Charm Alone Won’t Do It For Obama

Barack Obama’s outstretched hand policy has helped him even with enemies such as Iran and Cuba, but it has yet to result in anything concrete. Now it’s time for Phase II: If he doesn’t want his friendliness to be mistaken for weakness, Obama has to get tougher.

No one is safe from Obama’s outstretched hand. Whether it’s Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela or the whole continent of South America, anyone who doesn’t duck into the bushes quickly enough is lavished with attention, beguiled by Obama’s refreshing smile, has his hand sympathetically patted, is reassured by America’s self-criticism, or is in some other way drawn into Obama’s feel-good universe.

One can hardly name a country that hasn’t been the object of the fastest charm offensive in history. Well, perhaps North Korea. What with its missile tests and its withdrawal from the nuclear negotiating table, Pyongyang’s macho posturing was apparently too crude to make even Obama want to feign cheerfulness.

At the end of the Bush administration, emissaries from American think tanks swarmed across the world to find out what a new president should do to improve America’s image and its relations with other countries. The results of several studies showed no big surprises: The more distance between the new and the old presidents, the better. And Obama was successful in doing that. When even an American-hater like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez whispers, “I want to be your friend,” in Obama’s ear, it’s clear that the hypnosis has worked. The question now is, for how long?

The most surprising thing about the Obama phenomenon isn’t how positively his self-critical and promotional words are received, but rather what people don’t want to hear. His NATO partners praise him for wanting to have an Afghanistan troop surge and wanting to rely more heavily on civilian assistance there, but the fact that the alliance is less effective when only some of the partners make greater efforts is studiously ignored.

Obama talks of his vision for a nuclear-free world; Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier apparently doesn’t hear Obama say that he wants reciprocity, and simply demands the immediate removal of American nuclear weapons from German soil. Russia likes hearing Obama’s willingness to negotiate the European missile shield but is deaf to appeals that it help prevent Iran from going nuclear.

At the American summit in Trinidad and Tobago, Obama not only demonstrated understanding for the sensitivities of his southern neighbors, he also laid out what the United States expects from them, saying, “But that also means that we can’t blame the United States for every problem that arises in the hemisphere …That is the old way, we need a new way.” One wishes that the rest of the world would also take this simple truth to heart. The Europeans are beset by this “old way” as well.

And that’s the bitter truth behind Obama’s open smile: His charm offensive has thus far been a global one-way street. It hasn’t resulted in any behavioral change by so-called rogue nations (which may no longer be labeled such according to Obama’s new policies). The desired plan to manage global problems by close partnerships or regional powers such as China or Russia has yet to bear any fruit. So far, the president’s soft-power strategy hasn’t worked.

But it’s too early to say this new approach has failed. In the Obama camp, they speak of these approaches as investments in the future that will pay off later down the road. In reality, however, we see that Obama can no more circumvent the laws of international politics than he can avoid the pull of gravity. Charles de Gaulle expressed the unsentimental reality when he said, “France has no friends, only interests.” And on that point, Obama will have just as tough a time as his predecessor did. But the president is right about one thing: The ball is in the other court now. Now it’s up to Cuba, Iran and Russia (just to name a few) to make a move. Anyone who expects the United States to unilaterally solve unsolvable global problems will only succeed in making himself look foolish.

That’s also the reason why a great deal of nervousness is breaking out in world capitals. Without their favorite bogeyman Bush, there’s no easy way for the Cuban, Iranian, Russian and Venezuelan governments to explain to their people why they don’t have good relations with the United States. True, Obama can no more influence the strategic calculations of the Iranians in the matter of atomic weapons than he can Hugo Chavez’ decisions to gain influence in South America through destabilization or calm Havana’s communist leaders’ fears of liberalizing policies in their country. But by communicating directly with the citizens of these nations, he is building up the pressure of legitimacy on their governments that will even be difficult for dictatorships to escape.

Obama’s softer policies, however, also harbor grave risks. They tempt regimes in North Korea and Iran into thinking they can pretty much have their way with the new and inexperienced man in the White House. That’s the only apparent reason for the current escalation on the Korean peninsula. The stone age mentality of the communists leads them to think they can get a better deal from Obama than they could ever have hoped for from Bush. That’s why they’ve already withdrawn from nuclear negotiations. With Iran, Obama has already made his first major blunder by not making an Iranian cessation of uranium enrichment a prerequisite for negotiations. That would have put pressure on the Mullahs as well. The president would be ill advised to repeat Europe’s negative experiences here.

Barack Obama is seen as the president with the greatest global cultural sensitivity in history. But it’s necessary to remember that that will be interpreted as weakness in many parts of the world. That’s the way it is in the Near and Middle East as well as in other regions.

Unfortunately, many nations still see foreign policy as the zero-sum game it was considered in the 19th century. It won’t be sufficient to merely call for “new thinking.” Obama will have to demonstrate to those “rogue nations” in particular that he’s no weakling that can be ignored at will. That should be Phase II of his smile offensive.