Obama's seven days in Europe

On his first official trip abroad president Obama met with adoration and kisses. Not even the omnipresent and sometimes violent demonstrators vented their anger on the new president, preferring instead to attack vague concepts like 'globalisation' and 'imperialism'.

Obama's reception during his seven-day tour recalls the enthusiasm that greeted Mikhail Gorbachev in the Warsaw pact countries in the late eighties. If Gorbachev at the time personified the coming of a liberation, Obama today embodies the promise of a new era of multilateralism.

Obama's halo is not altogether imaginary. In London, Obama successfully mediated between China and France who couldn't agree on how to tackle tax havens. In Strasbourg, he reconciled the Turks with the appointment of the Danish prime minister as the new secretary general of Nato.

But just like Gorbachev, Obama has little time, now that America's economic leadership is waning. His plea to admit Turkey to the EU fell on deaf ears. Sarkozy said he was working "hand in hand" with Obama but that he has always opposed and will continue to oppose Turkish membership of the EU.

It was an indication that despite the enthusiasm over the new president the international mood is less cooperative than it seems. Just before Obama's Prague speech about the need for disarmament, North Korea launched a missile. The provocation had been announced and it failed. But it underlined the fact that Obama is currently being challenged from all sides.

Obama himself seems to realise that the proliferation of nuclear weapons is becoming uncontrollable. "Fatalism is a deadly adversary," he said in the Czech Republic, which has agreed to accommodate the anti-missile shield Obama has promised to build if Iran is seen to continue with its nuclear arms program. At the same time, he announced a renewed effort to pressure the US senate into ratifying the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which it refused to do in 1990. For now America is a member of a club that includes China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.

For this reason, Obama's show of good will is a positive sign. But the reality of the current world order is much more complex. Obama may have announced that he is prepared to host a global summit on nuclear security within the next year, and he may have pledged together with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev to reboot nuclear arms talks between the US and Russia, but the truth is that the fate of a new round of disarmament talks is no longer in the hands of the old nuclear powers.

The current power vacuum is not just an economic one - politically, the first steps toward new and more balanced international relationships have yet to be taken. Obama's seven-day tour then is not the genesis of such a new world order. It merely signals a new orientation. Yes, the new president offers the world new perspectives but he offers no supernatural hope - for the simple reason that there is no such thing as a saviour.