TheLoop21.com

By: Michael E. Ross (Add to your loop)
Wed, 04/08/2009 - 00:00

Barack Obama during his visit to Turkey.

Continuing the global barnstorm of his first presidential trip abroad, Barack Obama has raised the stakes of both his own presidency and the future of relationships between the United States and the rest of the world.

In two addresses in particular, Obama set out nothing less than a new framework for those relationships. But as usual, the devil is in the details. Hours before Obama spoke about the future, an event unfolded that would call that new diplomatic blueprint into question. The new American president faces challenges in making his soaring vision a workable reality.

With a passionate speech in Prague, the Czech Republic, President Obama on Sunday called the question on the necessity of nuclear weapons, announcing that the policy of the United States would be nothing less than the eventual end of those weapons everywhere in the world. In typically dramatic fashion, the Obama White House sought to defuse the threat of that hypothetical 3 a.m. phone call (you remember, it’s the same one now-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to club him with during the campaign).

“Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be checked — that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction,” Obama said to a crowd of an estimated 20,000 people outside the gates of the Prague Castle. “This fatalism is a deadly adversary. For if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.”

“As a nuclear power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act,” Obama said before pledging to “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy,” negotiate a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with the Russian Republic, and to “immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.”

“Make no mistake: As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies — including the Czech Republic,” he said. “But we will begin the work of reducing our arsenal.”

Obama's first 3 a.m. call

But almost on cue, like something straight out of a movie, Obama got that 3 a.m. call; it came around 4:30 a.m. Prague time on Sunday, when he was notified that North Korea had launched a communications satellite atop a Taepodong-2 ballistic missile — an action widely suspected to be a precursor to North Korea’s development of a long-range missile with the capability of reaching other countries, and the United States.

Obama’s spirited Prague challenge on nuclear weapons didn’t include Israel, whose longstanding official ambiguity about whether it even possesses nuclear weapons — as has been widely suspected for decades — complicates Obama’s call for a nuke-free world.

Obama called for improved relations with the Iranian Republic, expressing support for Tehran’s quest for peaceful nuclear energy “with rigorous inspections.”

“My government will seek engagement with Iran,” Obama said.

But Obama’s rhetorical overture to Iran — which follows one he made in March on the occasion of the Iranian holiday of Nowruz — confronts the shrill, anti-American rhetoric of the leadership of the Iranian theocracy, still reacting to the United States as an aggressor in the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the 444-day hostage crisis that followed.

Speaking Monday in Ankara, Turkey, the last stop of his trip, Obama ventured into the thorny issue of American-Muslim relations, seeking to defuse the cultural and rhetorical war of words and images that’s characterized that relationship throughout the years of the Bush White House.

“I know that the trust that binds the United States and Turkey has been strained, and I know that strain is shared in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced,” he told the Turkish parliament Monday.