The Hotspots No Speech Can Fix

Mike Segar / Reuters Obama’s U.N. speech was fine, but words won’t solve much. Leslie H. Gelb’s advice to the president: Go slow on Afghanistan, do community organizing in the Mideast—and don’t snub the dictators.

To solid applause at the U.N. General Assembly, President Obama called on the world’s leaders to join the United States in “a new era of engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect." To more applause, he said his country would “re-engage” with the United Nations. To less applause, he added that “the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve [its] problems alone.”

Click Image To View Our Gallery of Memorable U.N. Moments

For all the high-sounding rhetoric, this is an awful week. When the United Nations General Assembly comes together, you have all the would-be peacemakers and villains of the world gathered together in one place. And it becomes plain to see how hard it is to get anything done. In the Middle East, there’s stalemate again, or stalemate still. In Afghanistan, we’re on the verge of making some impossibly hard decisions. And then you’ve got Libya and Iran —with Muammar Qaddafi and President Ahmadinejad walking around talking their nonsense. All the monsters and mayhem of the world have arrived on our doorstep. And when these leaders from renegade states talk--and they will be talking--you’ll see how far apart they are from the rest of the world.

• The Daily Beast’s Geoffrey Robertson: Qaddafi Was a New Low for the U.N.

• Watch: A History of U.N. Outbursts President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton are going to dozens of meetings with heads of state and foreign ministers. It’s going to be hard to get any real business done, because the meetings are relatively short and the problems are deeply rooted and impossibly long-range. As they go about their various get-togethers, one enormous weight bears down on them, one that outweighs all others at the moment: what to do about Afghanistan.

The pressure on that front shot way up this week when Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s assessment of the situation and his likely recommendations were leaked. The White House is in a tizzy about who leaked the report, but they won’t find out. Chances are it was leaked by our military—because they saw the White House was wavering on its commitment toward Afghanistan, and they were trying to stiffen the president’s spine. But if the military did leak the report, the plan backfired; the leak precipitated instead an all-out review of policy.

And that’s how it should be. Obama responded appropriately—by slowing down the machinery. Everybody is in a different place—Joe Biden, the military, the Republicans and the American public; there is, at the moment, no good way to bring everybody together. He’s got to slow things down, and he’s right to do that until he gets his bearings again—as long as he realizes he can’t keep changing his bearings.