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President Obama's push for a 90-day settlement freeze is doomed to failure. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pulled the wool over Obama's eyes in landing $3 billion worth of fighter jets as well as a promise to veto any nasty UN resolutions aimed at Israel over the next year. It's a measly return for the investment that Obama is making. After three months expire, peace between the Israelis and Palestinians will be further away than ever. Like Daniel Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins, Obama is making one bad investment after another, while his fans become increasingly disgruntled.

My fellow blogger Paul Pillar essentially makes the above case, and does so persuasively. All too persuasively. But perhaps there is a case to be made for Obama's approach--it's a Hail Mary pass. Nothing else has worked in the Middle East. American president after president has attempted to bring about peace and failed. If Obama's attempt to break the log-jam doesn't work--and it probably won't--no one can, as Pillar himself notes, say that he didn't try.

But the real wrinkle in this drama remains Netanyahu. My surmise is that Netanyahu does want a deal. He goes down in history as a nullity if he doesn't obtain one. The only way he can match, or even surpass, the record of the founding fathers, and mother, of Israel is to reach some kind of accommodation. He has every incentive, as did Ariel Sharon, to betray his followers. Which is why he didn't "fleece" Obama, as PIllar vividly puts it. Instead, Obama provided Netanyahu with political cover by handing him a sweet deal. Yes, Netanyahu could dissolve his cabinet and form a more mainstream one. But his aim may be to keep a right-wing cabinet together as long as possible and use it, in turn, as cover for a deal with the Palestinians.

There's not much doubt how the U.S. and Israeli governments see their relative bargaining strength—not the total potential strength that each side could bring to bear if there were sufficient will, but instead the way the bargaining relationship works in practice—if the latest deal the Obama administration has cut with Benjamin Netanyahu is any indication. Let's review the balance sheet. Netanyahu agreed to propose to his cabinet—and cabinet approval may still be in doubt, with rumblings about further Israeli “conditions”—to suspend for three months new construction of settlements in the West Bank. That's a three-month pause in a process that has continued for over four decades and has put over half a million Israelis on that portion of the occupied territories. The pause doesn't even apply to construction in Israel's expansively defined and unilaterally annexed version of East Jerusalem, which is where more than a third of the settlers have settled and where much of the more recent construction has taken place. In return, the United States has bestowed still more military largesse on Israel, in the form of $3 billion worth of advanced fighter aircraft, has committed to oppose any efforts in international organizations to “impose” a political solution on Israel (which sounds like a promise to veto any Palestinian move to seek recognition of statehood), and has further promised that after the three months it would not press Israel for any more settlement freezes. That last concession may be the most important to Netanyahu's government.

Today Senator John McCain pointed to GOP Senator-elect Rand Paul as a potentially dangerous harbinger of “isolationism” in the GOP ranks. Meanwhile, Senator McCain’s grinning visage appears as an “invited speaker” on the home page of a conference featuring a smorgasboard of crackpots like Jon Voight and Alan Keyes and conspiracy theorists like Frank Gaffney and Kenneth Timmerman advocating for regime change in Iran.

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is not happy with the way military operations are going in Afghanistan. He called on the United States to dial the military operations back and end nighttime special ops raids. Karzai said that “the time has come to reduce the presence of, you know, boots in Afghanistan . . . to reduce the intrusiveness into the daily Afghan life.” Today, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to the operations’ defense. She said that the administration is “very sensitive” of Karzai’s concerns about the impact of the U.S. presence on the war and the Taliban insurgency. But, Clinton said, the operations are in the “best interest” of Afghanistan, are having a “significant impact” and Washington believes “the use of intelligence-driven, precision-targeted operations against high value insurgents and their networks is a key component of our comprehensive civilian-military operations.”

The Obama administration is increasingly worried about Turkey’s apparent unreliability as a U.S. ally. The litany of grievances grows ever longer. Much to the dismay of U.S. officials, Ankara continues to make life difficult for the Kurdistan regional government in Iraq and openly opposes Washington’s hard-line strategy toward Iran. Equally disturbing from the standpoint of the Obama administration is Turkey’s increasingly cozy relationship with Russia and blatantly hostile attitude toward Israel.

I discuss the growing estrangement between the United States and its long-time NATO ally in an article in the latest issue of Mediterranean Quarterly. The article emphasizes that the tensions with Ankara are caused by far more than the specific issues involved. Those tensions illustrate a broader phenomenon—the growing unwillingness of previously friendly regional powers (even treaty allies such as Turkey) to follow Washington’s policy lead. Without a frightening and powerful mutual adversary to keep traditional security partners in line, we are almost certain to see such balky behavior become the norm. And, unfortunately, U.S. leaders are not adjusting well to the changed circumstances.

