Barack Obama has confessed to being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize over others more deserving than him. And he has kept the world guessing about the reach and intent of U.S. foreign policy under his command.
A fertile week that started with a new arms reduction treaty with Russia, and culminated with a productive global summit aimed at keeping nuclear material out of terrorist hands, clears up some of the ambiguity and shows that the U.S. President could yet earn his Nobel. But it also shows he is working toward it in his own deliberative way.
In tone, the foreign policy differences between Mr. Obama and George W. Bush could not be starker.
North Korea and Iran, for instance, are no longer "rogue states." They are but mere "outliers" that have a chance at global acceptance if only they'd just behave. There is no neoconservative chutzpah about spreading American "values" globally, but rather a desire to reduce the need for more costly and controversial U.S. involvement abroad in the first place.
And though Mr. Obama's stated objectives can appear plenty ambitious - none more so than his Nobel-winning aim of a world without nuclear weapons - they also reflect the President's trademark pragmatism.
"Mr. Obama is trying to restore solvency to American foreign policy - both political and economic solvency," Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in an interview. "He is attempting to lighten the load by getting allies to do more, by dealing with adversaries through diplomacy rather than coercion and, over the course of his presidency, trying to wind down the commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan."
The nuclear file occupies a unique and privileged position among Mr. Obama's foreign policy priorities, not least because it is where the President most clearly hopes to leave a lasting and positive legacy.
Mr. Obama has deftly negotiated an arms reduction treaty with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that promises relatively modest reductions in each country's arsenal of deployed nuclear warheads but, more important, signals potentially better times ahead in a bilateral relationship that had become dangerously embittered.
The signing of that treaty last week in Prague was preceded a day earlier by the administration's release of the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), in which it vowed to significantly restrict the conditions under which the United States would launch a nuclear weapon. But Mr. Obama did not go so far as to embrace the "no-first-use" policy advocated by liberal Democrats.
Both moves were emblematic of the "due modesty" with which Mr. Obama is pursuing his nuclear policy goals, said Prof. Kupchan, adding: "It's that modesty that will help protect him from attacks on the right."
Mr. Obama needs Republican support in the Senate to secure the ratification of the arms reduction treaty. Getting it will depend on the degree to which the President's policy can be sold domestically as one of global engagement rather than capitulation. Sarah Palin was quick to liken Mr. Obama's approach to saying: "Go ahead, punch me in the face and I'm not going to retaliate." But Republican senators have been more circumspect.
The two-day nuclear security summit that concluded yesterday in Washington - the biggest gathering of world leaders summoned by a U.S. President in six decades - capped Mr. Obama's week of progress on the nuclear file. The summit and the treaty are meaningful steps toward the "nuclear spring" he hopes to advance at next month's United Nations review conference on nuclear non-proliferation and June's G8 Summit in Huntsville, Ont.
Mr. Obama "has a theory that the culmination of these events will begin to bend the trend lines that are otherwise driving us to hell," said Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. "It's a big theory."
Indeed, Mr. Obama has so far made no progress in containing the biggest non-terror-related atomic threats - nuclear buildup in India and Pakistan, the prospect of nuclear-capable Iran and an obdurate North Korea. Mr. Obama talked tough yesterday on pursuing sanctions against Iran, but in the same breath acknowledged that China's dependence on Iranian oil is still an obstacle to getting a UN Security Council resolution with any teeth.
That was Mr. Bush's problem, too. But for all of its colossal failures, his foreign policy had largely unambiguous rationales and Mr. Bush articulated them unambiguously. Mr. Obama's approach is more nuanced.
Writing earlier this year in Foreign Policy, Walter Russell Mead characterized Mr. Obama's approach as "Jeffersonian" in nature, aimed at minimizing U.S. involvement abroad and "managing America's foreign policy at the lowest level of risk."
Instead of Bush-like proselytism, Mr. Mead wrote, "Jeffersonians like Obama argue that even bad regimes can be orderly international citizens if the incentives are properly aligned" and "think oversize commitments abroad undermine American democracy at home."
Hence, Mr. Obama's move to send more troops to Afghanistan was coupled with a vow to begin bringing them home in mid-2011. And yesterday, the President confirmed Mr. Mead's "incentives" idea by saying the aim of sanctions is "to change the calculus of a country like Iran, so that they see that there are more costs and fewer benefits to pursuing a nuclear-weapons program." He said nothing about weakening or replacing the current regime.
The biggest risk in such a strategy may not be international as much as domestic in nature. Presidents who emulate Thomas Jefferson's foreign policy are easily, if unfairly, depicted as passive. The last one was Jimmy Carter and we know how that ended.