Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institute is an unlikely voice to join the cacophony of voices slamming Israel's Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, for his upcoming speech before Congress on March 3.
After all, he founded a right-wing policy center with Bill Kristol, worked on shaping John McCain's hawkish foreign policy in 2008, and advised Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State. However, this is just what he's done in The Washington Post in a piece entitled "At What Price, Netanyahu?"
Kagan's piece is a brutal and on-point dismanling of Netanyahu and GOP leaders, focusing upon their solipsistic motivations and the unprecedented chutzpah Netanyahu's demonstrating while tearing at the fabric of Israel-U.S. relations. Near the end of his piece, Kagan rightly notes that, from this point forward, inviting foreign leaders will become one more partisan card to play in future foreign policy fights. It's a dangerous hand to start playing, and one Netanyahu and GOP leaders have decided to deal.
Is anyone thinking about the future? From now on, whenever the opposition party happens to control Congress — a common enough occurrence — it may call in a foreign leader to speak to a joint meeting of Congress against a president and his policies. Think of how this might have played out in the past. A Democratic-controlled Congress in the 1980s might, for instance, have called the Nobel Prize-winning Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to denounce President Ronald Reagan’s policies in Central America. A Democratic-controlled Congress in 2003 might have called French President Jacques Chirac to oppose President George W. Bush’s impending war in Iraq.
Does that sound implausible? Yes, it was implausible — until now. Now we are sailing into uncharted waters. Those who favor having Netanyahu speak may imagine this is an extraordinary situation requiring extraordinary measures, that one side is so clearly right, the other so clearly wrong. Yet that is often how people feel about the crisis of their time. We can be sure that in the future the urgency will seem just as great. The only difference between then and now is that today, bringing a foreign leader before Congress to challenge a U.S. president’s policies is unprecedented. After next week, it will be just another weapon in our bitter partisan struggle.
Kagan's voice joins an opposition to the speech which is now snowballing, with the momentum to reject it entirely picking up speed. Indeed,
40 members of Congress are now boycotting the speech, and that number will grow further – perhaps dramatically – as Tuesday approaches.
One of those who recently announced they will be boycotting Netanyahu's speech is Senator Tim Kaine, whom many consider to be high up on Hillary Clinton's list of potential VP candidates. Someone in such a position would not break from "nervous" Democrats (as David Weigel calls them) to skip the speech if it didn't promise potential political benefit. Which is what makes Kaine's announcement, citing Netanyahu's election ambitions as reason enough to skip the speech, so significant.
Publicly breaking from Israel on a foreign policy matter has now become a political gambit worth taking for Kaine after John Boehner's dealings with Netanyahu behind President Obama's back. You can be sure that, if others are not yet beginning to feel the same as Kaine, the environment is being established for them to feel so inclined in the future.
And this too is unprecedentd in contemporary politics.
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David Harris-Gershon is author of the memoir What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?, recently published by Oneworld Publications.