It would be hard to find someone whose background better suited him to write about the U.S.-Israel relationship than Dennis Ross. A long-time diplomat and policymaker, he has been involved in Arab-Israeli negotiations in every administration from Carter to Obama, with a single time-out under the first Bush. His new book does not disappoint: Doomed to Succeed devotes a pithy chapter to each administration, explaining its policies and the reasoning behind them.
Ross describes a recurring pattern wherein a president with warm feelings toward Israel tends to be replaced by a chillier executive, only to be replaced in turn by a friend. Thus Truman (friendly) is replaced by Eisenhower (not so much) then by Kennedy (who initiated arms sales), Johnson (also friendly), but then Nixon-Kissinger (a Machiavellian combination in outmaneuvering Israel), and so on.U.S.-Israel relations have hit a nadir with the current president. Ross quotes National Security Adviser Susan Rice playing the race card as she tells ADL chief Abe Foxman that Benjamin Netanyahu “did everything but use ‘the N-word’ in describing the president.” Yet the changes at the top matter less than they might seem to. Ross’s chief contribution is to show how certain unchanging and misguided assumptions have driven U.S. policy since Israel’s birth and remain idées fixes in the minds of U.S. policymakers to this day. He writes, “I was struck by the similarity of the arguments. I found them recycled, often (to my amazement) couched in the exact same terms.”
