Report: Israelis spied on U.S./Iran talks . . .

This sounds a bit like an episode of NCIS, except that we're operating at a higher level than Eli David and Leon Vance. Before the Obama presidency, the Israelis trusted the U.S. about as much as they trusted anyone, but they don't trust anyone implicitly. That's why Jonathan Pollard came to be. It's a longstanding and rather weird dynamic of our relationship with them, but it really owes to their recognition that the U.S. is not a monolith politically - and you can only count on U.S. support so long as certain kinds of thinking don't come to dominate our foreign policy.

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Which brings us to now, and the time when all trust appears to have completely collapsed. When Obama started talks with Iran in 2012, he expressly kept it from Netanyahu because he was worried about leaks to Congress. Think about that for a second: If our ally finds out I'm talking to the enemy, he might tell the co-equal branch of government I'm supposed to be working with. We can't have that. So the one nation whose very survival was most affected by these secret talks is kept in the dark, prompting Netanyahu to initiate spying on the talks. And what bothers the White House most is not so much the spying, but the fact that the Israelis shared what they learned with Obama's real enemies - not the Iranians, stupid, the Republicans:

“It is one thing for the U.S. and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal U.S. secrets and play them back to U.S. legislators to undermine U.S. diplomacy,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on the matter. The U.S. and Israel, longtime allies who routinely swap information on security threats, sometimes operate behind the scenes like spy-versus-spy rivals. The White House has largely tolerated Israeli snooping on U.S. policy makers—a posture Israel takes when the tables are turned. The White House discovered the operation, in fact, when U.S. intelligence agencies spying on Israel intercepted communications among Israeli officials that carried details the U.S. believed could have come only from access to the confidential talks, officials briefed on the matter said. Israeli officials denied spying directly on U.S. negotiators and said they received their information through other means, including close surveillance of Iranian leaders receiving the latest U.S. and European offers. European officials, particularly the French, also have been more transparent with Israel about the closed-door discussions than the Americans, Israeli and U.S. officials said.

As if your head wasn't already exploding, now the French are the ones keeping the Israelis informed, while the Obama White House is trying to keep them in the dark about what's going on - remember, only because they don't want them telling those nasty Republicans anything. This is all just surreal, especially when you think back to the days when the Democrats were screaming that George W. Bush had "shredded our alliances" and "squandered the world's goodwill" and whatever. Obama is as outwardly hostile to our most stalwart ally as it's possible for a U.S. president to be - working behind the scenes with the nation that is not only ideologically committed to Israel's destruction, but that is also still declaring "death to America" with no sense of shame whatsoever. So does it bother me that Israel is spying on us? Sure. Not because I blame Israel, but because the truth they recognize is so very disturbing: America may be their friend, but Barack Obama is their enemy - every bit as much as Iran. And what's really maddening about it is that this is only true because Obama is a petulant ideologue who can't get past partisanship to understand the nature of realpolitik and global strategic realities. I'd be surprised if our other allies aren't spying on us to. In fact, I'd be disappointed in them. The alternative is to trust Obama, and that woulds be insane.