Dan Drezner comments on the frayed ties between the U.S. and Israel. He remarks on something from the new Israeli spying story:

Second, I have never seen a senior administration quote like that one directed against an ally. There is precedent for a souring of a bilateral relationship because of craven campaign rhetoric. The George W. Bush-Gerhard Schröder relationship was never the same after Schröder won reelection in 2002 on an anti-Iraq War platform. But to my knowledge the Bush administration never claimed that the effect would outlast their administration. Either a senior administration official has gone way off-script or there’s something else going on that hasn’t been made public yet.

Drezner may be reading a bit too much into this quote. When an Obama administration official says that “a lot of these people will not only be around for this administration but possibly the next one as well,” this means that the official expects there to be significant continuity in personnel between Obama and Clinton administrations. The official hedged this with “possibly” because it is not at all guaranteed that the next administration will be Democratic. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t something else going on. The scars left by this latest episode of Israeli espionage could be significant. The main reason why they would have effects that continue into the next administration is if the next administration is staffed by many of the people that have had such an awful experience with the Netanyahu government while serving in the current one. It’s possible that Clinton wouldn’t keep on as many people from this administration as Obama’s officials expect, but it’s reasonable to think that there would be some significant overlap for a few years.

The comparison with Schröder and Germany doesn’t entirely work. Any modern German government would have been opposed to the invasion of another country. U.S.-German relations soured in that instance not just because Schröder used the war opportunistically to win re-election, but because the Bush administration believed that all European allies ought to be openly supportive of the invasion. But Schröder wasn’t reneging on any previous commitments, and he hadn’t recently made a desperate bid to interfere in American politics because of his opposition to administration policy. He was tapping into Germans’ postwar aversion to war and criticizing U.S. policy in tandem with France. France was the ally that the administration resented most because of the Iraq debate (remember Rice’s recommendation to “forgive Russia, ignore Germany, punish France”), but even then France was not punished very much. That’s because the relationships with those actual allies mattered enough that they weren’t going to be permanently damaged because of a major disagreement over one policy. It’s also because the behavior of the German and French governments during that debate was not nearly as shoddy as the Israeli government’s has been during this one. In other words, U.S.-Israeli relations are worse now than U.S.-German or U.S.-French relations were under Bush because the behavior of the other government has been much more antagonistic and obnoxious in this instance. Then again, anonymous administration officials have been griping about Netanyahu to the press for a long time and it has had no discernible effect on what the administration does. Maybe that is about to change, but until it happens I remain skeptical that the administration will follow through on its threats to make Israel pay a “price.”