Obama will definitely try to avoid the fate of Carter who brokered the Camp David Peace Accords as the first Middle East peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1979. Carter served only for one term from 1977-1981 after losing his bid for a second term to Ronald Reagan. Carter went on to have a distinguished international career after that but remains today a marginal figure in the US. Carter is marginalized because he is loathed by the US mainstream media and the political establishment for criticizing Israeli policies in the occupied territories and supporting Palestinian demands for statehood.

For President Obama, despite strong efforts to pressure Israel into negotiating with the Palestinians and end its settlement policies, such efforts did not materialize to bring about meaningful negotiations and the peace process came to a screeching halt. The Obama administration, not wanting to pressure Israel any further for obvious domestic reasons, ended up washing its hands from the peace process altogether.

President Harry Truman who served from 1945-1953 recognized Israel as a state only 11 minutes after it was declared in 1948, thus winning accolades from the leading American Zionist leaders and the American Jewish community. Truman resisted pressure from some of his advisers not to recognize Israel so as not to antagonize the Arab states, but he decided to recognize the newly declared state instead. Today, the Hebrew University recognizes Truman's legacy and friendship with Israel, in the form of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace. The institute awards an annual Truman Peace Prize and among its recipients are former US Secretary of State Colin Powell and the late presidential envoy Richard Holbrooke.

In highlighting the US economic support for Egypt and Tunisia and other parts of the Arab world, and criticizing the Syrian regime for its violent suppression of pro-democracy protesters, Obama intends to show the US in a positive light and as a supporter of democracy and freedom in the Arab world.

Despite his efforts to end the Middle East conflict, Obama is not really interested in the Middle East as the most important strategic concern for the United States. His National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon is said to believe, according to a report published last month in the New Yorker magazine, that the US should "rebuild its reputation, extricate itself from the Middle East and Afghanistan and turn its attention toward China and Asia." The magazine reported that Donilon has convinced Obama with this worldview and it became Obama's strategy. Obama has stayed the course in this strategy throughout his presidency and is determined to withdraw the US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan on schedule.

Meanwhile, Obama's reluctance to put more and stronger pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is calculated to prevent the perception among the US electorate that he is tough on Israel and soft on Arabs, which might lead him to suffer the fate Carter did.

Moreover, Obama is actually more interested in saving his presidential career for a second term than worrying whether the Palestinians will have a state or not or whether Iraq will become a stable state or a failed state after the US withdrawal later this year. As the first and perhaps the only African American president, a historical achievements in its own right, Obama will be making sure that he plays his cards right in order to get re-elected for a second term. For that, Obama will not allow the thorny Middle East conflicts get in his way.

In this regard, Obama is returning the US foreign policy to its "realist posture" that avoids both benevolent intervention to spread democracy and freedom around the world of the Wilsonian era early in the 20th century and the aggressive militarized intervention of George W. Bush at the beginning of the 21st century.

Obama's realism is based on nonintervention and working within the international system to solve international disputes. During his presidential campaign in 2007, that he said he would not leave the US troops in Iraq even to stop genocide, according to the New Yorker magazine. The New Yorker also quoted Obama as stating, "If genocide is the criteria by which we're making decisions on the deployment of US forces, then by that argument you would have three hundred thousand troops in Congo right now where millions have been slaughtered as a result of ethnic strife." In another campaign stop, Obama said that his foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional realistic policy of George Bush's father, John F. Kennedy and in some way Ronald Reagan. In this speech Obama is in complete harmony with his realistic policy toward the Middle East and with himself.