Last year Barack Obama carried the hopes of much of the world at the UN General Assembly. No longer, writes Graham Usher in New York When Barack Obama addressed his first United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in 2009 he was still wrapped in the aura of a president inspiring hope and committed to change. After the lean years of American unilateralism, he pledged a "new era of engagement" with the world body. He said his foreign policy would rest on "four pillars": tackling climate change; addressing the economic crisis; promoting nuclear non- proliferation and disarmament; and pursuing peace and security. He may rehearse the same goals when he speaks before the UNGA today. He will be applauded. But the aura has gone. For those leaders attending from the south and non-aligned countries he will instead look like another American president trying to solve new problems with old paradigms, and failing -- and nowhere more so than in the Middle East. For much of the last year the United States' "re-engagement" with the UN in the region has focussed on one policy goal: isolating Iran over its nuclear programme, deemed by Washington as the gravest threat to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It took US diplomats until June to convince China and Russia to approve a fourth round of UN Security Council (UNSC) sanctions against Iran. Obama paraded the vote as an example of an "international coalition" against Iran. In fact, UNSC members Turkey and Brazil voted against. But the UNSC vote opened the way to other national sanctions, particularly from the US and European Union. And these are starting to hurt. Earlier this month Tehran announced it was converting petrochemical plants to boost the domestic production of petrol -- a tacit admission that petroleum imports are starting to dry up under threat of US penalties on countries which trade with Iran. But there's no sign "pressure" has slowed Iran's steady production of low-enriched uranium, which, with further enrichment, could provide fuel for nuclear weapons, say Western analysts. Nor has it made Iran more open to negotiations. In June Tehran barred two International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors for spreading "false information" about its nuclear programme. "Relations between Iran and the IAEA are the lowest they've ever been," said one Western diplomat. Faced with defiance the US resorts to more pressure. It is rehashing containment, as deployed against Iraq and Iran in the 1990s: on 18 September the New York Times reported that Obama was seeking Congressional approval for a $60 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia to help "create a containment shield against Iran". It may also continue covert Bush-like policies of regime change to help "efforts inside Iran by responsible civil and religious leaders to take hold of the apparatus of the state", mused Secretary of State Hillary Clinton 19 September. Neither gambit is likely to succeed. In fact, some analysts say America's hyping of the Iranian nuclear threat -- and the sanctions and arms sales it permits -- is less about deterring Tehran than dissuading Israel from any preventive strike should Iran get close to a nuclear weapons capability, a hit that could set the region ablaze. If so, containment or regime change is not about changing the region's dangerous status quo, as Obama put it in 2009, but about being held hostage to it. This certainly seems so with the so-called "peace process", the revival of which is Obama's only triumph. Last year before the UN he could say "America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements", that resolution of the Arab- Israeli conflict was in the US national interest, and that a meaningful peace process must be accompanied by a total settlement freeze. Yet when Israel refused to freeze, he buckled, and accepted a partial moratorium on West bank settlement starts that excluded occupied East Jerusalem. This year he won't even get that. On 17 September Israel said the moratorium would end this month: according to Israel's Peace Now monitor, this means 2,000 settlement units will be built immediately in the West Bank and 11,000 in due course. Obama may protest but pressure will more likely be exerted on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to continue Oslo-like negotiations "without preconditions": allegedly in return for a presidential promise that a Framework Agreement on a Palestinian state would be established "within a year". If Abbas buys that his credibility will sink as low as Obama's. Obama's "stunning lack of originality" (in the words of a former Israeli negotiator) contrasts poorly with another leader, who may also address the UNGA. For many, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has represented the kind of forceful leadership and diplomacy they had hoped to see in an Obama presidency. Of all the region's leaders, he has been the most vocal in stating that there can be no progress in a Middle East peace process as long as Gaza is caged and its Hamas government ostracised. He has also brought change, albeit in tragic circumstances. The Turkish-led flotilla in May cost nine Turkish lives. But it forced the question of Gaza back onto the international agenda and compelled both Egypt and Israel to ease the siege. Due to this, when today the peoples of the region think of Palestine, they think of Gaza: they do not think of direct negotiations. Similarly, Erdogan not only opposed Security Council sanctions against Iran. Together with Brazil, he persuaded Iran to sign a nuclear exchange deal similar to one Obama had initially promoted only to then spurn. Ankara has also said there is unlikely to be a compromise on Iran's nuclear programme as long as Israel's nuclear arsenal remains unaddressed. In all three cases Erdogan has acted on the basis of a real engagement with all nations, blowing away the facile, US-Israeli paradigm of "moderate" versus "radical" regimes. This perhaps explains why he is the region's most popular politician. And why Obama's rating heads further down the tubes with every UNGA.
