It would not have been possible to imagine worse for the US’s credibility in the region than what befell it during Joe Biden’s visit this week; a comment made by Aaron Miller, a prominent member of the US team negotiating with the Israelis under the administration of Bill Clinton and George Bush Jr. And because Miller is aware of the balance of power in the American-Israeli relationship, he described it as “dancing with a bear”, where the problem becomes, as he says, that if you start dancing with it, it no longer becomes possible to let it dance alone!

This is what happened with the US Vice President in Israel. Indeed, dancing with “the Israeli bear” (perhaps describing it as a wolf would be more accurate) led to the insult to which was subjected the second highest-ranking man in the United States, an insult which he had to swallow before heading to the dinner table alongside that very bear, then publicly praising the strong relations between Israel and the United States, and declaring complete consideration of the US for Israel’s security, being “Israel’s best friend in the world”.

There are those who say that the Netanyahu government decided to deliberately teach Joe Biden and his President Barack Obama a lesson they would not be able to forget about the limits of the pressure the US can exercise on Israel. The insult was not just intentional, as there in fact was also a desire there to punish the US President for opposing Israel’s request to breach Iraq’s airspace in order to carry out the strike Netanyahu wants against Iran. The purpose of the Israeli lesson is to make Obama understand that he cannot obtain from Israel what it considers to be “concessions” in the Palestinian issue, with the aim of improving Washington’s image in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and of confronting the extremism for which the US and the West are paying the price in terms of their security and stability, at a time when the US President is not taking into consideration what the Israelis view as their interests and the “concessions” they seek to obtain from the Obama Administration in the Iranian nuclear issue. The bottom line of these concessions sought by Israel is for it to be given the opportunity to resolve this issue in its own way, i.e. by force, or for the US to take on such a task itself. In other words, there is a return to the nature of the relationship that arose between Israel and the United States during the Kuwait war under Bush the First and the Iraq war under Bush the Second: Israel accepting to be flexible on the Palestinian front in exchange for the US being intransigent and waging wars, on behalf of Israel, on the other fronts.

This is how the Iranian issue currently becomes at the core of the formula of the difficult relationship between the United States and Israel. And although the Obama Administration now recognizes that the policy of opening up to Iran and stretching their hand out towards it has not led to the desired results, which is what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates frankly said during his meeting with a number of American journalists during his visit to Abu Dhabi. Gates also said that his government considers this policy to have achieved a goal of no less importance, which is that it exposed the truth of Iran’s intentions before the world, thus making agreement over imposing sanctions on the regime in Tehran easier.

The policy of sanctions is the one the Obama Administration wants to try, in hopes of reaping its fruits in forcing Ahmadinejad’s government to abandon its inflexibility on the nuclear issue. This had been the main objective of Gate’s tour of the Gulf, with the aim first of reassuring these countries over their security in the face of Tehran’s threats of severing the hand that extends towards the oil of the “Persian Gulf”, then of obtaining an agreement to participate in strengthening sanctions against Iran, which primarily concerns the United Arab Emirates, and specifically the Emirate of Dubai.

However, Gulf countries, as concerned as they may become about Iran’s boasts, political, sectarian and security-related, cannot compensate for the US’s powerlessness towards Israel through “Viagra” doses out of their own account. Indeed, the balance of US interests in the region requires first and foremost for the United States to prove that it is a superpower, the leaders of which do not accept insults and punish those who subject them to them, and to take into account that one of the reasons behind Iran’s arrogant behavior in the region and towards it is based in Israel’s arrogant behavior towards all rights and requirements of peace in the region, a behavior which has reached the point of being arrogant towards the US itself.