religious factions of its society, the ones that insist on inflaming Arab opinion by building settlements in disputed areas. Religion in the Middle East does not unite, it divides and antagonizes. The sooner everyone recognizes that, the sooner that troubled region can come to terms with the many overlapping and conflicting claims to territory, and with the lives lost and broken by the fighting.

(And now I've followed the crowd, too.)