HELENE COOPER ESSAY

WASHINGTON

LIKE EVERY DEMOCRATIC president since John F. Kennedy, President Obama is battling the perception that he’s a wimp on national security.

Here is a president who just ramped up the war in Afghanistan, sending an additional 30,000 American troops. He has stepped up drone strikes by unmanned Predators in Pakistan and provided intelligence and firepower for two airstrikes against Al Qaeda in Yemen that killed more than 60 militants. He has resisted the temptation to sign a new nuclear arms agreement with Russia that might not provide American inspectors with the level of verification detail that they want. He is moving toward the wide use of full body scans in American airports.

Some experts say that the weakling label is more about this city than Mr. Obama - that every political cycle brings with it the opportunity for pundits and politicians to try to prove they were right all along.

“I think the problem is much less Obama than the audience,” said George Perkovich, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This is about talk radio and punditry; these are the absolutes that the bloggers deal with: wimp or macho? This is the new caricature, but it doesn’t withstand any analysis.” What, exactly, it is that Mr. Obama has to do by the end of the year to turn around the impression that Democrats are soft on foreign policy?

For the White House, 2009 was a year of emphasizing a departure from the blunter foreign policy style of President Bush, of projecting that America could offer an unclenched fist (Iran), push the reset button (Russia) and proclaim that it was moving to a policy that focused not only on guns but also offered butter (Pakistan).

But now, 2010 “will be about achieving some results there,” said Brian Katulis, a national security expert at the Center for American Progress and a Democrat. “They’re going to need to demonstrate a set of tangible successes that’s not just a set of speeches.”

Those tangible successes include being able to show that the nice-guy act can yield real results.

Take Russia . Mr. Obama needs Russia’s agreement to impose stiffer United Nations Security Council sanctions against Iran this year, to make worthwhile the 12 months he just spent courting President Dimitri Medvedev.

Mr. Obama removed a thorny dispute when he announced last September that he would scrap plans for missile defense system sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, a central irritant to Russia, in favor of smaller ship-based interceptors that might later be positioned on land in Europe. Russia welcomed the move, with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin going so far as to call it “correct and brave.”

Now it’s time for some payback. The United States wants the Security Council to endorse tough new sanctions against Iran as part of the international effort to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Russia and China don’t like sanctions, and both have dragged their feet before. So far, Mr. Obama has gotten Mr. Medvedev - but not China’s president, Hu Jintao - to say publicly that he might be willing to endorse new sanctions. But will Russia and China come through ?

“The biggest vulnerability that he’s got is that he said all that stuff about engagement and the outstretched hand, that he looks naive if he discovers that other people don’t reciprocate,” said Stephen Sestanovich, Clinton administration ambassador-at-large to the former Soviet Union who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Speaking of Iran, nobody thinks there’s much chance that the Iranian government will suddenly suspend its enrichment of uranium, as Mr. Obama would like. But Mr. Perkovich argues that Mr. Obama has done much to unhinge the government there, by giving the opposition in Iran more of a reason to view the United States with a kinder eye, thanks to Mr. Obama’s overtures over the past year. Still, since the president can’t depend on the Iranian opposition toppling the government, 2010 is the year he must show he is standing tough to try to contain Iran. Which means harsher Security Council sanctions.

Then there’s terrorism. Mr. Obama will also have to demonstrate some tangible action there, the experts say, to dispel the notion put forward by the Republicans that his plans to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, makes Americans less safe.

The problem, though, is that many of the steps he can take against terrorism - like intelligence cooperation, drone strikes and covert actions - are, by their very nature, often invisible. “He needs visible victories there, like hits on Al Qaeda leaders, so no one is able to put together a narrative that says he’s weak,” said David J. Rothkopf, a Clinton administration official and author of “Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.”

For Mr. Obama, that may also mean talking tough more often, Mr. Rothkopf said. “If you’re going to be president of the United States in the early part of the 21st century, you’re going to have to look like you’re tough on terror.”

President Obama is battling the perception that, as a Democrat, he is weak on national security. / JIM WATSON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES