BARACK OBAMA UN Assembly


BARACK OBAMA has a busy week at the UN General Assembly. He addresses the body on Wednesday September 23rd the day after an expected round of meetings involving Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. Mr Obama’s strategy for the Middle East will no doubt come under scrutiny in the usual annual diatribe against America and the West delivered to the UN by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s leader, on Wednesday.

BARACK OBAMA faces squalls at home, but his reputation in most of the rest of the world continues to shine. Next week the president will have a chance to wear these golden opinions in their newest gloss at a parade of meetings at the United Nations in New York. He will chair a summit on climate change, thank countries that have contributed to UN peacekeeping missions, meet African leaders and in general reinforce the message that America is at last under the management of an enthusiastic multilateralist (putting trade to one side, perhaps). On September 24th he will also chair a meeting of the Security Council devoted to nuclear proliferation and disarmament—only the fifth time the council has met at head-of-government level and the first time an American president has chaired it.

Mr Obama excels at public diplomacy. His speech in Cairo in June received rave reviews in much of the Muslim world. But there is more to diplomacy than speeches. The meeting on proliferation cannot but focus attention on the fact that, for all his popularity, Mr Obama has had no more success than the reviled George Bush in persuading North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons or Iran to stop enriching uranium. His promise was to do everything in his power to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, while also extending his hand to countries that unclenched their fists. But his policy of engagement has so far yielded no result.

Two letters from Mr Obama to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, are reported to have received a dusty answer. The rigging of Iran’s elections in June and the violent repression that followed have made further overtures harder. Indeed, some Iran-watchers in America accuse Mr Obama of inadvertently speeding up this sequence of events by opening a dialogue that has emboldened Tehran’s hardliners. He is soldiering on nonetheless. America has just announced that it will take part next month in direct talks with Iran (albeit with Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia at the table, too).

This, said a State Department official, was being done “without illusions…our patience isn’t infinite.” But it is not clear what Mr Obama will do if, as seems likely, Iran continues to defy the Security Council’s orders to stop enriching uranium, and when America’s patience does at last run out. Despite bold talk in Washington about imposing “crippling” economic sanctions, Russia and China have given no sign of helping Mr Obama any more in this regard than they did the less popular Mr Bush.

George Mitchell, America’s Middle East envoy, has meanwhile been shuttling around the region in the hope of extracting a settlement freeze from Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, in exchange for the Arab states taking steps toward “normalising” relations with the Jewish state. The administration hopes that if Mr Mitchell can close this deal in time, Mr Obama will be able in New York next week to inaugurate peace talks between Mr Netanyahu and the Palestinians’ president, Mahmoud Abbas. But even then Mr Obama would be a long way from a breakthrough. Amid much fanfare, Mr Bush launched peace talks between Israel and Mr Abbas at Annapolis at the end of 2007. The two sides talked and talked—and got nowhere.

For many of his admirers around the world, the truest test of Mr Obama will not be whether he can make a breakthrough in the incorrigible Middle East, but whether a president who acknowledges the overwhelming danger of global warming can galvanise multilateral action on climate change. There too, however, public diplomacy has its limits. Mr Obama’s eloquence may blow away his audience in New York. But foreign governments know that, with less than three months to go before the world’s climate summit in Copenhagen, the Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill faces an uphill battle in Congress. A president who cannot reduce America’s own carbon emissions will not easily persuade other countries to do so, no matter how much people like him.

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