Over the weekend, the incoming national security advisor Jake Sullivan spoke by phone with his Israeli counterpart, Meir Ben-Shabbat, and—according to a White House statement—expressed his commitment to “building on the success” of the Abraham Accords. This and other pronouncements suggest that, when it comes to foreign policy, the Biden administration won’t attempt to reverse everything done in the past four years. Yet the appointment to key positions of Obama-administration alumni responsible for the Iran deal, and the policy of creating “daylight” with Israel, is not reassuring.
But whatever policies emerge, one thing is clear: a return to 2016, desirable or not, is simply impossible, as Haviv Rettig Gur writes:
On the Palestinian front, there are easy and quick changes President Biden is likely to make: restoring aid funding, reopening and expanding a Palestinian consulate/interest section in the Jerusalem embassy, and so on. But . . . American policymakers will find conditions are now more resistant to American influence than in the past.
The Biden administration is quickly staffing its top posts with veterans of the Obama years. There’s institutional memory there, including the memory of President Obama’s frustration with the Palestinians’ inability to take advantage of his sympathy for their plight and willingness to impose pressure on Israel. The Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas proved unable to come to the negotiating table over ten long months of an Obama-imposed Israeli settlement freeze in 2010—a supposed trust-building measure—and that cost the Palestinian leadership a lot of credibility.
But there’s a broader issue at play as well:
America has swerved radically in its policies in recent years. On Iran, for example, Barack Obama led a dramatic break from the George W. Bush years, and Donald Trump an equally dramatic break from Obama, and Biden, many in Israel and the Gulf fear, may preside over yet another possible break with the past. . . . Strategic trust can’t be built on the basis of four-year American election cycles. It’s hard for allies to align themselves with American policy needs when it’s not clear America will be making the same demands just three years down the road.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/joe-biden-wants-to-erase-the-last-four-years-in-the-mideast-that-wont-be-easy/