Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post foresees these possibilities:
The best-case scenario is that Obama is willing to learn from the Bush
administration’s mistakes in attempting to appease the Palestinians,
the Iranians, and the North Koreans. Such an Obama administration would
recognize that its liberal formulations are fundamentally misguided and
abandon them in favor of reality-based policies. Given Obama’s stubborn
refusal to admit he was wrong about the surge and his insistence that
he can strike a deal with Ahmadinejad, the likelihood of this happening
is about zero.
The worst-case scenario is that Obama actually
bases his foreign policy on his ideological beliefs. If he does that,
he will leave Iraq prematurely and so enable Iran’s effective takeover
of the country through its Shiite proxies.
He will botch up Afghanistan and end up enabling an open jihadist takeover of nuclear-armed Pakistan.
He
will negotiate with Ahmadinejad, giving Iran the time and political
cover to complete its nuclear program and test its nuclear weapon, and
he will then refuse to assist Israel in attacking the Iranian nuclear
program thus escalating the threat of an Iranian nuclear attack on
Israel and Iranian nuclear blackmail of the Middle East and Europe.
He
will press Israel to curtail its counter-terror activities towards the
Palestinians and so enable a Hamas-Iranian takeover of the West Bank.
This in turn will precipitate the expansion of the missile war against
Israel from Gaza to the West Bank and so place Israel’s major urban
centers and its international airport at risk.
While he will
simply roll over a left-leaning Israeli government like the current one
while protesting his enduring commitment to Israel’s security, if a
Likud-led government is installed during his tenure and tries to
extricate Israel from the failed “land-for-peace,” policy paradigm
while gearing up to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, he will treat the
government with hostility and strengthen the position of Israel’s
enemies in his administration. This in turn will weaken the social and
political standing of American Jews who will find themselves under
unprecedented and unjustified suspicion of disloyalty due to their
support for Israel.
As in all things, the reality of an Obama
presidency is difficult to predict and may well fall somewhere between
these two extremes.