Old Questions On Robert Malley Are New Again

I ran into this short piece at Tablet, one of the sites that broke the Malley-Tabatabai story the week before the Hamas invasion of Israel, which points out that they'd been contrarian over US policy over Israel and Iran all along, with links to prove it. One of those links, from May 2021, is The Realignment: In the Middle East, Biden is finishing what Obama started. And his top advisers are all on board. A little searching indicates that this was re-linked frequently at the time, but it's gone dormant until the new questions have come up about Blinken and Malley.

Is the new president [Biden] forging his own path in the Middle East, or is he following in the footsteps of Obama? Until now, those who feared that his presidency might become the third term of Obama fixed their wary eyes on Robert Malley, the president’s choice as Iran envoy. When serving in the Obama White House, Malley helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, which sought accommodations with Tehran that came at the expense of America’s allies in the Middle East. In a revealing Foreign Affairs article, written in 2019, Malley expressed regret that Obama failed to arrive at more such accommodations. The direction of Obama’s policy was praiseworthy, Malley wrote, but his “moderation” was the enemy of his project. Being “a gradualist,” he presided over “an experiment that got suspended halfway through.”

Malley, the article leads one to assume, is now advising Biden to go all the way—and fast. But surely it is the president, not his Iran envoy, who determines the direction and pace of policy. Over the course of a career in Washington spanning nearly half a century, Biden has never cut a radical profile. Nor have Sullivan or Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The presence of this pair at Biden’s side signaled to many that Malley would not drive Iran policy. Shortly after the election, a veteran Washington insider noted to a journalist that “Blinken and Sullivan are certainly from the more moderate wing of the party, and that is reassuring.”

The piece goes on to tease out just what the "experiment" Malley referred to in Foreign Affairs involved:

To what, precisely, was Robert Malley referring when he spoke of Obama’s half-completed “experiment”?

If you answered “the JCPOA [the Iran nuclear deal],” you got it wrong.

If you said “improving relations with Iran,” you scored much higher, but you still failed.

The president’s “ultimate goal,” Malley wrote, was “to help the [Middle East] find a more stable balance of power that would make it less dependent on direct U.S. interference or protection.” That is a roundabout way of saying that Obama dreamed of a new Middle Eastern order—one that relies more on partnership with Iran.

It then ties Malley's policy prescriptions to Jake Sullivan, Biden's current national security adviser:

In May 2020, six months after Malley penned his Foreign Affairs essay, Jake Sullivan, writing as an adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign, co-authored his own article laying out a Middle East strategy. The goal, he explained, is to be “less ambitious” militarily, “but more ambitious in using U.S. leverage and diplomacy to press for a de-escalation in tensions and eventually a new modus vivendi among the key regional actors.” If we substitute the word “balance” for “modus vivendi,” and if we recognize that “de-escalation” and “diplomacy” require cooperation with Iran, then Sullivan’s vision is identical to Obama’s “ultimate goal” as described by Malley. Sullivan emphasized that equivalence when he defined the objective of his plan as “changing the United States’ role in a regional order it helped create.”

The piece goes on to argue that the Obama-Biden administrations have been remarkably secretive about the overall initiative, which it calls "The Realignment", which can be expressed as follows:

First, allow Tehran an unfettered nuclear weapons program by 2031; second, end the sanctions on the Iranian economic and financial system; third, implement a policy of accommodation of Iran and its tentacles in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon; and fourth, force that policy on America’s closest allies. If the United States follows those commandments, then a kind of natural regional balance will fall into place. The United States, so the thinking goes, will then finally remove itself from the war footing that traditional allies, with their anti-Iran agenda, have forced on it. Thereafter, diplomatic engagement with Iran will be the primary tool needed to maintain regional stability.

The piece then ties the Realignment to US domestic policies and the future of Zionism, prophetically it would seem:

Contemporary progressivism is, shall we say, less than enthusiastic about Zionism. One of its cherished goals is to reduce American support for Israel, and the Realignment helps it realize that ambition—but it does so slyly. It refrains from making its anti-Zionism explicit for fear of stirring up opposition to the project among the largely pro-Israel American people. But by upgrading relations with Iran, the Realignment perforce downgrades the Jewish state.

How Israel responds to this downgrading will depend on how its prolonged domestic crisis, marked by four national elections in two years’ time, finally gets resolved. Netanyahu haters in the Biden administration will be sure to delight if he is toppled from power and succeeded by someone with less foreign policy experience, such as Yair Lapid, the chairman of the Yesh Atid party. The White House believes that a post-Netanyahu Israel will work to accommodate its main demands. If, however, Netanyahu remains in power (or if he is succeeded by someone with a similar disposition on Iran), then the Israelis will not readily accept the diminished role assigned to them by the Realignment.

This, published in May 2021, puts us right into October 2023. Netanyahu, closely aligned with Donald Trump, returned as prime minister in December 2022. Indeed, as the Jerusalem Post observed at the time,

As election results heralded Benjamin Netanyahu’s amazing comeback, Yair Lapid and Naftali’s Bennett’s government of change let out its final breath.

Less than a year and a half after they made history and ended Netanyahu’s 12-year consecutive rule, history ironically struck back: Bennett, who retired after heading the government for 12 months, earned the dubious title of the prime minister with the shortest tenure ever, breaking Ehud Barak’s previous dishonorable record from the beginning of the millennium. Lapid, however, will end up serving for only 4 months, thus replacing his partner Bennett on the top of the short list.

Netanyahu, on the other hand, continues to break his own records, triumphantly approaching his sixth term, accumulating even more years as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, a title he already holds.

And it appears that the Hamas invasion earlier this month will cement Netanyahu's position now in a national unity government that will last as long as the Hamas war continues. Little is being said right now about what's going on in US-Israeli relations, but the tension that I think was evident in the brief exchange between Biden and Netanyahu in New York, when Netanyahu pointedly referred to "good Irish whiskey" and Biden crossed himself, suggests that Netanyahu, who spent time in the US between the 1950s and 1970s, is a savvy political player in the US environment as well as in Israel.

The Hamas war has put Netanyahu into the US election just as the progressives have aligned themselves with Hamas. This has the Democrats in a bind. Right now, Netanyahu is calling the shots.

The prediction in the 2021 Tablet piece, that a Netanyahu return to power wouldn't be a good sign for the Realignment -- or for the progressivist agenda behind it -- does point to an unresolved question. Malley, a direct report to Antony Blinken, a childhood friend of Blinken, and an Obama-Sullivan protégé, lost his security clearance and was put on leave from the State Department in a series of steps last spring, well before the Hamas attack, which itself appears to have come as a surprise to all Western parties. But the Tablet piece suggests that Blinken is on board with the Malley agenda notwithstanding.

What was going on there? I very much doubt l'affaire Malley signaled any serious Blinken departure from the Realignment, which has been central to progressivist Democrat policies. We still have a great deal to learn.