Obama and Israel and China

Obama is annoyed because he has to shaft Israel in order to shaft America's national interests, and Israel is resisting.

Did I say he wants to shaft the USA? My bad. The Washington Post explains:

(Israel) poses a special challenge for President Obama, whose foreign policy emphasizes the importance of international rules and organizations that successive Israeli governments have clashed with and often ignored.

Kenneth Anderson points out what the Chinese may do:

The new strong horse signals its presence, not by conquest – but by the imposition of a rough public order on the high seas that the old strong horse used to enforce, but had become unable to impose by reason of its insistence on a purely utopian rule of law, suitable for Oxford or Marin County, even for open ocean two hundred miles off Somalia. The act that signals China’s hegemony, if it comes, will not be purely self-interested, because pure self-interest is not what hegemony is about – it will be the imposition of a rough but reasonably effective public order mostly beneficial to it – but just enough beneficial to others that they will follow. As they used to follow the United States.

In other words, the Chinese will brutally resolve some international problem which America is conspicuously too dainty to handle.

Not inevitable, but plausible.