President Obama meets with Chinese President Hu Jintao at the Nuclear Security Summit. Obama's nuclear wizardry and Iran

Sir Francis Bacon once said, “In civil business, what first? Boldness. What second and third? Boldness. And yet boldness is a child of ignorance and baseness.”

At the Nuclear Security Summit President Barack Obama is presiding over in a transportation-gridlocked Washington this week, he is achieving a boldness — but not of bravado. Rather, it is one of calculated subtlety and strategic depth.


Obama has brought together 47 world leaders to get them to commit to safer nuclear materials management practices and prevent trafficking in weapons of mass destruction.

Obama is changing the direction of global gravity. He is also confronting Iran without the shallowness of bombing vs. sanctions vs. public humiliation that his administration has been flirting with. In the past week, and over the next month, Obama is showing what a U.S.-led world order should look like.

This is a huge shift, for the world hasn’t had much faith in America’s abilities to deliver. For example, in taking on strategic challenges like getting the Israelis and Palestinians on a two-state pathway; or ending the anachronistically simmering Cold War conflict in U.S.-Cuba relations; or persuading Iran to forgo a nuclear weapons track, most of the world has seen an America unable to achieve the objectives it sets out for itself.

In recent years, this has translated into a sense that the United States is a well-branded, globally important but underperforming country, whose influence is weakening — more like a national version of General Motors than Google.

Now, out of the blue, Obama is changing the game.

In a quick succession of deals focused on pre-empting a 21st-century nuclear nightmare, Obama has mended the foundation and infrastructure of a global nonproliferation regime that United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Vice President Dick Cheney and others of the pugnacious nationalist wing of the last administration worked hard to tear down.

And, by bringing together 47 key leaders, Obama is signaling to all stakeholders that a nuclear crisis with Iran and other potential breakout states would undermine the global commons.

Yet he is not vilifying Iran or its leaders. He is not making the same “axis of evil” mistake President George W. Bush did.

Instead, Obama is showing the benign and constructive side of U.S. power to other great states like India, China, Brazil and Russia. He is also inviting Iran to get in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and get back into a club that matters — where Iran could be respected for adopting a sensible course.

This comes on the heels of Obama’s release last week of a Nuclear Posture Review. It pledges to cut the size of the nuclear weapons footprint in U.S. arsenals while simultaneously influencing the cost-benefit realities for nations either “in” or “out” of the nuclear nonproliferation club.

The most obvious holdouts are Iran and North Korea — but frankly, there’s also Israel. The nuclear review also makes clear that the biggest nuclear concerns are nonstate actors, not states.

Obama has made a Faustian bargain in this new review. For he is allotting more financial resources to U.S. labs for maintenance and modernization of the current weapons stockpile, while pulling the plug on new weapons development.

Vice President Joe Biden should be given the credit for this crucial deal, which kept the national security right from mugging the president during the process.

Finally, Obama has signed a historic strategic arms reduction treaty with the Russians. This reverses the erosion of a relationship that — like the U.S.-China relationship — is crucial to virtually all the administration’s goals.

The primary reason driving Defense Secretary Robert Gates to stay on in the administration was to reconfigure U.S.-Russia relations. It had become so riddled with suspicion that Russia may well have vetoed any U.S. progress on the Iran front.

Senior Russian officials tell me that the tag team of Gates on the military side and Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher on the diplomatic front changed the climate from unproductive mutual skepticism and hostility to pragmatic respect. And this may now lead to new collaborations.

Coming next, in May, is sure to be reactivated U.S. leadership at the once-every-five-years review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Five years ago, Washington conveyed its disdain through envoys, whose policy postures were shaped by Bolton’s suspicions of international groups that bordered on a hyper-view of U.S. sovereignty.

This NPT review with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice and Tauscher — and with Obama at the helm — is now a part of a soft but perhaps effective strategy to contain Iran’s nuclear pretensions.

The administration’s team has worked hard to entice China and Russia into a partnership so they do not become more allied with Iran’s course than Washington’s.

Obama has now showed two essential strengths. First, he can deliver what he promised in September 2009, when he chaired a special Security Council session. Second, his team understands the difference between approaches that have strategic depth and can move global players into new positions versus those that are vapidly bilateral and uncompelling to either party.

Before Obama reset this new global contract on nuclear issues, Washington and Tehran had negotiated via public jabs.

Meanwhile, the U.S.-led effort to impose harsh sanctions on Iran was more about feeding U.S. political opinion than successfully steering Iran in a new direction.

Getting key stakeholders sewn together on this, through revitalized global institutions, is a far more effective way to animate the choices Iran may make.

Obama’s global nuclear wizardry — focused on Iran and North Korea — may yet fail.

He still needs to find a way to deal with the Iranian leadership’s paranoia about Western regime change efforts. He also has to balance carrots for Iran with constraints.

But Obama and his team are finally showing a Nixonian deftness for creating new possibilities at just the time the world believed America was a global has-been.

Steve Clemons is director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and publishes The Washington Note, a political blog.