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News item 2 of week 2

news topic:On Several Foreign Policy Fronts, Events Force Obama to Turn to Plan B

From:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/world/27prexy.html

Article:

UNITED NATIONS — For President Obama, the handshakes and hugs during his first visit to the United Nations last week masked a cold reality: nine months into his presidency, he is being forced to retool his most important foreign policy initiatives, from the war in Afghanistan to peace in the Middle East and his diplomatic overture to Iran.

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Mr. Obama’s efforts to reach out to adversaries and break political deadlocks are running up against old enmities, insoluble differences and foreign leaders who simply do not see eye to eye with the president.

The administration can point to successes: it has marshaled worldwide support for the campaign to pressure North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons. And it has put relations with Russia on a firmer footing, with a decision to revamp a missile-defense system that may have paid extra dividends in helping to win Russian support for tougher sanctions against Tehran.

Those bright spots, however, come amid a host of troubling developments, the latest of which was the disclosure by the United States and its allies on Friday that Iran was operating another clandestine nuclear facility.

That revelation came days after the White House’s midcourse correction in its push for peace talks in the Middle East, and the leaked, ominous warnings of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American commander in Afghanistan, about the direction of the war there.

“This is not easy,” Mr. Obama said Friday, after an economic summit meeting in Pittsburgh. Speaking of Afghanistan, he said: “I would expect that the public would ask some very tough questions. That’s exactly what I’m doing, is asking some very tough questions. And we’re not going to arrive at perfect answers.”

The debate over Afghanistan policy may be the most intense and far-reaching. But the administration also pivoted in its strategy for the Middle East, after it became clear that Mr. Obama would not succeed in one of his other early goals, persuading Israel to agree to a complete freeze in the construction of Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

Like all new presidents, Mr. Obama has also learned that many events are outside his control. Afghanistan and Iran held deeply flawed elections that produced leaders — or in the case of Afghanistan, a likely leader — with credibility problems and who would make for poor interlocutors for the United States.

In Israel, a right-wing government took power, dealing a blow to Mr. Obama’s hopes of securing a settlement freeze to set the stage for renewed talks between Israelis and Palestinians.

Officials said Mr. Obama’s activist diplomacy has paid off in other ways, like the recent United Nations resolution on nuclear nonproliferation, and with Pakistan, where aggressive prodding by the United States pushed the government to confront the threat of Taliban insurgents near its capital.

“Engagement should be judged as a means to an end, not as a policy goal itself,” said Denis R. McDonough, a senior foreign policy adviser to Mr. Obama in the National Security Council.

Yet Mr. Obama’s highest-profile effort at engagement, with Iran, is clearly shifting into a new phase focused on pressure as much as dialogue. With the Iranian government showing no signs of responding to Mr. Obama’s diplomacy, the United States has begun rallying support for tougher sanctions against Iran, should its leaders refuse to negotiate over their nuclear program at a meeting next Thursday.

Mr. Obama’s disclosure of Iran’s uranium enrichment facility, hidden deep inside a mountain, was a calculated move by the United States and its European allies to gain leverage over Tehran, by exposing it as dishonest. It was a far cry from Mr. Obama’s warm New Year’s greeting to the Iranian people early in his presidency.

These days, when administration officials talk about engagement, they mainly mean American efforts to engage Russia and China to secure their support for further sanctions. And in that regard, Mr. Obama and his aides said their dual-track strategy has worked well, with the news of Iran’s nuclear facility earning a rebuke from Russia and a warning from China.

“That kind of solidarity is not typical,” Mr. Obama said Friday. “Anybody who has been following responses to Iran would have been doubtful just a few months ago that that kind of rapid response was possible.”

Still, the positive response that the president most wanted, from Iran’s leaders themselves, has yet to materialize. Some administration officials said they always believed the odds were slim that the hard-line clerics who run Iran would clasp Mr. Obama’s outstretched hand.

And those slim prospects seemed to vanish entirely after Iran’s chaotic elections in June, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected amid evidence of flagrant irregularities that brought demonstrators into the streets and prompted a bloody government crackdown.

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