By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Though the economy will keep the next president of the United States up at night (if it doesn’t already), improving America’s standing on the world stage will also have to take priority. The world, particularly in the Middle East, is a dangerous place right now, according to Dr. Anthony Lake, who was national security adviser during President Bill Clinton’s first term and now serves as senior Middle East policy adviser for Democratic candidate Barack Obama.
Lake spoke with JTNews about the state of the world — the Middle East in particular — while in Seattle on Sept. 20–21 to raise funds for Obama from Jewish supporters.
“If we asked ourselves one question: Is the Middle East in better shape or worse shape than eight years ago, I think the answer is clear,” Lake said. “We really need to change our approach.”
With the elevation of Tzipi Livni to prime minister of Israel — assuming she can cobble together a coalition — Lake believes a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians might be possible. There are a lot of barriers in the near-term, however.
In a Sept. 29 article in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Achronot, outgoing prime minister Ehud Olmert said that Israel would have to give up the West Bank and, possibly, the Golan Heights for peace deals with the Palestinians and Syria, respectively. While those statements could help to move a peace deal forward, Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who would likely win a national election if Livni can’t form a coalition, said on the Israeli news site Walla! that he would continue to allow building in West Bank settlements. Hamas, in the meanwhile, continues to resist moving forward on any sort of peace deal.
“In the talks for a two-state solution with the Palestinians, it’s hard to know how much progress there might be over the next few months, given the political difficulties on each side,” Lake said.
Though Lake believes the window on creating two states has not closed, “it hasn’t widened, unhappily over recent years, but Tzipi Livni certainly seems committed to pursuing it. [Palestinian President] Mahmoud Abbas seems interested in pursuing it,” he said.
“[Obama] has pledged he will personally engage in Israel’s efforts to reach peace,” Lake added, and that includes actively supporting Israeli talks with Syria.
While he noted that current president George W. Bush took heat from former supporters for encouraging talks with Syria, “he did change his position and gave Israel the green light to talk to the Syrians, which is what Obama was saying then we should be doing.”
Talks between the two countries have been mediated by Turkey, and not the United States, which U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) said, when he spoke at an Obama event on Mercer Island in July, was a sign of America’s diplomatic weakness under the Bush administration. Support for Syria talks would not necessarily continue in a McCain administration, however.
The JTA wire service reported on Sept. 21 that an adviser for Republican presidential candidate John McCain, Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told participants at a retreat that talking with Syria could have a negative effect on Lebanon’s fragile government, and expressed doubts that Syria could detach itself from Iran’s sphere of influence.
In confronting Iran and its nuclear program, Obama has stated throughout his candidacy that the U.S. should be holding high-level diplomatic talks with Iran, though he has not always been consistent in how those talks should take place.
Lake suggested that to deal with Iran, confrontation be forceful, direct and with a very specific message: “To go to the Iranians with the weight of the United States at the table and present them with a very stark choice. Either they can abandon their nuclear program and move away from terrorism, or they can go on as now and face even tougher sanctions. It is not weakness to talk to them. It is toughness.”
Where Lake may contradict his candidate’s most recent position, stated in the Sept. 26 debate, is in the level of negotiations with Iran. In responding to his own adviser Henry Kissinger’s assertion that high-level diplomatic talks with Iran should be held without pre-conditions, McCain cast presidential-level talks with Iran as giving legitimacy to the enemy. Obama denied that the talks should be at the presidential level, but, according to Lake the week before, “there is no substitute for presidential involvement.”
Yet, he cautioned, discussion is a must.
“There is still time to try to find a diplomatic answer here,” Lake said, “the diplomacy has to be backed by power. All the options have to be on the table, and we have to find stronger sanctions.”
But putting pressure on Iran means not waiting for a new president to take office. The Europeans, he said, have put forward proposals that should move ahead now.
“You’d be in a much stronger position to rally the world if you had made a genuine effort at a diplomatic solution than if you hadn’t,” he said.
At the same time as the Middle and Far East continue to generate heat, Lake said global warming as a foreign policy issue is one either an Obama or McCain administration will have to pay much more attention to than the Bush administration has.
“I think there are two extremely important reasons that we need to become far more energy independent,” Lake said. “One is diplomatic, because when we rely on foreign governments for energy decisions, we lose leverage. Secondly, because of climate change…. I believe global warming over the next 30 to 40 years is the most important foreign policy issue that we face.”
In addition to what he called “a devastating impact” on economies around the world, by 2050 climate change could cause as many as 250 million people to face famine and become refugees.
“We need to do something not only about our own carbon emissions,” Lake said, “but unless we are doing more here at home we aren’t going to be able to show any new leadership when going to countries like China and India, who argue now that, ‘Look, you grew your economy with a huge carbon footprint, now we have the right to do the same.’”