Buoyed by the success of his nuclear deal with Iran, President Barack Obama is preparing to move aggressively on other long-delayed priorities, including a major climate change summit this winter and his elusive quest to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

The National Security Council’s directorate of strategic planning has been quietly building an agenda of action items for the closing year of Obama’s presidency, in a White House that sees its work as far from complete, administration officials say.


“We have no intention of resting on our laurels,” said one senior administration official. “We have an ambitious foreign policy agenda that we’ll continue to pursue aggressively throughout the remainder of [the] fourth quarter of the administration.”

Part of that agenda includes striking a calmer post-Iran deal relationship with Israel — including a November visit to the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that officials announced on Friday.

Also high on the to-do list: completing a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal to which Congress gave "fast-track" approval in June; bolstering counter-terrorism partnerships in Asia and Africa; and putting U.S.-China relations on a firmer footing, a project that will include a state visit to Washington by Chinese President Xi Jinping this month.

As Obama's presidency draws to a close, he will focus increasingly on the policies his successor will inherit after he's gone, according to sources familiar with the administration's thinking.

"The last 16 months actually can be very important not only for this president's legacy, but for setting up the next president's administration," said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who is close to Obama foreign policy officials. "No matter what people say in campaigns, you're most likely to see incremental change from administration to administration."

Even as the Iran deal gets implemented in the months ahead, a potentially thorny process that will occupy significant bandwidth in the White House, Obama will shift his focus to climate.

An international climate summit kicks off at the end of November in Paris, where Obama hopes to find agreement on meaningful new limits on carbon gases. The summit is expected to be one focus of Xi's visit.

Beneath the heady talk of agenda-setting, however, is the grim reality of a global stage where multiple fires burn despite Washington's efforts to extinguish them. Obama could spend much of his final year performing triage on issues like the Islamic State, Syria’s civil war and the conflict in Ukraine.

Officials are also braced for possible new crises, including in Afghanistan, as U.S. troops withdraw from a country whose government and security forces remain fragile.

One of Obama’s post-Iran deal projects has already run into trouble as Secretary of State John Kerry has begun new diplomacy to find a political resolution to Syria’s civil war. Russia, a key backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad, has recently sent military personnel and equipment to the country—a dramatic escalation that has surprised and angered Obama and Kerry and may derail that project.

"We continue to believe that there needs to be a political solution to the conflict in Syria, and that support for the Assad regime, particularly in a military way, is unhelpful to achieving that goal,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said Friday.

And although the White House been working on a new plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, a key promise from Obama's 2008 campaign, it has been bedeviled by old obstacles, including political resistance to the transfer of detainees from Cuba onto U.S. soil.

Some Pentagon and intelligence officials remain deeply wary of freeing other detainees cleared for release, and some top officials are skeptical that the camp can be shut down as long as a Republican Congress remains in power.

Other disappointments appear inevitable. Obama is likely to leave office having made little progress on defusing the danger of nuclear-armed North Korea and on stabilizing a volatile relationship with Pakistan, which U.S. officials believe continues to support Taliban factions that attack and kill Westerners in Afghanistan.

Nor does Russian President Vladimir Putin show any sign of ending Moscow's support for separatist rebels in Ukraine, despite U.S. and European sanctions intended to coerce him to do so.

Another frustration has been the resilience of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL. A year of airstrikes and the return of more than 3,000 U.S. troops to Iraq has failed to dislodge the Sunni Muslim group from major Iraqi cities like Mosul and Ramadi.

As some hawks call for a deeper U.S. engagement in the fight against ISIS, including by moving American soldiers from rear positions to the front lines of battle, Obama shows no appetite for escalation.

That is despite his past vow to defeat the group: “Our objective is clear: We will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy,” Obama said in a televised national address almost exactly a year ago, on Sept. 10, 2014.

Katulis said he does not expect Obama to take aggressive new steps in the Middle East, where top officials remain deeply skeptical about their ability to shape events constructively.

"After seven years, you get a sense they understand that the lesson is that things are easier said than done," Katulis said, citing two failed efforts to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. "There’s a cautious pragmatism that I think will restrain the administration’s ambitions on the tougher problems."

