The US lacks a clear plan so its partners lack discipline

When the Israeli air force bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor that Saddam Hussein was building near Baghdad in 1981, it set off a major international crisis. Amid a worldwide outcry, everyone in Washington wanted to know what steps President Ronald Reagan would take to punish the Israelis for their aggression. He thought about the issue, and then summed up his position in a typically pithy quip. Mr Reagan said of the Israelis: "Boys will be boys."

This reaction, recalled this week by Reagan's national security advisor, Richard Allen, encapsulates the indulgent attitude in Washington towards Israel at that period of the Cold War. Israel was seen as a mini-America, and its actions merited no more than verbal condemnation. In this case, it was barely a slap on the wrist. Within five months, the US had signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Israel.

How Washington policy makers must yearn for the simple certainties of the days when the world was divided into West and East and countries generally stayed in their assigned boxes. And the nostalgia is not just in Washington. Meir Dagan, the head of the Israeli foreign intelligence service Mossad, lamented that Israel was "gradually turning from an asset to the United States to a burden". With every passing year since the end of the Cold War, he said, Israel's importance to US foreign policy has decreased.

This blunt statement was prompted by the worldwide reaction to Israel's storming of Turkish aid vessel which was trying to break the blockade on Gaza, in which 12 activists were killed. If Mr Dagan was hoping for his words to be contradicted in Washington, he was wrong. President Obama now says that the Gaza blockade is "unsustainable". The doyen of US military commentators, Anthony Cordesman, pronounced that Israel, far from being a favoured son, was a "tertiary US strategic interest in a complex and demanding world". Israel, he warned, should beware of taking actions which made it a "strategic liability" to the US, rather than an asset.

Professor Cordesman pointed out that Israel, for all the billions of dollars military assistance it has received since 1967, has provided little military advantage to the US; the reasons for American support were moral and ethical rather than military. One could even add sentimental: Israel's national narrative of a can-do settler state has much in common with America's. Viewed from Washington, Turkey - a Nato member and US ally for decades - now looks like a strategic liability too. On Wednesday Turkey and Brazil voted at the UN Security Council against the latest US-backed resolution imposing sanctions on Iran for its nuclear programme. Last month these two countries brokered a uranium swap agreement with Iran, but the White House dismissed this confidence-building measure in favour of stiffer sanctions.

There is an element of grandstanding here: the sanctions resolution still passed, so Turkey's No vote was more demonstrative than effective, a sort of calorie-free treat. But this is the Obama administration's key foreign policy objective, so a No vote sets the seal on Turkey's journey from reliable to unruly ally. This could never have happened when Turkey was neighbour to the USSR, and needed American military support. Now freed from that security worry, it has discovered its own interests, which lie in expanding its commercial interests in the region. The European Union has played a contradictory role in shaping the new Turkey: the prospect of Turkey becoming a member of the bloc has forced Ankara to democratise, thus allowing the Islamic heritage of the populace to emerge after decades under the boot of the army and the secular elite.

But now that Europe has effectively closed its doors to entry by a large Muslim country, the AKP government in Ankara has found another stage to play on. Taking advantage of impotence and lack of leadership of the Arab states - as Iran has done before - it has filled the political vacuum to play the role of protector of the Palestinians. At the turn of the century some American thinkers sought ways to focus, as they saw it, the discipline and clarity of purpose of the Cold War in the Middle East. In plain English that meant enshrining Reagan's old way of giving Israel a free pass while exerting pressure on the Arab states to accept Washington's hegemony. The result, after the September 11 attacks on new York and Washington, was George W Bush's war on terror. But it was a flawed concept.

As a weakened America tries to clean up the mess, Mr Obama has many goals, but they are not matched by sufficient means. He intends to withdraw from Iraq, while that country's politics are still unstable; he is fighting to beat the Taliban in Afghanistan, while planning a speedy withdrawal; he is pressing for peace between Israelis and Palestinians while incapable of imposing his will on the government of Benjamin Netanyahu or unifying the Palestinians.

Clearly it is more important for America to have a close relationship with the Afghan security service than with Israel's Mossad at the moment. That goal would be helped if the Israelis vacated their settlements. But that is not happening. In this muddle, it is hardly surprising that medium-sized countries are stepping up to see if they can do a better job. Ultimately, if the White House had a convincing plan which it could pursue with vigour, Turkey and other old allies would fall into line. They all recognise that there is only one superpower and they know that at some stage they may need its protection. If there was a plan, discipline would follow. But at the moment, a weakened America appears to be floundering.