All Talk

From the the pen of John Bolton, appearing in the New York Daily News:

Secretary of State Clinton's announcement last week that direct Israeli-Palestinian talks will recommence next month poses considerable risk for the United States. The odds are high these negotiations will fail. If so, and combined with U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq, President Obama's commitment to begin withdrawing NATO forces from Afghanistan next summer and Iran's continuing progress toward nuclear weapons, failure means that Washington's Middle East influence will decline.

The conventional wisdom is that it never hurts to talk, and that the United States loses nothing by pursuing an active "peace process," even without concrete results. This is badly wrong, because negotiations are never cost-free. In fact, diplomacy, like all human activity, has both costs and benefits, and the issue in any specific case is whether the benefits of negotiating outweigh the risks. And for Obama, acting as a facilitator or mediator, the key risk is that failure brings the perception of weakness and incompetence.

Whether it's the economy or international affairs we're talking about, "weakness and incompetence" are the defining characteristics of this administration.