US: Success abroad seems to be eluding the US president in his second term, write Peter Baker and Dafna Linzer.
President Bush's campaign against what he once termed the "axis of evil" has suffered reverses on all three fronts in recent days, underscoring the profound challenges confronting him 3½ years after he vowed to take action.
First, multilateral talks orchestrated by the US to put pressure on North Korea to give up nuclear weapons were adjourned last week without agreement. Then Iran restarted its programme to convert uranium, in defiance of the US and the EU. Finally, negotiators in Iraq failed to draft a new constitution by Monday's deadline amid an unrelenting guerrilla war against US forces.
None of these developments may be fatal to Mr Bush's policy goals, but the quick succession of setbacks has left his national security team privately discouraged and searching for answers.
Whereas in his first term Mr Bush vowed to reinvent foreign policy with a new doctrine of military pre-emption to deal with rogue states, he has largely dropped such talk since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Instead, he has favoured diplomacy with Tehran and Pyongyang and nation-building with Baghdad. Yet this old-fashioned improvisation has yielded similarly murky results.
Publicly, administration officials have put the best face on the situation, finding hope in the fact that Iraq's sectarian leaders remain at the negotiating table and that neither Iran nor North Korea has ruled out further talks. Unlike in Iraq two years ago, US officials note, this time they are working more or less in tandem with European and Asian allies.
"These are difficult issues," national security adviser Stephen Hadley said in an interview last week after the Iran and North Korea setbacks. "They're going to take some time. But the main thing is to keep the international community focused."
Iran's new hardline president has said he has ideas to discuss with Britain, Germany and France, which have taken the lead on behalf of the EU in dealing with Tehran, and his new national security chief said yesterday that negotiations would continue. The six-party talks involving North Korea and the US, along with China, Japan, South Korea and Russia, are due to resume in Beijing on August 29th.
Seeking to justify his optimism, Mr Hadley noted that the latest round of talks on North Korea had ended a 13-month boycott by Pyongyang. "They were basically testing us to see if they could split the [ other] five . . . and they failed," he said. "Similarly now, the Iranians are trying to test the EU three to see if they can split them."
Yet, in the broader picture, the fitful pace of the talks in both cases belies the urgency the president has expressed in the past and some Bush supporters believe that the time has come for a more robust approach.
"The present course cannot be followed forever," said David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who helped to coin the "axis of evil" phrase the president used in his 2002 State of the Union speech to target countries believed to be developing weapons of mass destruction. "The president made his statement - that he will not permit that - so now he has to find a course of action. In Iraq, the president said he will see the job through. The job's not through, and we'll see if he'll follow through on that."
Mr Frum said he sometimes worries that the president has become a captive of a status quo bureaucracy. "The Bush administration since 9/11 has been again and again fighting to escape gravity, fighting to escape the weight of the way things have always been done," he said. "Things are now coming to a decision point and we'll know soon."
The unexpected difficulties experienced in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003 have coloured the broader efforts against the axis-of-evil states. Tehran and Pyongyang have felt more free to flout American pressure, secure in the knowledge that the US military is tied down in Iraq, analysts say.
"The situation in Iraq is sufficiently sober [ that] I think this has given the Iranians a boost of confidence that they didn't have two years ago," said Geoffrey Kemp, a former Reagan administration national security official and now a scholar at the Nixon Centre. "They're not scared of us as they once were."
In the interim, North Korea, by its own account, has built several nuclear devices. How much progress Iran may have made, if any, is less clear. Iran denies pursuing weapons, although in the past it hid nuclear development efforts which it attributed to civilian purposes. However, a recent US intelligence estimate concluded that the theocratic state is as far as 10 years away from making the key ingredient for nuclear weapons.
Robert Einhorn, a former assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation, said that North Korea and Iran demonstrated the difficulty in stopping determined proliferators without using force. "We are not prepared to use military options in either place, but we also have not come up with a combination of incentives and disincentives to get the job done."
After the sabre-rattling rhetoric of the first term, Kemp credits the new Bush team with being "remarkably restrained" on North Korea and Iran. "At least now we're seen as a co-operative multilateral player and not thumbing our nose at the rest of the world," he said.
Yet, by seeking international consensus, Mr Bush has made his policy dependent on other countries in a way he has been loath to do. The administration was caught out by recent South Korean comments supporting civilian nuclear energy for the north. And the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last week adopted only a mild resolution calling on Iran to turn off its uranium-conversion facility, with no threat of consequences.
"Obviously, Iran is ahead for the moment, and they had a much better week," one disappointed senior European official said. "But I don't think anybody on our side would say we've lost this yet."
US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive ongoing diplomacy, said that they still could win a consensus to refer the Iran nuclear issue to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.
For all the focus on Iraq, the problems there are even more complex. The administration has tried without success to pressure fractious Iraqi leaders to write a constitution. The impasse led the Iraqis to extend their deadline to next Monday as US officials scrambled to help find a consensus.
From the beginning, the White House has said that it would employ different strategies for each member of the "axis". In the case of North Korea, it has refused one-on-one negotiations but agreed to sit down with Pyongyang's representatives in the context of multiparty talks. Mr Bush refuses to talk with Iran at all, although he has supported the European outreach to Tehran. Some Republicans in Congress are starting to quietly urge the administration to communicate with Iran directly, as it has done with North Korea.
The disparity in strategies has recently become more evident. At a news conference last week, Mr Bush was asked why it might be acceptable for Iran to develop civilian nuclear power but not North Korea. He replied by suggesting that Tehran had been more honest. "North Korea is in a different situation," he said, "because they did not tell the truth when it came to their enrichment programmes."
It was a striking shift in tone for a president who has regularly accused Iran of hiding weapons programmes.
As the conflict drags on, some analysts predict that resolution will elude the president, who vowed not to wait almost a full term ago.
"I think in five years we'll be in the same stalemate we are now, at best," said Clifford Kupchan, an analyst of Iran at the Eurasia Group. "Neither Pyongyang nor Tehran wants to pick a fight with the 800-pound gorilla, because they'll lose. On the other hand, the 800-pound gorilla doesn't have a lot of options right now either."