For Obama, fate may have spoken

United Nations   For President Obama, the handshakes and hugs during his first visit to the United Nations last week masked a cold reality: nine months into his presidency, he is being forced to retool his most important foreign policy initiatives, from the war in Afghanistan to peace in the Middle East and his diplomatic overture to Iran.

Mr. Obama’s efforts to reach out to adversaries and break political deadlocks are running up against old enmities, insoluble differences and foreign leaders who simply do not see eye to eye with the president.

The administration can point to successes: it has marshaled worldwide support for the campaign to pressure North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons. And it has put relations with Russia on a firmer footing, with a decision to revamp a missile-defense system that may have paid extra dividends in helping to win Russian support for tougher sanctions against Tehran.

Those bright spots, however, come amid a host of troubling developments, the latest of which was the disclosure by the United States and its allies on Friday that Iran was operating another clandestine nuclear facility.

That revelation came days after the White House’s midcourse correction in its push for peace talks in the Middle East, and the leaked, ominous warnings of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American commander in Afghanistan, about the direction of the war there.

“This is not easy,” Mr. Obama said Friday, after an economic summit meeting in Pittsburgh. Speaking of Afghanistan, he said: “I would expect that the public would ask some very tough questions. That’s exactly what I’m doing, is asking some very tough questions. And we’re not going to arrive at perfect answers.”