What Zelensky can learn from Netanyahu and his Oval Office meltdown with Obama
On May 20, 2011, inside the Oval Office and before the cameras, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lectured President Barack Obama.The incident was the closest the two countries came to a total breakdown.I was then Israel’s ambassador to the United States and had a ringside seat to the clash.It left a deep impression on me, underscoring the importance of interpersonal relationships in the shaping of foreign policy.Those lessons proved especially applicable last week in the wake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Oval Office meltdown with President Trump and Vice President JD Vance.By repeatedly interrupting and finally lecturing his hosts, the feisty Ukrainian leader supplied a textbook example of how not to handle a foreign leader of formidable pride and breakaway policies.To understand how he might get out of this mess, it’s worth going back to the Netanyahu-Obama collision.As the prime minister was flying to Washington, Obama declared that “The borders between Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines,” totally upending a decades-old US policy.Bibi was livid.
Convening with him at Blair House, several advisers and I literally had to hold him down and soften the public rebuke he intended to deliver to Obama.Yet even the watered-down version of his words managed to sound enraged.
“It’s not going to happen,” he insisted, referring to any return to the 1967 lines, and punching his knee with each syllable.Obama, seething, left it up to his lieutenants to respond.“Is your boss in the habit of lecturing his host in his home?” White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley accosted Bibi’s senior aide Ron Dermer right there in the Oval Office.Rahm Emanuel, whom I encountered that evening, pounded my chest and barked, “Your [expletive] prime minister cannot come into the [expletive] White House and [expletive] lecture the president!”“Crisis!” screamed every headline.Fourteen years have passed since the sensational Bibi-...