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-Obama showdown. Few remember it today.
And yet, just last week, in the same location, another head of an embattled state tried to lecture a popular and headstrong president.
Zelensky complained about the administration’s policy toward Putin, only to have Trump and Vance dress him down for showing ingratitude to the United States and weakness to the Russians.
Later, rather than retreat, Trump insisted that Zelensky apologize publicly.
Times have changed since 2011, of course, and so have the personalities. Bibi is not Zelensky and Obama patently is not Trump.
Yet like Bibi then, Zelensky is today dealing with an administration that views his cause as belonging to “the other side.”
And the latest Oval Office lecture reminds me of the lessons I learned from the last one — and which Zelensky would do well to heed.
First, know who you’re addressing. For all his popularity, Obama never struck Netanyahu as a particularly strong individual.
By contrast, when Trump says “don’t,” neither Israel nor Ukraine should dare to try.
For Zelensky, this lesson will prove especially difficult. After all, he antagonized Republicans by campaigning for the Democrats last year in Pennsylvania.
Little wonder that, in addition to its strategic disagreements with him, the White House has scant affection for Zelensky. As a former actor, you’d imagine he’d be better at reading his audience.
Secondly, Zelensky must know his cards. Trump was right: The Ukrainians hold virtually none.
They’re low on ammo, steadily losing turf to the Russians, and increasingly hemorrhaging conscripts.
Finally and most fundamentally, Zelensky, no less than Netanyahu, must understand the geopolitical landscape on which he acts.
Today it means grappling with the fact that, like it or not, a new global order is emerging. The mainstays of the old one are no longer certainties.
In their place a new world is coming into being — divided into spheres of influence and driven far less by Cold War-era idealism than by 21st-century self-interest.
In this new order, a deal in which Ukraine consigns half of its mineral wealth to the United States which, in turn, confines Russia’s conquests to the Crimea and Donbas, makes perfect sense.
So, too, does Trump’s decision Saturday to grant Israel an additional $4 billion in military aid. In Trump’s view, Israel falls squarely within America’s sphere — and the aid is a good investment for America itself.
Netanyahu seems to have rapidly internalized all these lessons. With Trump in the Oval Office, he’ll never hazard lectures, but display the deference owed to a singularly supportive president and that Israel’s critical interests require.
As such, Netanyahu supplies a model for the leaders of smaller states who must navigate this treacherous new world.
They must consistently convince the president that their country serves America’s best interests.
They must be realistic about the cards they hold.
And they must accurately measure the man who now sits in the Oval Office. In his presence, they must know when to say thank you, and when, simply, to shut up.
Michael Oren, formerly Israel’s ambassador to the United States, is the president of the Israel Advocacy Group. Adapted from The Free Press.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