Former CIA director R. James Woolsey worries in the Wall Street Journal that the Obama administration has become too "eager for a deal" with Russia. He claims the terms of the New START arms control agreement is "substantially more lax" than its predecessor, signed in 1991. In particular, Woolsey warns that the newer version is basically unverifiable and does not put enough limits on Russia's capabilities, while at the same time failing to explicitly give the United States the right to modernize its nuclear wapons, build nonnuclear weapons systems and deploy missile defenses. Finally, he says the Senate should only pass the pact if the administration can address each of these issues directly.

Needless to say, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates disagree. Their joint op-ed in the Washington Post urges the Senate to approve the agreement without delay and specifically rebuts Woosley's fears about verification, modernization, missile defense and conventional capabilities.

Also in the Post, editor Fred Hiatt thinks the administration has swapped the July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan with the more-recently-emphasized date of December 2014, although "the American people have yet to be clued in." Hiatt notes that "deadlines, whether in 2011 or 2014, carry risks" by emboldening enemies and encouraging "regional players to jockey against one another."

Distrust of establishment institutions is the distinguishing characteristic of modern America. One institution after another--Enron, Lehmann Brothers, FEMA--has proved to be either incompetent or corrupt or both. Now the Federal Reserve is coming under fire.

For decades a small group of conservatives, led by Ron Paul, has viewed the Fed with suspicion. The founding of the Fed led to conspiracy theories that Jewish bankers were behind its establishment in 1913, a view propagated in books such as Eustace Mullins' Secrets of the Federal Reserve. Paul's opposition to the Fed is based on a more traditional fear of hyper-inflation and of central banks. In Paul's case it is rooted in a study of the Austrian school of economics.

Lately, more mainstream economists and politicians on the conservative side have been targeting the Fed. Until recently, the criticism of the Fed came mainly from the left, which has traditionally complained the the Fed is the servant of Wall Street--too interested in holding down inflation and not doing enough to stimulate the economy. The complaint from conservatives is the reverse.

Today's Wall Street Journal thus examines the mounting anger at the Fed. The Journal observes,

A group of prominent Republican-leaning economists, coordinating with Republican lawmakers and political strategists, is launching a campaign this week calling on Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to drop his plan to buy $600 billion in additional U.S. Treasury bonds.

More is getting written about a subject that as recently as a few years ago was as far away from mainstream thinking as, and barely more respectable than, the fantasies of science fiction. That subject is geoengineering—measures to ameliorate man-made climate change caused by greenhouse gases. A variety of possible techniques come under that label, including the sowing into the stratosphere of chemicals that would reflect more sunlight into space or the dispersal of other substances into the oceans to enable them to absorb more carbon dioxide. The increased attention results partly from scientific study of the subject, which has accelerated over just the last three or four years and has shown how application of some of the available technologies at a surprisingly modest scale could have significant effects on the global climate. It also results from the mounting evidence that human activity is indeed changing the global climate, reducing the ranks of the skeptics to die-hard deniers such as Senator James Inhofe (R-OK)--whose family, during one of last winter's snowstorms, built an igloo on the National Mall in Washington and labeled it “Al Gore's New Home”.

The union between the Daily Beast and Newsweek is good for the weekly magazine and even better news for Tina Brown. Brown, the British expatriate who is married to Harold Evans, himself a crack writer, made waves at the New Yorker which she reinvented, turning it into a hip, au courant publication. Now she has a chance to try and reinvent hardcore journalism. The fact that Newsweek will be merging with an online publication is, in effect, a declaration of surrender by old-line media.

Newsweek, which the Washington Post dumped into the lap of billionaire Sidney Harman, has, like much of the media, been "struggling," as the polite term goes. In reality it's probably at death's door. But can Brown revive it?

My guess is that by jazzing it up and bringing in lots of outside contributors, she probably can. But even more helpful to her is probably the rise of the GOP. Brown, like Newsweek, has liberal instincts. There should be plenty for Brown to cover and skewer in her inimitable style. If nothing else, Brown's return shows the lasting mark that British journalism continues to make in America. Increasingly, American newspapers and magazines are dispensing with the notion that they can aspire to an independent, objective standard. Instead, copy is getting juiced up at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

Now Brown is back in the fray. Her mandate is daunting. But if anyone can pull it off, it's Brown.

(Photo by Cliff)

Atlantic correspondent Robert Kaplan is touting "India's emergence as a great Eurasian power" as "the best piece of news for American strategists since the end of the cold war" in a very lengthy New York Times op-ed. He emphasizes that President Obama's trip to Asia took him all the way around—but not to—China, with the real purpose of the visit to prepare geopolitically for the PRC's rise. Kaplan sees naval power as essential to present and future international politics, making the land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan increasingly "diversionary." He applauds the administration's efforts to get New Delhi and Jakharta on board, and calls for more "discreet operating locations" to help Tokyo and Seoul rather than the gigantic "cold-war-type" bases on their soil that make their publics "restive." And in the Washington Post, columnist Charles Krauthammer praises the president's Asia tour as "worth every penny," for much the same geostrategic reasons that Kaplan highlights.