Here is a reasonable-sounding assessment by Jonathan Freedland of the early days of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy:

That same official explained it to me like this yesterday: "The Bush administration hindered its own efforts by tying one hand behind its back. Diplomacy is a tool, but they viewed it with such suspicion, as if those who pursued it were somehow weak. This is about being wise."

Specifically:

… plaudits surely go to Obama’s direct appeal to Medvedev, with its echoes of John F Kennedy’s resolution of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Just as JFK agreed to remove US missiles from Turkey if the Soviet Union took theirs away from Cuba, so Obama implicitly made a similar offer to Russia: you get Iran to back down, and I’ll remove my interceptor missiles and radar stations from Poland and the Czech Republic.

Here is a cross counter-view from Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky at NRO:

… instead of holding Russia accountable for abetting Iran’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, President Obama has invited Medvedev and Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin to name their price for some vague and unspecified “assistance” in controlling a problem that they deliberately created…

The Obama administration’s show of weakness will encourage Russia to treat the U.S. as it does Europe. Threats to U.S. supply lines will be used to extort all manner of concessions.

Will the United States be pressured to mute its criticism of Russia’s human-rights abuses and the Kremlin’s links to organized crime? To recognize Russia’s extravagant claims in the Arctic? To exclude Georgia and Ukraine from NATO? To abandon Georgia if Russia launches another offensive? Where will the Obama administration draw the line?

Meanwhile in Moscow there will be heard the view  that it makes little sense for Russia to ‘cooperate’ with Washington on Iran in return for the Americans rowing back on the missile shield system, "a problem they deliberately created".

And so on.

The underlying leitmotif of the Obama approach seems to be that better results will be achieved for the USA by proclaiming itself to be the ‘UnBush’, then determinedly pursuing reasonable and ‘inclusive’ policies aimed at opening up to many former opponents while marginalising those who show themselves to be implacable extremists.

Which might work for a while, although the risk is indeed that it will start to look more like weakness and uncertainty of purpose than smartness or wisdom.

And these days implacable extremists have a tendency to just get in the way. So, after all that friendly unclenched fist persuasion fails, at what point to heave a sigh and, in a flash of UnBush Bushlike firepower, blow them out of the way?

In fact it all depends hugely on what the Obama team think they are dealing with – the underlying assumptions.

It is one thing to negotiate with people who are capable of behaving reasonably – another to waste time giving concessions to people whose only aim is to pocket concessions and offer nothing serious in return (see eg the Bosnia conflict, passim).

Plus in engaging with one’s opponents one needs to mobilise one’s friends.

Jonathan Freedland:

… while it is the prospect of dialogue with America’s enemies that generates headlines, no less important is the relationship with America’s friends … this was the thrust of Biden’s message to Nato’s North Atlantic Council in Brussels yesterday: not some kind of "wussy multilateralism", with lots of cosy meetings and platitudes, but a "results-oriented" desire to get things done – and the belief that that only happens when the world acts in concert.

Part of achieving that is all about dilgently sending positive signals to one’s friends.

Not, perhaps, signals like these:

If it’s any consolation to Gordon Brown, he’s just not that into any of you.

What Mr. Brown and the rest of the world want is for America, the engine of the global economy, to pull the rest of them out of the quicksand — which isn’t unreasonable. Even though a big chunk of the subprime/securitization/credit-bubble axis originated in the United States and got exported round the planet, the reality is that almost every one of America’s trading partners will wind up getting far harder hit.

… We’re seeing not just the first contraction in the global economy since 1945, but also the first crisis of globalization. This was the system America and the other leading economies encouraged everybody else to grab a piece of.  But whatever piece you grabbed — exports in Taiwan, services in Ireland, construction in Spain, oligarchic industrial-scale kleptomania in Russia — it’s all crumbling.

Ireland and Italy are nation-state versions of Bank of America and General Motors. In Eastern Europe, the countries way out on the end of the globalization chain can’t take a lot of heat without widespread unrest. And the fellows who’ll be picking up the tab are the Western European banks who loaned them all the money.

Gordon Brown was hoping for a little more than: “I feel your pain. And have you ever seen The Wizard of Oz? It’s about this sweet little nobody who gets to pay a brief visit to the glittering Emerald City before being swept back to the reassuring familiarity of the poor thing’s broken-down windswept economically devastated monochrome dustbowl. You’ll love it!”

Thus, a prediction:

I would make a modest prediction that in 2012, after four years of the man who was supposed to heal America’s relations with a world sick of all that swaggering cowboy unilateralism, those relations will be much worse.

Only 150 weeks or so until we know how that gloomy view has worked out.