Whatever the immediate practical outcome, the nuclear summit in Washington last Monday and Tuesday has given an undoubted boost to the standing of the United States – and of President Barack Obama himself. The meeting of more than 40 heads of state and government has been billed as the greatest gathering of world leaders since Franklin D Roosevelt summoned his predecessors to San Francisco in 1945 to create the United Nations. The implicit message of the summit was that President Obama was the world's leading statesman and that the US was the world's only superpower. Banished was talk of America's decline or the emergence of a multi-polar world. Banished, too, was any suggestion that Barack Obama was weak or ineffectual – accusations which had circulated widely before the successful recent passage of his much-needed health care reform bill. He was now the most powerful man on the planet and its leading problem-solver. The conference was seen as a further step in the direction of Obama's lofty vision – outlined a year ago in a major speech at Prague – of a world free of nuclear weapons. Before the meeting opened, the United States revealed a significant shift in its nuclear strategy. Published last Monday, the Nuclear Posture Review states that “The United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states that are party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations.” The “fundamental role” of America's nuclear weapons, the Review says, is to deter a nuclear attack – and not to be used for aggressive purpose. Even a chemical or biological attack against the US or its allies will not trigger a nuclear response but only, in the words of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a “devastating conventional military response”. The US has also pledged not to develop a new generation of nuclear warheads. By thus setting an example of nuclear restraint, the US is hoping to persuade non-nuclear states to give up the idea of acquiring nuclear weapons. The only trouble is that, in explaining the new strategy, President Obama himself and Robert Gates, his Secretary of Defense, singled out some notable exceptions to the new doctrine. “We essentially carve out states like Iran and North Korea that are not in compliance with NPT,” Gates said. “If you're not going to play by the rules, if you're going to be a proliferator, then all options are on the table in terms of how we deal with you.” Iran has responded indignantly to these threats. Accusing the US of “nuclear terrorism,” it has said it would make a formal complaint against the United States to the United Nations. Officially, the main item of business of the Washington conference was a four-year plan to control and lock down the more than 1,500 tons of enriched uranium and plutonium scattered at more than forty sites around the world – enough to manufacture over 100,000 nuclear bombs and destroy human civilization several times over. The main challenge, Obama declared, was how to keep these dangerous nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists, such as those of Al-Qaeda. In fact, the real business of the conference was conducted at bilateral meetings behind closed doors. Obama conferred with China's President Hu Jintao, whose backing he is seeking for sanctions against Iran; he met separately with India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari, since peace between these wary neighbors is an essential prerequisite for a settlement in Afghanistan; he met with Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev, securing his agreement to allow US military overflights of Kazakh territory to America's Bagram airbase in Afghanistan; he met with Ukraine's president Viktor Yanukovich, who pledged to eliminate his country's Cold War stockpile of enriched uranium by 2012; and with many others as well – including King Abdullah of Jordan, a signal that Obama is still determined to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose not to attend the summit. His personal antipathy for Obama – fully reciprocated by the latter – may have played a part in his decision to stay away. He may have feared a snub, such as he suffered during his recent visit to Washington, when there were no photographs with a smiling Obama and no joint press conference. Or he may have believed that Israel and its parochial problems would be overshadowed for once at an American summit of the world's greatest powers. Above all, Netanyahu must have wished to avoid any international pressure regarding Israel's large nuclear arsenal. Israel has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), or submit to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). It is determined to remain the region's only nuclear power – and has used force in the past, notably against Iraq, to retain this monopoly. It has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran and is totally hostile to the idea, floated by Egypt and other Arab states, of a Middle East free of nuclear weapons. The Israelis are all too aware that, in Obama's mind, Iran's nuclear activities and Middle East peace are intimately connected. The US President will undoubtedly expect a reward from Israel for his pressure on Iran. If Iran can be persuaded to halt its nuclear program – which Israel never misses an opportunity to depict with great drama as an “existential threat” to itself – then Israel will have to respond by halting its settlement expansion on the West Bank and in Arab East Jerusalem. That is what Obama clearly anticipates. Particularly alarming to Israel are persistent reports out of Washington that, if Israeli-Palestinian talks fail to start, Obama will announce – and seek to impose – his own peace plan. This is an outcome Israel wishes to avoid at all costs. Obama's vision of a nuclear-free world is undoubtedly a noble one. But there are flaws in the implementation. Military threats against Iran such as Gates and Obama himself have already made – and which Israeli leaders make routinely – are not likely to impress an increasingly defiant Iran. On the contrary, far from causing Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions, they are more likely to spur it to develop nuclear weapons with all possible speed, as a deterrent against attack. Rather than being threatened and excluded, Iran should be brought into the security architecture of the Arab world, as Amr Moussa, the Secretary General of the Arab League has often recommended. The Washington summit will not have cleared Obama's many headaches, but diplomacy is a step-by-step process requiring patience and determination. Obama has demonstrated that he has both.
