May 9, 2009

When President Obama meets Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, behind the diplomatic niceties, their encounter will have profound implications for confronting the threat of a nuclear Iran.

by Elliot Abrams, Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2009

First impressions matter. Experts say we size up new people in somewhere between 30 seconds and two minutes. So how will the first 30 seconds, and the rest of the meeting, go when President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sit down together on May 18?

The first thing to remember is that this meeting is far more important for Mr. Netanyahu than for Mr. Obama; Mr. Netanyahu has a lot more at stake. Foreign leaders come and go in the White House week in and week out, as fast as you can change the sheets in Blair House. (Blair House is for one-night stands, two if you’re lucky. When the King of Jordan dropped by for a whole week in late April he had to stay at a fancy hotel instead. Mr. Netanyahu will happily take Blair House, a physical token of his return to the prime minister’s office after 10 years in the wilderness.)

All those meetings with presidents, prime ministers and princes are valuable for the United States in many ways, yet none are really critical for our security and our future. For an Israeli prime minister, those relations are a matter of survival — political survival because his opponents at home will quickly jump on any perceived gap with Washington, and physical survival because Iran’s nuclear program tops Mr. Netanyahu’s agenda. (Continue Reading this Article)