Barack Obama took office in 2009 with two big personal priorities in foreign policy: the limitation of nuclear weapons and the cause of Palestinian statehood. This summer the president has been weighing a flurry of possible last-minute actions to cement his legacy on nukes, including a UN resolution that would ban testing. That raises an obvious question: Will Obama also launch an 11th-hour Mideast gambit?

The possibility has been debated in and outside the White House ever since Secretary of State John F. Kerry’s quixotic effort to broker an Israeli-Palestinian deal collapsed in 2014. All along, the assumption has been that Obama might wait to act until after the presidential election, so as to avoid creating problems for Hillary Clinton. There’s plenty of precedent: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush all bid for a Middle East legacy during their final months.

Not surprisingly, the prospect of an Obama initiative — which could take the form of a speech, or at its most ambitious, a UN resolution — is producing “high anxiety in the Netanyahu world,” as one former administration official puts it. That would be Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, the Israeli leader who has haunted and taunted Obama since he took office — and absorbed in return more White House animus and abuse than any other US ally. In the end, Obama’s final decisions on the Middle East may be driven by another drama: the Barack and Bibi endgame.

Read the full article at the Washington Post.