The biggest rap against United States President Barack Obama’s foreign policy is that he is naive. Yet, as his presidency matures, Mr Obama is showing qualities one would normally associate with Mr Henry Kissinger — the arch-realist of US diplomacy. Neo-conservatives and liberals alike care about the internal character of regimes with which the US does business. Mr Kissinger stands apart from that tradition. The less Mr Obama preaches morality to foreigners, the more he distances himself from the exceptionalists — the more opportunities he creates. It is a welcome sign of a President with a learning curve.

The chief example is Mr Obama’s evolution on the Middle East. In 2009, he went to Cairo to offer a new chapter in relations between the West and the Muslim world. His felicitous words went down well in the region but were quickly forgotten. Today Mr Obama gives fewer speeches but has a bigger appetite for deeds. The best measure is his recent framework nuclear deal with Iran. Much to the chagrin of his critics, the agreement is silent on Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism abroad and repression at home. Its focus is on curtailing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

There is no mention of Iran cutting off its support for the Houthi rebels in Yemen, or recognising Israel’s right to exist. That is just as well. Had Mr Obama insisted on either, there would have been no deal (there is still a way to go before reaching a final agreement).

CAN OBAMA RESTORE AMERICA’S INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY?

In pushing ahead anyway, Mr Obama is grasping the essence of diplomacy — when adversaries come to terms, neither achieves everything they want. Much the same would apply to Mr Obama’s recent deal with Cuba’s dictatorship. Although Mr Kissinger has criticised Mr Obama’s Iran deal as too weak, it is very much in line with his school of diplomacy. The perfect should not be the enemy of the good.

But it goes heavily against the grain of the debate in Washington. In 1972, Mr Kissinger shocked the world — and the “red scare” hawks back home — by pulling off a rapprochement with Mao Zedong’s China. The Shanghai Communiqué was scandalously amoral. It made no mention of Chairman Mao’s gulags. Nor did it call for China to end its Third-World adventurism. But by splitting Beijing from the Soviet orbit, it dramatically served US interests and laid the foundations for the West’s victory in the cold war. Had Richard Nixon — Mr Kissinger’s boss — been hamstrung by ethical concerns, it would never have happened.

Without acknowledging it, Mr Obama is taking a leaf from Mr Kissinger’s book in the Middle East. At the same time as pursuing a deal with Iran’s unsavoury regime, Mr Obama is stepping up support for its equally dubious counterparts in the Sunni world. In the same week Mr Obama’s Iran deal was signed, he restored US$1.3 billion (S$1.75 billion) in annual military aid to Egypt’s army, increased US support for Saudi Arabia’s strikes on Yemen’s Houthi rebels and gave his backing to the creation of an Arab (read Sunni) force. Next month he will host Arab leaders at his presidential retreat in Camp David.

It is a classic balance-of-power approach to the Middle East. Mr Obama is simultaneously giving succour to both sides of the region’s gaping Sunni-Shia divide. Rather than trying to convert the Middle East to Western values, it seeks to limit the region’s ability to export its pathologies. In 2008, Mr Obama campaigned to restore the US’s moral authority in the world. Yet Mr George W Bush’s blunders in the Middle East were driven by moral zeal. Many of Mr Bush’s advisers believed they could implant Jeffersonian democracy on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. Should Mr Obama develop his deftness of touch, he could stake a claim to restoring America’s intellectual authority in the world.

It is an approach that will ultimately be tested in the battle with the Islamic State. In Mr Obama’s first year in office, there were 1,600 terrorist attacks in the Middle East and north Africa, according to the US state department. That had almost tripled to nearly 4,650 by 2013. Far from cutting off Al Qaeda’s head with the death of Osama bin Laden, the Salafist threat has grown a hundred new ones — and poses a far more complex challenge. Sending troops to fight Islamic State would be to risk another quagmire. Yet betting on the competency of US-trained Iraqi army units and moderate Syrian rebels would be a triumph of hope over experience. As has been said when US-trained Afghan forces are defeated: “Who trained the Taliban?” The answer is no one. No one trained Islamic State, either.

If Mr Obama wants to defeat Islamic State without allowing the US army to be sucked into another destructive war, local strongmen must do the job for him. In some places, such as Iraq, that means relying on Iran-sponsored local Shia militias, and the Kurdish peshmerga. In others, such as Syria, it means Bashar Assad. Such an approach will attract a great deal of opprobrium. Mr Kissinger received a lot of that — sometimes deservedly (there was no possible justification for the US carpet bombing of Cambodia). But what matters in the negotiating chamber is the end result. US values are both admirable and universally desirable. Sometimes the best way of realising them in practice is to put them on the back burner. THE FINANCIAL TIMES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Edward Luce is the Washington columnist and commentator for the Financial Times.