David Ignatius is wrong about what is possible with Mitt Romney vis-a-vis Israel.
The biggest difference between these candidates on the Middle East, when you boil down all the other rhetoric, is probably on Israel. Romney said it pretty clearly: “The world must never see any daylight between our two nations.” Taken at face value, that seems to mean the United States shouldn’t take public positions that are different from Israel’s. That’s a formulation that few Republican foreign policy leaders would agree with. Among those GOP luminaries who very deliberately opened “daylight” were Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Brent Scowcroft, James Baker and Condoleezza Rice.
Romney can’t seriously mean that on all major issues affecting Israel, he will defer to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? No nation hands over policy choices to another, even to its best friend.
I understand that no one ever got rich taking Mitt Romney at his word, but what else do we have to go on? During the Republican primaries, Mitt Romney told Newt Gingrich that he should pre-clear any rhetoric about the Palestinian question with Israel’s leaders.
“Before I made a statement of that nature, I’d get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say: ‘Would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do?’”
That sounds more extreme than Tony Blair’s relationship to George W. Bush in the lead-up to the war in Iraq. Romney won’t even talk about the Middle East without getting his talking points from his “friend Bibi Netanyahu.” Call it pandering if you want, but it’s poodlesque any way you look at it.
