Obama and Netanyahu: A clash of world views, not just personalities

A long, steadily worsening showdown between the rivals is coming to a head in the tense final stages of talks between world powers and Iran in pursuit of a nuclear deal backed by the U.S. but opposed by Netanyahu.

READ: Will Netanyahu’s speech to Congress backfire?

Highly unusual

Netanyahu’s visit is highly unusual. Not only will he not meet with Obama, but he is taking the most prominent stage outside the White House available to a foreign leader in Washington and directly campaigning against one of the president’s top second-term priorities — a nuclear deal with Iran. Netanyahu appears to have concluded that the proposed agreement is so bad that, in a highly unorthodox move, he will actively join Obama’s political adversaries in an effort to derail the president’s Iran deal-making.

The Israeli leader will make the case against the proposed deal in an address to Congress on Tuesday, against the wishes of the White House, at the invitation of GOP House Speaker John Boehner.

The speech, likely to delight Republicans, who are also trying to thwart Obama’s Iran diplomacy, will be the starkest illustration yet of the estrangement between Netanyahu and Obama.

“Each one is convinced that the other one doesn’t get the other side’s core interests,” said David Makovsky, a former advisor on Secretary of State John Kerry’s Middle East team.

“Beyond all the grievances and the slights, that is the fundamental issue.”

U.S. power

In a wider sense, Obama and Netanyahu are also at opposite ends of a debate on the use of U.S. power that emerged as a fault line in American politics after the September 11 attacks in 2001.

Netanyahu’s Likud Party is a much better fit with neoconservatives and Republican hawks who prospered in the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency than with Obama’s doctrine of “strategic patience” when deploying U.S. power abroad.

“I think Bibi has always been close to the American right, it is partly where he got his political education,” said Daniel Levy, who worked as an advisor to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname.

And from the start, it was clear that the two figures’ political ideologies were not in line.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama told a Jewish group that “there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel, then you’re anti-Israel.”

That, he told them, “can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel.”

CNN