Eight months into his presidency, Barack Obama has become a global celebrity, far more popular abroad than he is at home and sometimes eclipsing foreign leaders among their own people.
But just as his domestic honeymoon has clearly ended, international events have demonstrated the limits of Obama’s personal charm.
As he takes the stage to address the United Nations for the first time Wednesday, Obama will face world leaders — adversaries and allies alike — whose rebukes of the new American president serve as reminders that the world’s differences with the United States transcend who is in the White House. European nations have refused to send significant numbers of new troops to aid the US-led war effort in Afghanistan. Few countries have agreed to accept detainees held at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Scottish officials ignored Obama’s plea to keep the Lockerbie bomber in prison, and US efforts to head off a coup in Honduras were ineffective. North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons, Iran may be doing so, and Middle East leaders have rebuffed Obama’s efforts at peacemaking.
Even staunch Obama defenders concede that the expectations for the president abroad were exceedingly high. “What did you expect?” she said. “The president gets elected and all of a sudden, you know, we reach nirvana in short order? I mean, that’s a little bit ridiculous.”
Obama began building expectations for peace in the Middle East in the first months of his presidency and raised hopes even higher with a June speech in Cairo in which he pledged that he could make things happen. He asked Israel to ease its embargo of the Gaza Strip and freeze construction in West Bank settlements. He asked the Arab states to take steps toward “normalization” of ties with Israel. He made restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks a top priority, announced plans to repair relations with Syria and said he would engage, rather than confront, Iran.
On Saturday, the White House announced that Obama plans to hold a three-way meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in New York on Tuesday. It will be the first meeting between the two since Netanyahu took office. “It is another sign of the president’s deep commitment to comprehensive peace that he wants to personally engage at this juncture,” said special envoy George Mitchell.
But progress has been slow, and the frustration has built on all sides — among Israeli officials upset that he focused public demands on them; among Arabs, especially Palestinians, over his inability to wrest concessions from Israel; among human rights activists who say his idealism has not been borne out in action.
“I think there has been too little appreciation of realities and too much well-intentioned belief in the power of rhetoric and goodwill,” said Mark Heller, principal research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University.
Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the United Nations, countered that Obama has made “significant progress on a wide array of issues” relating to the Middle East peace process. But White House officials said they do not expect an agreement on settlements to be announced at the three-way meeting next week.
The Islamist Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip has said that Mitchell’s inability to negotiate that agreement with Israel proves Obama’s shortcomings. It is “proof of the failure of the Obama administration in helping the Palestinian people,” Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said in a statement, reflecting a broad skepticism among Arabs about whether Obama’s overture to the Muslim world would make a difference on the ground.
Obama’s political struggles at home and his performance internationally have led some observers abroad to remark that a charismatic leader who seemed to be walking on water last year is only human, subject to the same bruising political battles as everybody else.
