Obama holds out his hand, only to get it bitten

Barack Obama came to power ''extending an open hand'' to America's allies and enemies alike. He must be getting tired of having to wipe the spit off it. Sure, Obama still scores phenomenally well in opinion polls across most of the world outside the US. But popularity is not translating into power to enact the change he thought we should believe in.

First, the allies.

America not only befriended Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai, it installed him as President. In return, he has done a first-class job of discrediting himself and compromising his great ally.

True, Karzai grew angry at the US habit of mistakenly blowing up Afghan citizens. The Pentagon has been so single-minded in killing the enemy hiding among the Afghan people that it was all too ready to kill the Afghan people themselves as ''collateral damage''.

Far from diminishing the enemy, this policy has been strengthening it. Careless violence has been turning the entire country against the US.

But the new US policy recommended by General Stanley McChrystal is designed to change that. The top priority would be protecting the Afghan people, rather than killing the enemy.

At exactly the moment when Obama is weighing how to implement this new policy, Karzai has inflicted dreadful damage. By stealing the election he has demonstrated he is corrupt and illegitimate. He is no better than any other tinpot dictator.

The proposed election run-off on Saturday, cancelled late last night, Sydney time, was a joke. After the opposition leader, Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew his candidacy in protest at Karzai's refusal to sack his crony elections chief, Karzai has become the ruler of a one-party state. The entire enterprise is stripped of legitimacy. No number of troops can restore what Karzai has stolen.

Then there's Japan. Within the limitations of its pacifist post-war constitution, Japan has been a steadfast ally of America's for half a century.

It was America's ''unsinkable aircraft carrier'' in Asia, in the words of Yasuhiro Nakasone, Japan's prime minister from 1982 to 1987.

And Tokyo has gradually redefined its constitution to expand its armed forces and its global military role in support of the US.

After the US, Japan has the biggest and most sophisticated navy in the Asia-Pacific, a democratic counterweight to China. But the strength of the US-Japan alliance is suddenly in doubt. In the election in August the Liberal Democratic Party, the conservatives who had ruled Japan for all but one of the past 54 years, were removed.

The new Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama of the centre-left Democratic Party, has chilled relations with the US. Indeed, he campaigned against ''US-led globalisation''.

Hatoyama is insisting on a fundamental review of US bases in Japan. The bases, host to about 40,000 US troops, are the centrepiece of US forward deployment in the Asia-Pacific. The US Defence Secretary, has warned if Tokyo reneges on its agreements with Washington "it would be immensely complicated and counterproductive''.

Further, Hatoyama has proposed a new East Asian community of countries with a common currency, a bloc to include China but not the US.

The Washington Post published this telling quote last month: ''A senior State Department official said the US had 'grown comfortable' thinking about Japan as a constant in US relations in Asia. It no longer is, he said, adding that 'the hardest thing right now is not China, it's Japan'.''

This is, potentially, a deep disturbance to the structures of US power and influence in the Asia-Pacific. It appears the US did not so much have an alliance with Japan as an alliance with the LDP. As China rises to rival US power, Japan is shrinking as a reliable US ally.

Then there is Israel. Obama set out a precondition for Middle East peace talks that Israel halt all settlement activity. But when the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, defied his demand, Obama yielded.

Now Israel has offered a new policy of ''restraint'' in settlements, and the Obama Administration has agreed in order to get a start to negotiations over a peace settlement with the Palestinians. This piece of alliance mismanagement needlessly annoyed Israel and revealed American weakness.

Then there are America's rivals.

North Korea's response to the open hand? It conducted its second nuclear test and conducted provocative missile firings. It tore up its armistice with South Korea, technically restoring the Korean War, and refused negotiations. And Iran, exposed as having built a secret new nuclear plant, is unapologetic and spurning Obama's hand.

The French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, voiced frustration with Obama in the United Nations Security Council in September. ''We live in a real world, not a virtual world, and the real world expects us to take decisions. President Obama dreams of a world without weapons … but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite.

Since 2005 Iran has flouted five Security Council resolutions. North Korea has been defying council resolutions since 1993. I support the extended hand of the Americans, but what good have proposals for dialogue brought the international community? More uranium enrichment and declarations by the leaders of Iran to wipe a UN member state off the map,'' referring to Israel.

It's not all bad. Pakistan has yielded to Obama's pressure to pursue the Taliban seriously for the first time. But this was a response to US coercion, not to the open hand.

Obama's is truly the hardest job in the world. And despite all the goodwill in the world, he may as well use the open hand to wave goodbye to his early hopes of a happy transformation in world affairs.