If Barack Obama Were to Sell Israel Down the River, Hillary Would Make a Heck of a Salesperson.

Let me say this from the start, I have no idea what the Obama administration policy towards Israel and the U.S.-Israeli alliance will be. After all, during the campaign, he literally had one policy towards Jerusalem one day and a completely different one 24 hours later.

While the President-elect eventually won over most of the American Jewish community by throwing a few folks under the speeding bus and speaking in centrist tones, there have always been concerns by some Israel supporters about his close associations to fervent Palestinians like Rashid Khalidi and anti-Israel advisors like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Andrew Malley.

Caroline Glick does an excellent job of listing those concerns in the Jerusalem Post. You can read that here

If Glick is right and the United States is ready to change its stance towards Israel, this policy will need to be sold to an Israeli government that always puts the safety of its nation first (in other words, we’ll blow up Iranian nukes whether the U.S. likes it or not) and the American People. If he tries to sell that, the only person who could sell it is Hillary Clinton.

While we have had numerous posts on the political implications of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, we haven’t had much discussion about what her presence would mean to Obama administration policy around the world.

While the world is excited about Barack Obama’s election, he has no credibility on the world stage and has not yet earned the trust of our allies. Through her own work and the goodwill former President Clinton has abroad, Senator Clinton has that trust and credibility. Whatever President Obama wants to sell, he may just need Hillary to sell it.

The concern is, would he use her to try and sell this:

As for direct talks with Iran itself, the question immediately arises, what could Obama offer Teheran in exchange for an end to its nuclear program that Bush hasn’t already offered?

What it can offer is Israel.

Over the past few years, Obama’s top nuclear nonproliferation adviser, Joe Cirincione, has repeatedly advocated placing Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the negotiating table and offering it up in exchange for an Iranian pledge to end its nuclear program. Defense Secretary Robert Gates – whom Obama is considering retaining – insinuated in his 2006 confirmation hearings that Iran is only building nuclear weapons to defend itself against Israel. Gates, it should be recalled, has been instrumental in convincing Bush not only not to attack Iran’s nuclear installations, but not to support an Israeli attack against Iran’s nuclear installations.

What is profoundly distressing about statements by men like Cirincione and Gates is what they tell us about the strategic reasoning informing the incoming Obama administration.

Again, I have no idea if this is what an Obama administration will do. Would Senator Clinton as Secretary of State even go along with this kind of policy? What I do know is this, if the new President really wants to change our foreign policy approach radically, John Kerry or Bill Richardson won’t be able to do the job. They can’t walk into a room with other world leaders and say trust me. Hillary Clinton can. That may be why she really is being considered for the job.