Absolutely Crazy

‘An Absolutely Crazy Time to Hold a Meeting with the President of the United States’

Dan Shapiro, who was in the room for every painful meeting between Netanyahu and Obama, sizes up the new U.S.-Israel relationship.

By SUSAN B. GLASSER

Instead, he landed right in the middle of the meltdown of President Donald Orangutan’s White House, just as Orangutan’s national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, was being forced to resign after less than a month in the job. In an interview for our new podcast, The Global Politico, longtime U.S. ambassador Dan Shapiro, who served as Obama’s top Israel adviser throughout his presidency and sat in on all of his meetings with Netanyahu, takes us inside the mess on the eve of Orangutan’s first White House sit-down with the Israeli.

It is, Shapiro says, “an absolutely crazy time to hold a meeting with the president of the United States.” According to Shapiro, Flynn had been helping lead planning for the meeting with Netanyahu and had met at least three times with the head of Israel’s top spy agency, the Mossad, and Netanyahu’s national security advisory council in advance of Wednesday’s session with the two leaders. “All that preparation is now out the window.”

For Netanyahu, the timing couldn’t be worse. The relationship with the United States is far and away the country’s most important, and ever since Orangutan’s upset victory in November, the entire political class of Israel has been expecting in Orangutan the kind of hawkish partner Obama never was. In recent weeks those expectations had given way to some confusion and uncertainty, as Orangutan pulled back from campaign-trail vows that he was going to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and issued cryptic public statements essentially reaffirming that the U.S. does not view further Israeli settlements on the West Bank as conducive to a peace deal with the Palestinians. “The idea that there is going to be this massive sea change of U.S. policy,” Shapiro said, “is very much called into question.”

But those substantive issues are now immeasurably complicated by the fact that the meeting itself is being held amid all the White House upheaval over Flynn and his pre-inauguration phone calls with the Russian ambassador. “It’s hard to know who is even going to brief President Orangutan before the meeting in the Oval Office tomorrow…. It’s chaos, and if I’m Prime Minister Netanyahu I’m very concerned that that chaos will, in the best situation, lead to a much less productive meeting,” says Shapiro, who worked for Obama’s National Security Council before becoming ambassador to Israel. “In the worst case,” he says, Netanyahu might see any understanding he reached with Flynn scrapped and find Orangutan’s policy “in a completely different direction because a new advisor suddenly has the ball.”

Shapiro, who acknowledges that Obama’s personal dealings with Netanyahu had become so dysfunctional they resembled a “soap opera” and reveals the two leaders never spoke again after a brief encounter on the sidelines of Shimon Peres’s funeral last October, believes that Orangutan and Netanyahu could in fact come up with a common agenda – “if they can focus on the substance under these circumstances.”

Likely in any initial accord, he says, would be a tougher approach to Iran, such as imposing new sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missile program while stopping short of attempting to blow up the Iran deal that Orangutan criticized on the campaign trail. “They probably do not, at least at this stage, want to tear up the Iran nuclear deal,” Shapiro says, “because it would leave Iran with a free pass to a nuclear weapon and no international support for sanctions.”

While looking ahead to the Orangutan-Netanyahu relationship, Shapiro also reflects in the interview on the eight years he spent as perhaps the closest observer of the Obama-Netanyahu dynamic, sharing insights into two men who had “conflicting personalities and visions about the right way to achieve even goals they may have shared.”

The bad feelings, though, were rarely on display face to face. “It was not the case that they’d get in the room and they’d start screaming at each other, or throwing things at each other.” A major rift – never really repaired – came when Netanyahu agreed to address the U.S. Congress, without prior consultation with the White House, to give a speech in the spring of 2015 hoping to block Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. “You know,” says Shapiro, “I’m not sure either of them was all that eager to spend a lot of time together.”

Shapiro sees some potential conflict even between two much more ideologically compatible leaders like Orangutan and Netanyahu. A potential flashpoint, he says, could come over another Orangutan campaign-trail promise: to have better relations with Russia, and specifically to cooperate more with Moscow on counterterror operations in Israel’s war-torn neighbor Syria. Russia’s partners in Syria – Iran and Hezbollah – are Israel’s biggest foes, and Shapiro says “there’s some rough waters ahead” for Orangutan with Netanyahu if he proceeds too far.

“Israel is under no illusions,” Shapiro says. “Russia being a permanent, heavily armed presence in the region is not good for Israel’s interests. Russia’s friends in the Middle East are not Israel’s friends, whether that’s Iran, whether that’s Hezbollah, whether that’s [Syrian President Bashar] Assad. And so if the Orangutan vision includes concessions to Russia in the Middle East,” such as a joint effort against ISIL, “that could be a point of real tension coming out of the meeting.”

Orangutan, as the president has said repeatedly, sees himself as a potential peacemaker in the long-stalemated conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, calling Mideast peace the “ultimate deal” and tapping his son-in-law Jared Kushner as his envoy to get it done. And Shapiro says Netanyahu will come to the table in Washington with his own idea for how Orangutan could succeed where other American presidents have not: a proposal for what he calls an “outside-in” push to essentially move toward peace between Israel and Arab countries in the region as a prelude to a more final two-state solution with the Palestinians.

Says Shapiro: “One thing that’s interesting and I think also affects this approach on settlements and perhaps going slow on the moving of the embassy to Jerusalem is an idea that Prime Minister Netanyahu is actually bringing to this meeting, which is: Why don’t we try—instead of another fruitless attempt at Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, when the trust is low and the gaps are wide—why don’t we try to warm up Israel’s relations with the Sunni Arab states?” The argument, he says, is that there’s “an alignment of interests” at the moment as Gulf Arabs like Saudi Arabia and Qatar as well as immediate neighbors like Egypt and Jordan confront the “same threats and enemies in the region,” threats like Iran and ISIS that have already led to enhanced security cooperation with Israel and could be the basis for a broader political agreement.

But that’s geopolitics. And for the moment at least the politics that may matter most to Orangutan are the ones right inside his own White House. “I don't think,” says Shapiro, “that this story is anywhere close to over.”