Embraced Overseas, But to What Effect?

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Obama's International Tour

Presidential hopeful Barack Obama has embarked on a weeklong tour of the Middle East and Europe designed to deepen his foreign policy credentials, confront questions at home about his readiness to be commander in chief and signal the possibility of a new era in U.S. relations with the rest of the world.

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"The point is, with change comes some risk, and I combine two things," he said. One is a shift in policies, the other a biography he said will take people time to process. "They're going to keep their powder dry and get as much information as they can the next three months," he added.

McCain advisers complained through much of the week about what they labeled "a premature victory lap," and McCain made a joke of it.

At his closing news conference in London, Obama pushed back against suggestions that there was something inappropriate about his week abroad.

"It is hard for me to understand Senator McCain's argument," he said. "He was telling me I was supposed to take this trip. . . . John McCain has visited every one of these countries, post-primary, that I have. He has given speeches in Canada, in Colombia, Mexico, he made visits. And so it doesn't strike me that we have done anything different than the McCain campaign has done."

The difference, of course, was the scale and ambition of Obama's tour. He flew in a chartered plane with the words "Change We Can Believe In" on the fuselage and with a sizable press corps. He traveled with a retinue of senior foreign policy advisers, who were veterans of the Clinton administration, as well as his top political advisers. McCain had nothing in comparison.

From a sheer logistical challenge, what Obama attempted was unprecedented, a presidential-style trip without the resources and clout of the White House. But the result was a series of meetings with foreign leaders who seemed to go out of their way to court their guest, as well as stunning visual images, from a news conference on a hillside in Jordan, with the ruins of the Temple of Hercules in one direction and the city of Amman as a backdrop, to the sea of humanity -- estimated at 200,000 -- that turned out in Berlin on Thursday night for Obama's only major public event of the trip.

The policy highlight was Iraq and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's embrace of a timetable for withdrawal akin to Obama's 16-month plan. The visual highlight was Berlin.

"The speech in Berlin and that stirring picture of the crowd lined up a mile long will be the enduring image or memory of this trip," Democratic strategist Dan Gerstein said. "That said, 'America is back' -- or more accurately, 'America will be back' -- in world esteem more than any nifty turn of phrase Obama and his excellent speechwriters could have ever come up with."

But Republican strategist Alex Vogel called the Obama strategy "the hope of audacity" and said it may not work. "Taking a page from the Clinton campaign's inevitability strategy, the Obama folks are hoping that voters will substitute symbolism for experience," he said.

The message Obama hoped to send was that, after eight years of President Bush and rising anti-American sentiment in many countries, the United States could have a president the rest of the world admires.

"What I thought was useful was to give the American people some sense of how I was approaching these issues, but also to give them a sense that the world can be responsive to this approach and that it will make a difference," Obama said.

"[French President Nicolas] Sarkozy is much more likely to be able to provide more troop support in Afghanistan if his voters are favorably disposed towards us," he added.