American Incredibility and Israel

Considering the Obama administration's
ever wobblier attempt to impose "crippling sanctions" on Iran, the
New York Times' David Sanger recently wrote, "The delays and the potential
for a substantially
watered-down resolution, Mr. Obama's allies say, have put the
administration's
credibility on the line in one of its biggest foreign policy
challenges."

Credibility.
Washington
policymakers have been in search of it, have even fought wars in its
name, for
half a century now. In the Vietnam era, realizing that our victory
weapons, nuclear bombs, were essentially too powerful to use, American
strategic
thinkers sought others ways to project, if not power commensurate with
our
arsenal, then an image of power commensurate with it -- "an image of
vast
national strength and of unwavering determination to use that strength
in world
affairs," as Jonathan Schell explained in his remarkable book from that
era,
Time of
Illusion. Unfortunately, when you put your faith in
"credibility," you also offer power to others in whose eyes you must, of
course,
be credible.

By that standard, in the
age of
Obama, the United
States has reached a curious moment of rising
incredibility on the global stage. Indeed, nothing illustrated this
onrushing state more vividly than the whack the Israelis recently gave
Vice
President Joe Biden -- and so the global image of American power. While

Biden was in Israel paying
homage to that country and trying to jumpstart the "peace process,"
Israel announced a new
building program in East Jerusalem. The
news wasn't in itself particularly startling -- such building in
occupied lands,
after all, has been a non-stop reality of Israeli policy for years. New

was the stunning timing of the announcement, the way the leadership of a
country
remarkably dependent on American power and money evidently had no
hesitation in
administering a humiliating credibility-drubbing to Mr. Number Two.

Most observers have discussed
this
startling act largely in terms of the Middle East, but it was no less
striking
if you were sitting in
Beijing,
wondering how exactly to deal with U.S.
complaints
about the value of the yuan, or in Moscow, where Russian leaders, during
a visit
by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the following week, duplicated the

Israelis' act. They announced
that they, too, were about to do a little more
building; they were
going to have Iran's first nuclear power
plant at Bushehr up and running this summer, another
credibility-drubbing that
was more striking for its timing than its substance. Nor were they
alone. As Jay Solomon and Peter Spiegel of the Wall Street
Journal point out, there has been "a string of public
rebukes of U.S.
foreign policy in recent weeks," including by Brazilian President Lula
da Silva,
who spoke out against Iranian sanctions (also during a Clinton visit),
and
Syrian president Bashar Assad, who appeared with Iran's Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad and
the head of Hezbollah, "defying U.S. calls to loosen ties with Tehran
and the
militants." The Israelis, the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese...
when
the Europeans start to say "no," and make
announcements meant to sting while
American officials are visiting, you'll know that we're in a new
world.

In the meantime, consider Prime
Minister
Netanyahu's slap (and his reiteration of Israeli building policy in his
speech at the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee convention yesterday) a measure of a
Washington with two
draining wars and a host of domestic problems that finds itself
increasingly
incapable of projecting an image of "credibility" abroad. Fifty years
ago,
with the invention of what Schell called "the doctrine of credibility,"
the
U.S. superpower actually gave others
the power to judge. Now, the judgments are beginning to roll in. As
TomDispatch regular Tony Karon, who runs the provocative Rootless

Cosmopolitan website, makes clear, at least when it comes to
Israel,
more imagery, no matter how credible, or even more angry words alone,
won't help
to change
that.