IT WAS Israel and the US alone against the world yesterday. Obama, we hardly knew you, the icily silent audience in the cavernous hall of the UN General Assembly seemed to say.
In 2009, the then new president gave a speech on re-engagement with the rest of the world, on the US return to multilateralism. He was interrupted by applause 12 times.
In 2010, Mr Obama’s hope of welcoming “an independent sovereign state of Palestine” this year was greeted with thunderous applause. No one interrupted his speech yesterday.
Instead of Palestine, South Sudan was the only new member. Peace was hard, Mr Obama repeated, lamenting this “imperfect world” and trying to put a brave face on the “new direction” set by the US when it killed Osama bin Laden and sought to end wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The tide of war is receding,” he declared. “Today, we stand at a crossroads of history with the chance to move decisively in the direction of peace.”
The Israeli prime minister and foreign minister praised Mr Obama as never before and thanked him for not mentioning those taboo subjects: settlements and 1967 borders.
But the assembled nations were not impressed. Mr Obama’s third annual address to the UN General Assembly was a flop.
As he struggled to explain why the US would veto the Palestinians’ application for membership of the UN, one could hear papers shuffling, diplomats shifting in chairs. The Palestinian foreign minister, Riad Malki, shook his head in despair.
The US president’s speech was preceeded and followed by the president of Brazil and the emir of Qatar, epitomising the emerging power of the developing world and the exhaustion of Arab patience. Dilma Roussef and Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani were both applauded when they called member states to vote to recognise a Palestinian state.
A chasm had opened up with Europe too. “We can wait no longer!” French president Nicolas Sarkozy declared, proffering a peace plan with deadlines and an interim status for the Palestinians, far more elaborate than Mr Obama’s vague exhortation to Palestinians and Israelis to “stand in each other’s shoes”.