Obama stymied by others

Opinion: April 9, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Barack Obama’s trip to Prague for Thursday’s signing of the latest U.S.-Russia arms reduction treaty is a useful reminder that, for all the yearlong domination of health care, crucial international issues are never far from any president’s agenda.

This pact reduces both countries’ nuclear arsenals and seems to have been reached with minimal difficulty, largely because it’s in the interest of both. But in other areas where the president is trying to carry out his foreign-policy campaign pledges, he is encountering conflict between U.S. interests and those of the countries or leaders involved.

In a sense, this reflects the fact that in international as well as domestic matters, the late House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill’s mantra that “all politics is local” often applies.

That is notably true in the U.S. efforts to forge an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, create international consensus to prevent a nuclear Iran and strengthen the central government to quell the insurgency in Afghanistan.

Limits

And it shows that, despite superior U.S. military power and overall international standing, there are limits to the degree the U.S. can force even friendly leaders to bend to Americans’ sense of what’s in their best interests.

The most obvious instance where local political problems hamstring Obama’s goals is in the Middle East, where he pledged a renewed peace effort and named a top-level negotiator, former Sen. George Mitchell. While Israel and the Palestinians say they favor an agreement providing Israeli and Palestinian states, getting there has proven difficult.

Back in 2001, when former President Bill Clinton sought to broker a deal before leaving office, Palestinian internal pressures kept leader Yasser Arafat from accepting an agreement that made sense for both sides.

Since then, conflicts among Palestinians have increased.

But the presence of an Israeli government led by longtime peace skeptic Benjamin Netanyahu has hardly helped, notably when its hard-line faction chose Vice President Joe Biden’s arrival in Israel to announce yet another expansion of West Bank settlements.

Whether Netanyahu sincerely supports a two-state solution remains in doubt, but the fragility of his coalition and its dependence on those hard-line elements undercuts any hopes for peace — as does repeated Palestinian violence directed at Israel.

In Afghanistan, meanwhile, Obama’s public effort to force President Hamid Karzai to reduce corruption and concentrate on the effort to quell an al-Qaida-backed insurgency may have backfired. Karzai has retaliated by denouncing the U.S. role in a way that suggests he is more interested in protecting his own domestic standing — and perhaps corrupt relatives — than in taking the steps American officials consider necessary.

But perhaps the best example where other countries’ self-interest undercuts the common good is in Iran, where Obama, like his Republican predecessor, has pushed for a united front to prevent the development of nuclear weapons.

Sanctions

Key countries involved in the U.S. effort to intensify sanctions against Iran remain leading trade partners with the Islamic Republic, including China, Russia and such major European countries as France.

China, Iran’s biggest international trading partner, has been reluctant to join in sanctions, although there are reports it’s easing that stance and China’s president agreed to attend Obama’s global security summit next week in Washington.

Still, it’s uncertain sanctions alone can prevent Iran from pursuing nuclear weapon development.

During the campaign, Obama promised his new approach would produce greater results in dealings abroad and at home. His election and his efforts to reach out to the Muslim world have eased some strains of the Bush years. His switch in emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan may be beginning to produce results in the latter.

But many problems he inherited remain as unresolved as ever. Regrettably, the parochial motivations of the various parties still carry more influence than any new Obama approach.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.