Obama meets challenges with charm

By CHRISTI PARSONS

ISTANBUL, Turkey — He talked dinosaurs with the British prime minister’s sons and bonded with the young Russian president over their shared coming of age in the post-Cold War years. He elicited an embrace from the physically standoffish leader of Turkey.

At one point in Barack Obama’s overseas charm offensive, one world leader confided that he’d never felt able to personally “connect” with the previous American president.

“You’ll notice my approach is quite different from my predecessor,” Obama told the president of Spain, as the two began and ended an official bilateral meeting by talking about their daughters.

As Obama hugged his way across Europe and Turkey this week, the visual images clearly showed a president trying hard to build personal relationships with other foreign leaders. In one week’s time, he sat down personally with 15 heads of government.

But amid the photo opportunities and public displays of affection, there emerged a clarifying message about dealings based on “shared interests.” Rapport is “necessary but also not sufficient,” said Denis McDonough, Obama’s deputy national security adviser.

“A personal relationship without a sound grounding of what our national interest is is nice but, at the end of the day, inconsequential,” said McDonough. “A strong personal relationship with a solid understanding of what our national security interest is, and what our desired end state and goal should be, is the kind of form that with the proper substance ends up advancing U.S. interests.”

The early scorecard doesn’t immediately vindicate the approach. Obama returned home Wednesday with commitments from other nations to spur the global economy through government spending, but they are smaller than the U.S. originally wanted. Nor did leaders rush to send new combat troops to Afghanistan to support the mission there.

Obama’s team says it’s too early to judge, though. “Over time, the seeds that were planted here are going to be very, very valuable for the security and progress of the United States,” senior adviser David Axelrod said as the trip drew to a close.

Obama faced a “greatly diminished curve of lowered expectations” of what he could accomplish going into the trip, said Steven Schrage, international business expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. “Grading on that curve, because the challenges were so great, he did handle the diplomatic matters well.”

Guiding his interactions was a new philosophy the White House began to reveal over the week, one that differs in one significant way from the prior administration.

Former President George W. Bush acknowledged strong personal feelings for other world leaders, saying after his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2001 that he had gotten a “sense of his soul” by peering into his eyes. With countries that crossed the administration on one issue — Iraq, for example — bilateral relations in general seemed to go south.

Obama’s White House consistently offered analysis during the trip based not on how he clicked personally with other leaders, but on where their interests aligned. The phrase “shared interest” or “shared challenges” cropped up in at least a dozen post-meeting analyses by staffers traveling with the president.