The spluttering of the American right — and some European conservatives — over Barack Obama’s foreign policy reached a new level of vituperation last week. “Is Obama naive?” pondered Michael Ledeen at National Review. “I don’t think so. I think that he rather likes tyrants and dislikes America.”

Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation wrote in The Daily Telegraph: “[Obama’s] appeasement of Iran, his bullying of Israel, his surrender to Moscow, his call for a nuclear-free world ... have all won him plaudits in the large number of UN member states where US foreign policy has traditionally been viewed with contempt. Simply put, Barack Obama is loved at the UN because he largely fails to advance real American leadership.” Jennifer Rubin at the neoconservative publication Commentary declared Obama’s speech was “one of the more embarrassing and shameful displays by a US president before the UN”. For Gardiner, Ledeen and Rubin the model for foreign policy is that represented by Dick Cheney. He projected strength and decisiveness and America’s enemies allegedly cowered. Obama — or Obambi — is, in their eyes, an arugula-eating surrender monkey.

Let’s review the evidence. In Iraq, Obama postponed any rapid withdrawal, keeping troops there as long as the Bush administration had pledged. While ending torture, Obama has retained key provisions for extraordinary rendition and has recently scored real successes in the terror war. Last week brought the exposure of what looks like the first real Al-Qaeda plot within America, busted by the FBI and unaccompanied by any Obama grandstanding or fear-mongering. Several Al-Qaeda leaders have been taken out by drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Obama has sent more troops to Afghanistan and ordered a full review of strategy from one of Cheney’s favourite generals, Stanley McChrystal. For the first time in two decades Israel does not have carte blanche from the White House to do whatever it wants in the West Bank.

On the critical test of Iran we see the Obama method in clarifying perspective. Look at the moves of the first eight months. First off, Obama makes it clear that America is ready to talk if Iran is ready to deal. The Bush-era polarisation is defused, revealing to global opinion that it is Tehran, not Washington, that is the problem here. The Bush-style warnings are instead given by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, further underlining the fact that this is a global problem, not just an American one.

Obama then goes to Cairo to deliver a speech rebranding the United States with the Muslim world. The following month the green revolution breaks out on the streets of Iran and, despite brutal suppression, the spell of theocracy is for ever smashed. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, and Ayatollah Khamenei, its supreme leader, are opposed now not only by the massive majority of Iranians, but by part of their own elite as well. Then Obama scraps the missile defence system in eastern Europe, pleasing Russia, and moves the focus of defence to the Mediterranean, pleasing Israel. Dmitry Medvedev expresses the view — never uttered by a Russian leader before — that sanctions against Iran may be inevitable. Obama follows up by being the first US president to chair a United Nations security council meeting, where he presides over a resolution calling for nuclear disarmament. The vote is unanimous. Again, he wields American power through the prism of international co-operation — and receives a rapturous welcome at the UN from many developing countries that would previously have stayed aloof. Again, he lets Brown and especially Sarkozy make the more focused comments on Iran.

On Friday he reveals the existence of a second uranium enrichment site — near the religious centre of Qom — and proves that Tehran is a dishonest negotiator. And this time the storyline is not America versus Iran, but the world versus a deceptive dictator, clinging to power via a coup.

Is this weakness or is it a different avenue to strength? Politics is always about timing and context. Seeing Obama’s moves without taking into account the Bush-Cheney inheritance is to wear ideological blinkers. Obama’s promise was and is a rebranding of America (which was the primary reason I supported him). If you are an unchastened neocon you see no need to rebrand after Guantanamo, Iraq, Bagram and Abu Ghraib. But if you are capable of absorbing complicated reality, you realise that such a rebranding is essential if America is to dig itself out of the Bush-Cheney ditch and advance its interests by defter means than raw violence and occupation.

That’s what Obama is doing. It may not work. I’ll believe the Russian support for more aggressive sanctions against Iran when I see it. Binyamin Netanyahu may simply refuse to budge from occupying the West Bank. The Palestinians may again miss the opportunity to seize their own future. The Saudis have been intransigent so far. Ahmadinejad retains the support of the most radical elements of his national security state. Pakistan is teetering, while sustaining the insurgency in Afghanistan.

What were the alternatives? Bombing Iran would entail unimaginably awful consequences — polarising the Middle East still further, giving an expiring Al-Qaeda a new lease of oxygen and isolating Israel even more. The slow and delicate process of tightening the noose around Tehran, while eschewing US grandstanding, is the next best thing. Of course you need to coax Russia into support; but above all you have to remove the sense of grievance at US unilateralism and perceived arrogance.

There is also a difference between strength and brittleness. Cheney and Bush, for all their swagger, failed to prevent North Korea or Iran from progressing with nuclear weaponry. Bush retreated somewhat in his second term, under the influence of Condoleezza Rice and Bob Gates. Obama’s alternative strategy — which is a logical evolution of the second Bush term — seems to me the most productive avenue the West now has. And the West now has a leader who doesn’t need the headlines or the braggadocio of the Cheney method.

Sometimes a little give can mean a much bigger take. Sometimes a little restraint and cunning are more effective than constant tub-thumping and ideology. Who do you think had a more successful foreign policy: George H W Bush at the end of the cold war or George W Bush at the start of the war on terror? Obama is following the first Bush, not the second.

It would be foolish to dismiss the potential payback just eight months in.

www.andrewsullivan.com

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