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Once upon a time there were two ways to answer the question. According to Realists, the Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend while idealists maintained the Enemy of my Enemy remains my Enemy. Now, under Barack Obama’s Presidency, we have a new approach, the Enemy of my Enemy is a Threat to National Security. At least that’s the case when it comes to Israel.

How else to understand Obama’s remarks last week that Mideast peace represented  “a vital national security interest” because fighting between Israel and its neighbors “ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.” Aside from the fact that no American soldiers have bled on Israeli battlefields, there is some merit in this view. Clearly, the world, no less than the region,  would benefit from a peaceful resolution to the conflict. The problem arises from a not so subtle shift in American attitudes toward Israel.

American Presidents always pressure Israel to make sacrifices in the interest of peace. They do this because, for the most part, only Israel is willing to make the necessary gestures. They expect Israel to participate in the charade that peace is actually achievable. But Obama has changed the story line. No longer are the Palestinians willing to make peace as soon as we figure out the magic formula.  Today it is Israeli intransigence which stands in the way of a peace agreement.

This shift in American policy probably owes more to Obama’s arrogance than any specific poison he may have inherited from his anti-Semitic spiritual mentor. Betraying a woeful ignorance of recent history as well as overweening hubris, Obama presumed it would be easy to achieve peace between Israel and her Arab rivals. After all, this was a man whose very presence causes sea levels to stabilize and enables the planet to start healing itself. With achievements like this on his resume, how hard would it be to resolve that formerly intractable conflict?

Very hard indeed, it turns out. Obama’s contribution to the process betrayed his bias. Under American pressure, the Israeli President has publicly accepted a two state solution, and substantially curtailed settlement construction. In return, the Palestinians refuse to participate even in indirect talks (previously known as shuttle diplomacy). Far from resolving the conflict, Obama’s bumbling has set the peace process back by decades.

In keeping the “Chicago way of politics,” Obama’s response has been to vilify yet another ally. Israel, once considered an ally, is no longer even the Enemy of our Enemy. It is now a threat to our national security. That nation stands on the brink of American-sanctioned destruction.

In fact, Obama might dispute the underlying premise, that Israel is the Enemy of our Enemy, because that would presuppose that Israel’s enemy, radical Islam, is in fact our enemy. While most rational observers would unhesitatingly concur that radical Islam is our enemy, there is little other than the occasional boiler-plate sop to foreign policy realists to suggest that Obama actually believes this to be the case.

Beginning with his making obeisance to the Muslim world from a pulpit in Cairo, through his panegyrics to the “Islamic Republic of Iran” during his annual celebration of the Persian festival of Nowruz, the American President  has gone out of his way to flatter the most frenzied elements of radical Islam. He wants to be friends with a brutally repressive regime. He finds common ground with theocratic dictators who believe earthquakes are caused by immodestly dressed women.

Obama can’t bring himself to condemn thugs who beat freedom seeking children to death, but he can publicly insult and scold a democratically elected leader who neglected to halt a bureaucratic licensing process during an American blowhard’s visit to his capital. He is willing to toss Israel under the bus in order to appease Iran, and America’s few remaining allies are beginning to wonder, as French President Nicolas Sarkozy did so famously last fall, in what sort of fantasy world the American President dwells.