Even President Obama's liberal base thinks he's mishandling Israel. With all the problems America has on its hands -- China, Iran, al Qaeda, deficit, health care, jobs -- why is the president spending even an ounce of his political capital on getting in a big fight with Israel and its American supporters?
Martin Peretz seems to assume it's intentional, but how does that explain Brazil, China, Turkey, and Europe, which the Obama administration has also managed to alienate in one way or another. As I put it earlier, whatever one's view of the underlying merits of all these cases, they do pose a certain challenge to the widely repeated narrative that America's problems with the world were all the result of President Bush's clumsy neo-conservative cowboy unilateralist foreign policy.