Cables Depict Range of Obama Diplomacy

By DAVID E. SANGER
NYT

BEIJING — Barack Obama came to office vowing to restore “engagement” — talking and listening to America’s most troubling adversaries and reluctant partners — as a central feature of American foreign policy. But engagement can take many forms, from friendly to wary, naïve to cunning, and it was never quite clear how the term would translate from a campaign sound-bite to a practical approach to the world.

Now we know, from the granular picture of engagement-in-action that emerges from that trove of 250,000 WikiLeaks cables, many from the first 13 months of the Obama presidency. Mr. Obama’s style seems to be: Engage, yes, but wield a club as well — and try to counter the global doubts that he is willing to use it.

The cables suggest that Mr. Obama’s form of engagement is a complicated mixture of openness to negotiation, constantly escalating pressure and a series of deadlines, some explicit, some vague. In the cables, the administration uses all of these tools to try to prevent the mullahs in Iran from dragging out an endless series of feints and talks until they have a bomb. The July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan is a whip to get President Hamid Karzai to train his troops — so that the United States can start to leave. This policy is tailored to the needs of a new president trying to demonstrate that he is neither too inexperienced nor too soft to face the menaces of the world. In a handful of cases, the approach shows some early signs of success. But in dealing with some of the world’s most intractable governments — from the Middle Kingdom to the Middle East — Mr. Obama inevitably hits some real-world limitations.

In Russia, the policy of engagement yielded results. The cables tell a fascinating tale of intelligence-sharing on missile threats, with reasoned debates about what the Iranians and the North Koreans are capable of building. The cable traffic hints at horse trading: The Obama administration killed a missile defense site in Poland, seemingly to win Moscow’s support for sanctions on Iran.

(More here.)