This could be one of the first breakthroughs for Obama to tout in his diplomacy achievement column. It’s something foreign policy watchers have been waiting to see for some time, with Joseph Nye using the “if the deal holds” caveat on Al Jazeera English today.
Take Stephen Walt. Time to start working on a Plan B, was a recent post of his, hitting something I’ve been ruminating and writing about lately as we look at forestalled gains so far on the foreign policy front.
If I were President Obama (now there’s a scary thought!), I’d ask some smart people on my foreign policy team to start thinking hard about “Plan B.” What’s Plan B? It’s the strategy that he’s going to need when it becomes clear that his initial foreign policy initiatives didn’t work. Obama’s election and speechifying has done a lot to repair America’s image around the world — at least in the short term — in part because that image had nowhere to go but up. But as just about everyone commented when he got the Nobel Peace Prize last week, his foreign policy record to date is long on promises but short on tangible achievements. Indeed, odds are that the first term will end without his achieving any of his major foreign policy goals.
The last line of Walt’s post is the clincher.
But today comes a positive sign, though it must be agreed upon in Tehran and Washington, which people are hoping will happen by the weekend.
Also on Al Jazeera English today (which I can watch regularly now that I’m in D.C.), Secretary Clinton once again reiterated Iran’s reality: “The door is open to a better future for Iran. But the process of engagement cannot be open-ended.”
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