Obama Needs to Focus on Foreign Policy

As President Barack Obama plays Robin Hood with health-care reform, more than just his other domestic priorities are at stake. With his presidential approval rating going south—according to the most recent Rasmussen poll, 40 percent of Americans strongly disapprove of his performance in office and only 31 percent strongly approve—Mr. Obama is increasingly pressed to put foreign policy on the back burner.

The president and his advisers would likely disagree with such criticism, pointing to Mr. Obama’s well-received speech in Cairo, hours of talks with Russian leaders in Moscow, and the recent “Three Amigos” summit in Mexico, as well as Vice President Joe Biden’s high-profile visits to Ukraine and Georgia and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s long trip to Africa.

But speeches, even when well reasoned and delivered in style, are not a substitute for making those hard choices that often require a president to use his bully pulpit at home, spend personal political capital, and even, perhaps, anger important domestic constituencies. And such heavy lifting has been sadly absent. His insistence that Israel freeze settlements on the West Bank seemed to symbolize a new, more evenhanded approach to the Arab-Israeli dispute. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to budge, standing his ground on the cheap and making himself more popular at home. President Obama has opted to claim progress simply because the Israelis are not starting new settlements. That falls quite short of what the president demanded originally, and yet there is no evidence that the administration has put any meaningful pressure on Israel as the impressive new Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, pointed out recently on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS. Contrary to media reports, Oren “wasn’t summoned at all” to the State Department over the settlements disagreement and as he emphasized, “these issues are being worked out in a very constructive, very friendly atmosphere.” But such sweet talk is not the way to get Netanyahu to make meaningful concessions on settlements against the opposition of his own coalition partners.