Obama At The G20 Conference

President Obama speaks during a press conference following the G20 summit in London.

Image: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

The negotiators came to Europe, and by the end of the conference they had proclaimed a great success, a profound rallying of world unity.

The year was 1928 and the negotiators had met in Paris to sign the Kellogg-Briand pact, a now-laughable document that renounced the use of war. Frank Kellogg was the secretary of state who signed for the U.S.; Germany and Japan also signed. So did Stalin's Russia, but less than a decade later each of the Axis powers had begun their military campaigns against peaceful neighbors.

In the wake of the G20 meeting in London, it's worth remembering this caveat about summits and treaties and agreements. International cooperation is good. Real things can get done and they did in London this week.

The decision to pump some $1 trillion into the International Monetary Fund and multilateral trade assistance to help developing nations was not only an elegant compromise—a way to stave off the irreconcilable differences between the United States and Europe, most notably Germany, over fiscal stimulus.

It was a way to pump money into nations who will use it. Poor nations spend the money they get. The poor nations may waste it, but they do spend it and it's all about spending now.

But just as the Kellogg-Briand pact proved to be a tragic piece of international theater, a naive optimistic blip between the World Wars, there's no guarantee that this week's meeting will do what's needed to be done to stem the financial woes rocking the globe.

After all, when it comes to the question of toxic assets that are at the heart of the matter, about all the heads of state came up with was a change in accounting rules to make banks look more flush than they really are. There's still no global plan to deal with all the bad loans that are weighing on banks and freezing credit markets.

For this mess, we can't blame President Obama. At least there's a U.S. plan now to soak up the toxic assets. And as the president is fond of reminding us, he did inherit a calamitous situation and he's made a good-faith effort at bringing the allies aboard.

But somewhere, I think, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (certainly) are laughing. It was easy to scoff at the Bush era as arrogant and alienating, an epoch where we lost friends and influence around the globe.

But Obama's elegant theatrics—calling on large numbers of foreign reporters, saying we're here to listen, pledging cooperation—has its limits too. We have differences with the world not because Bush was a swaggering cowboy but because we have different interests.

Forging international cooperation with a Germany that doesn't want to spend, a France that wants some Brussels-style global financial regulator, or a China that wants a new global reserve currency is not only not easy, it's impossible.

America's standing in the world is better under Obama. And surely it helps the 44th president that he's so popular abroad. Foreign leaders need to think twice about dissing a president who is so well loved by their own people. That's a great asset in an age of toxic assets. But this week Obama ran into the limits of Obamaism, his ideology of global cooperation.

After London, Obama has many herding-cats jobs ahead of him: convincing Russia to respect its neighbors and help contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, coming up with some kind of road to peace between Israel and Palestine, and, above all, to keep the global financial crisis from getting worse.

The recent rise in the stock markets offered welcome relief, but the worst probably isn't over. The markets aren't working, and a round of global protectionism seems more likely than not. Trying to persuade NATO to send more troops to Afghanistan to match the American commitment there seems tough at best.

It's telling that when Obama was asked at his press conference after the G20 meeting to compare his international diplomatic style with Bush's, he declined. But he went on to repeat his bromides about listening and sharing with the world.

Obama's been a bit chastened this week, I think. He didn't screw up the way John F. Kennedy did in his meeting with Khrushchev in 1961, a disastrous rendezvous in Vienna where the Soviet leader perceived the young new president to be weak and which helped lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Obama was very much a president in full. The agreement hammered out in London—much of it forged in advance by Michael Froman, the "sherpa" and Citigroup/Bob Rubin veteran—has its bright spots.

But like Kellogg-Briand, it's no guarantee about whether the world a few years from now will be a much darker place no matter how terribly sunny Obama finds it today.