Obama's Promise to Work With Foreign Governments
Kenneth T. Walsh

During his 2008 campaign, President Obama promised to work more closely with U.S. allies around the world and to end the perceived go-it-alone attitude of his predecessor, George W. Bush. It's now clear that Obama was quite serious about these pledges, and the latest evidence came when he convened a 47-nation nuclear security summit in Washington last week.

Obama told the assembled presidents and prime ministers that both the stakes and the need for international cooperation are higher than ever. That's because Obama says terrorists are making major efforts to obtain nuclear materials to use against the United States and its allies, and they must be stopped. Imagine 9/11 with nuclear bombs instead of hijacked jetliners and you get a sense of what the president is worried about.

Obama added that a "new mindset" is needed, a shift away from preoccupation with the Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction in which the United States and the Soviet Union built up vast stores of immensely powerful nuclear weapons on the theory that the prospect of annihilation would prevent a nuclear confrontation. The theory worked, and war between the superpowers was averted since the dawn of the atomic age. But the specter of Armageddon, intentional or inadvertent, haunted the human race for generations and on at least one occasion, the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, the world was indeed on the razor's edge of nuclear catastrophe.

Now Obama and other leaders are proposing an entirely new approach that would focus not on the supremacy of fear between the superpowers, but instead emphasize keeping nukes from getting into the hands of what Bush used to call "the evil doers." In addition to the pledges by individual nations to better control their own nuclear material, the final communique at the security summit unanimously endorsed Obama's goal of all nations securing the most dangerous nuclear materials within four years. And the president, echoing scientist Albert Einstein in the early part of the atomic age, set the tone when he said, "We are drifting toward a catastrophe beyond comparison. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive."

The question is whether the world's leaders can agree on what materials are most vulnerable and how to protect them, and that remains to be seen. Cooperative rhetoric is easy when leaders sit around a table and talk about high-minded principles, but following through is a far bigger challenge.

Yet Obama did show that his global outreach can make a difference. Not only did he display an ease in dealing with other leaders in personal terms, he was also effective in persuading them to at least begin working more closely to limit the spread of nuclear-bomb components. He also won some additional support for strengthening sanctions against Iran because of its nuclear program, which Obama says is designed to eventually construct nuclear weapons, a development that would profoundly destabilize the Middle East.

As usual at such international gatherings, there was no enforcement mechanism to convert the promises into action. But in getting the pledges in the first place, Obama seemed to be reaping the benefits of the goodwill he has generated because of his let's-work-together approach. U.S. officials say his goal is to show that he wants his international counterparts to be willing partners, not rubber stamps, which is a significant change from the unilateralist Bush era. "First and foremost," says White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, "the issue of non-proliferation, the issue of vulnerable nuclear material, is something that this president has made the cornerstone of his foreign policy," and leaders around the globe want to assist him in "making the world safer." And it's not only on proliferation. Gibbs argues that Obama's outreach paid big dividends with Moscow when the two former adversaries agreed in early April to reduce their nuclear arsenals. Gibbs predicts that foreign leaders will be more trusting of America's president than they have been in the past precisely because Obama has shown a willingness to find common ground. "They see an energetic president who is willing to discuss not just what's in our interest but what's in their interest," Gibbs says, "and work to align our interests together." If that spirit of comity continues and expands, it would be a welcome change.

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