Pat Dollard

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Analysis: What has Barack Obama’s first foreign tour really achieved?
After a frenetic eight days, 10,000 plus miles, three summits and meetings with some 15 world leaders, the White House press corps gathered to hear President Barack Obama’s closest political adviser trumpet an “enormously productive” trip.

Telegraph

By Toby Harnden in Istanbul

Standing in an Istanbul hotel beneath huge crystal chandeliers and a ceiling decorated with Ottoman motifs, David Axelrod argued that Mr Obama’s first appearance on the world stage had been an “great success” that had yielded “tangible progress”.

Certainly, Mr Obama was feted across Europe. In Prague’s Hradcany Square, more than 20,000 Czechs turned out on a Sunday morning to hear him promise to seek a “world without nuclear weapons” and demand that “the voices for peace and progress must be raised together”.

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In Strasbourg, there were squeals of delight as Mr Obama led a crowd of surprised students in a chant of: “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.” Arthur Renaud, 19, said afterwards: “This was a wonderful moment for the human race.”

As Mr Obama himself seemed to recognise when he referred to President John F. Kennedy’s remark about his wife Jackie, not since Camelot came to Europe in 1961 had an American commander-in-chief and his wife received such adulation.

“To paraphrase one of my predecessors, I am also proud to be the man who brought Michelle Obama to Prague,” Mr Obama said.

But Mr Obama returns to the United States with few demonstrable results to show for his tireless efforts to woo Europe and rebuild relations after President George W. Bush by apologising for American “arrogance” and declaring at every turn that he wants “to listen, to learn and to lead”.

In a deft attempt to manage expectations, he scaled down what he was asking for even before he stepped on Air Force One bound for London. This meant that even though the G20 summit yielded a fraction of the economic stimulus measures he could claim a historic success.

The same pattern followed at the Nato summit when allies came up with a paltry 5,000 troops for Afghanistan, including 3,000 that will be just a temporary election force and 600 that the Germans had already promised Mr Bush, compared to the 21,000 Mr Obama had just committed.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France lavished praise on Mr Obama at every turn and said that the American president’s fresh approach was “starting to bear fruit”.

Not a single additional French soldier will be sent to Afghanistan, however, and in Prague, Mr Sarkozy publicly berated Mr Obama for having the temerity to call for Turkey to be admitted to the European Union.

Perhaps the most tangible achievement of the trip was an agreement in principle with Russia to reduce nuclear stockpiles and negotiate a new arms control treaty.

But the Russian aspirations were similar to those expressed to Mr Bush at the Sochi summit a year ago and Moscow, with its ageing nuclear arsenal, has more to gain from strategic reductions than Washington.

Even one of Mr Obama senior adviser conceded that the “deal” with Russian could amount to nothing. “To establish an ambitious agenda does not mean we’re going to fulfil it, and we have no illusions about that,” he said.

Similarly, minutes before Mr Obama outlined his utopian vision of a nuclear free world, Gary Samore, a White House arms control adviser, admitted that this was “not a near-term possibility” and the speech was an attempt to exert pressure on Iran and North Korea by occupying “the moral high ground”.

Hours before Mr Obama’s Prague speech, Pyongyang launched a rocket over Japan – a clear test of the new president. Two days later, the United Nations Security Council had yet to agree on a response.

The danger for Mr Obama is that his message often seems to circle back to himself and while there is little doubt that he has won European hearts much of the affection is for his persona rather than his policies.

In France and Turkey, he sought to turn to his advantage the Muslim middle name that some American political operatives had believed would prevent him ever winning the White House.

The US “like every other nation has made mistakes and has its flaws”, he said in Istanbul, but if it wasn’t a tolerant country “then somebody named Barack Hussein Obama wouldn’t have been elected President of the United States of America”.

While presenting himself as the embodiment of a modern, progressive US, Mr Obama seems less than comfortable talking about American power.

In his G20 press conference in London, he said that he believed in “American exceptionalism” but then reduced the cherished notion that Americans are a special people because of their institutions and origins to mere patriotism. “Just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

Unfortunately, he chose to cite two countries whose empires crumbled to dust.

At the same event, Mr Obama quipped that these days things were not so simple as when Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill could cut a deal over a brandy “But that’s not the world we live in and it shouldn’t be the world that we live in,” he said, perhaps suggesting a preference for a multipolar world in which the US was no longer the sole superpower.

Der Spiegel quoted Mr Obama as agreeing with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy that America was to blame for the global financial crisis. “It is true, as my Italian friend has said, that the crisis began in the US. I take responsibility, even if I wasn’t even president at the time,” he reportedly said.

Although he travelled with all the awe-inspiring trappings of the most powerful man in the world – Air Force One, the armour-plated limousines, scores of Secret Service agents and more than 200 reporters in his wake – Mr Obama repeated stressed humility.

Only towards the end did he begin to show a touch of frustration that some – such as Mr Sarkozy – had accepted his apologies and explanations and then branded his softly, softly advice as interference in European affairs.

“I notice the Europeans have had a lot of opinions about U.S. policy for a long time, right?” Mr Obama shot back when a Turkish student asked him about Mr Sarkozy’s remarks.

There was also some impatience from Mr Axelrod that the White House press corps seemed a little sceptical about his analysis that the trip was a “great success” in which “we accomplished everything we had hoped” and more.

“Why didn’t the waters part, the sun shine, and all ills of the world disappear because President Obama came to Europe this week?” he asked, urging patience. “That wasn’t our expectation. That will take at least a few weeks.”