Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) -- There’s something about President Barack Obama that makes people want to rush to judgment. The premature award of the Nobel Peace Prize was just one example. A more negative assessment ran this week on the Huffington Post Web site: “The Audacity of Winning vs. The Timidity of Governing.”

It’s easy to say expectations about “the Obama Promise,” as France’s Le Monde calls it, were too high from the start, or to blame his own soaring rhetoric. It is also true that the U.S. president inherited some particularly intractable problems in Iran, Afghanistan and the Mideast.

Still, Obama and his foreign policy team have made tactical mistakes along the way, complicating their task.

Take the Arab-Israeli conflict, which Obama to his credit decided to tackle early in his administration. His first move was to call for an unambiguous freeze on Israeli settlements on the West Bank. That was the right thing to do, in line with U.S. policy going back decades. It was refreshing to see a new president take such a tough stance.

The problem wasn’t Obama’s position. It’s that he couldn’t pull it off. While in Israel last weekend, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton back-tracked publicly when she welcomed Israel’s “restraint” in proposing a moratorium on new settlements, which would not affect construction already underway.

High-Stakes Gamble

The reaction in Arab capitals was swift and negative, the disappointment all the more acute because of the earlier hopes, raised in Obama’s Cairo speech in June, that this U.S. president was going to be more even-handed.

The administration’s retreat on Israeli settlements -- which Clinton has tried to brush aside on a speed-dating tour of the Mideast -- won’t help U.S. credibility in the region. Obama and his team would have done better to head off Israeli intransigence, rather than confront it directly. That would have required a quieter approach, and less categorical grandstanding.

Obama’s challenge to Israel was a high-stakes gamble, but in diplomacy, the preferred game is not poker, but chess where you have to anticipate your opponent’s every move, right down to the end game.

In Eastern Europe, too, Obama would have been well-served by a more deft diplomatic approach, when he decided to cancel a Bush-era missile defense project that was unproven, unpopular and unnecessary.

Midnight Call

The problem lay not with the decision but with the way it was handled. Instead of waking the Czech prime minister with a late night phone call, the U.S. should have sent a top-level diplomat to Prague and Warsaw ahead of the president’s announcement.

This kind of tour was standard practice during the Cold War, when the U.S. would regularly “consult” with its allies on decisions it had reached with the Soviet Union.

You would think that the Obama team, with its stable of veteran diplomats, would have a better grasp of the rule book. That may be where the promise turns to hubris: diplomatic niceties may seem as out-dated as striped pants to a group determined to hit reset buttons around the globe.

In Afghanistan, too, the Obama administration’s emphasis on democratic elections has backfired badly, with the reelection by default of a much-discredited President Hamid Karzai.

Stealing Votes

What the U.S. president failed to anticipate was the possibility -- even the likelihood -- that Karzai would do his best to steal, rather than win, votes. The fact is elections do not make a democracy. A better bet would probably have been to concentrate on regional and local authorities, and perhaps even summon an emergency “loya jirga,” the traditional council of tribal elders.

It is too early to talk of this administration’s failures, just as it was too soon to crow about a “new climate in international politics,” as the Norwegian Nobel Committee did in awarding Obama the Peace Prize.

An honest appraisal of Obama’s diplomacy so far would focus on the new president’s own lack of diplomatic experience. This is a man who was still in law school in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, who first came to Washington as U.S. Senator less than five years ago. Even if the world weren’t a complicated place, his would be a steep learning curve.

That was certainly a Republican charge during the campaign. It was overlooked in the excitement of a candidate hailed around the world largely because he wasn’t George W. Bush. That in itself is change, and for many, that still remains change enough.

Still, as Obama’s popularity comes face to face with an unruly world, the rhetoric of “change” is no substitute for the cautious, sometimes boring, business of diplomacy.

(Celestine Bohlen is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

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To contact the writer of this column: Celestine Bohlen in Paris at cbohlen1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 4, 2009 18:00 EST