It is, almost certainly, the most important speech of his presidency. On Thursday Barack Obama will address the Muslim world from Cairo University. And no one quite knows what he is going to say.

There is speculation, of course. Last week the Arab press was a-twitter over Obama’s last-minute decision to visit Saudi Arabia en route to Egypt. Was this a swipe at Egypt? Did it signal an endorsement of the Arab peace initiative? Or was it the usual American brown-nosing of the royal autocrats who have all that oil?

Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, fuelled the chatter by insisting on the freezing of West Bank settlements. On Thursday, in a meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, Obama referred to the 2003 road map agreement which required an end to settlement activity. “We can’t continue the drift,” he said. “We need to get this thing back on track.”

The Israeli press, meanwhile, has seemed close to panic. David Horovitz, editor of The Jerusalem Post, argued that “in the briefing rooms of the American Israel public affairs committee conference [in Washington], as in the corridors of power back home in Israel, the contours were discernible not merely of a crack . . . but of a veritable abyss between Israel and America – a rupture that goes far beyond rhetorical gaps and conflicting emphases”.

One reason for this excitability is aware-ness on all sides of Obama’s huge charismatic clout – and, at the same time, of the near tabula rasa of his views on Middle Eastern diplomacy. Remember his silence during the bombardment of Gaza – and his Delphic distance from the Washington fight over the proposed appointment of Chas Freeman, a critic of Israel, to his national security team?

There are good reasons for the president to keep his views close to himself. George Mitchell, his special envoy, is shuttling around; the new Israeli government relies on a prickly bloc of rightists; the Iranian elections in June could change everything; the remnants of Al-Qaeda are testing the fledgling Iraqi government; and the Muslim nuclear power of Pakistan is in a brutal counter-insurgency campaign.

In such a climate, where you have to find a path between Jews and Arabs, Sun-nis and Shi’ites, you tread slowly and carefully. Obama is as careful as anyone in the presidential office in recent times.

My feeling is he has a shrewd sense of the regional politics and no illusions about fast change. The striking distinction from the Bush legacy is Obama’s conviction that moving tangibly towards a viable two-state solution in Israel/Palestine is the hinge on which this project depends. (It could be argued that George W Bush migrated reluctantly to this view in his second term, under the guidance of Condi Rice.)

Obama is, in this respect, undoubtedly on a collision course with Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who wants to disarm Iran of nuclear potential before ceding territory that could be used by Iran’s militant proxies. But Obama sees progress in Palestine as a prerequisite for persuading Iran to behave.

Meanwhile, Iran’s nuclear programme is advancing and Netanyahu has declared it must be slowed by the end of the year. Time is running out. Like everyone else, Obama is aware of the dangers. A unilateral Israeli strike on Iran, for example, could be the most disruptive event in US-Israeli relations since Suez. No one wants that.

This conflict will not, one senses, be the point of Obama’s speech. What he wants is a new foundation for America’s relationship with the Muslim world. He chose Cairo over Jakarta, in Indonesia, because he understands that if you can move Islam in its historic centre, the impact is far greater than if you try in its more moderate and tolerant peripheries. (Jakarta would also have led to a mass of biographical angles in the press, which Obama wants to avoid.)

Oddly, I suspect his speech will be less liberal than Bush’s famous address on the need for democracy in the Arab world, which he saw as the cure for Islamism. What Obama brings, that neither of the Bushes could, is his middle name, his skin colour and his biography. His father was an African who lived under imperial rule and Obama spent part of his childhood in a Muslim country – Indonesia – and has Muslim relatives. By daring to go to Cairo, he can show that America is less governed by fear than it once was. He can also show a simple thing: respect.

The speech will be a historic paean to Islam and to Muslim culture. He will appeal to Muslim pride; simply by showing up he will demonstrate that he is trying to defuse and unwind the misunderstandings and enmities that riddle the region.

One hopes there won’t be the usual pabulum about moderates and extremists that is all too familiar to Muslim ears after years of Bush. Instead Obama will be emphatically positive, knowing that a defence of Islam by an American president in Cairo is the one clear statement he can make that will resonate widely.

So here we have the usual Obama paradox: a mass emotional appeal joined to a cool, governing realism. He is trying to do in international affairs what he has done domestically: appeal to the masses in order to apply subtle pressure and leverage on the elites.

If he can make the region’s leaders less able to wield antiAmericanism to cover up their own errors, and if he can shift even to a minor degree the suspicion that young Muslim men feel towards the West, then he could undermine the appeal of Islamism. He could weaken the environment in which terror gathers speed. And he could also make it easier for some Arab autocracies to stay in America’s good graces and cooperate in its fight against terrorism.

Obama will surely fail in the short run. If there is any region that manages to buoy the cynic, it is the Middle East. But he is a patient man and patient in his radicalism. He is attempting to get the forces in that region to respond to him and, by responding to him, to show their cards.

Then, having laid the groundwork on a mass and elite level, he will deal with the problems methodically and sometimes ruthlessly.

What he wants, of course, is a radically new order: a nonnuclear Iran integrated into the region as a friend to Iraq and restraining its militant Shi’ite sectarianism; a two-state solution in Palestine/ Israel that can last; and a slow unwinding of the fear and hostility that 9/11 so dramatically unleashed.

He can dream, I suppose. And we can hope.

www.andrewsullivan.com

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