The image of two American women weeping with relief, after being spared 12 years of hard labour in North Korea, led to a tempting conclusion: that even in the darkest recesses of the world's most reviled regimes, the Obama effect is starting to take hold. From the moment he came to office just over six months ago, the new US president has sought to undertake a fundamental rebranding of America's international image. Gone is the Bush administration's Manichean view that divided the world between good countries (those that supported Washington's War on Terror) and evil ones (those that didn't).
Obama sees the world in a different light. He is not much concerned whether governments like or dislike America, or agree or disagree with his policies. So long as they are prepared to conduct relations with Washington on the basis of mutual respect, and without intimidation, he is happy to extend the hand of friendship, whether the recipients are unreconstructed Marxists, military dictators or Islamist fundamentalists.
We have seen Obama work his magic in Latin America, where his offer of a "new beginning" with Cuba took some of the sting out of the rhetoric of such prominent America-haters as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. The new approach has also paid dividends with Russia, which has toned down the militarism that characterised the final years of the Bush administration and is even assisting the Nato-led mission to pacify Afghanistan, rather than impeding it.
More dramatically, Obama's offer to conduct direct negotiations with Iran for the first time in 30 years has had a deeply destabilising effect on the ruling elite. This week's reappointment of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to serve a second four-year term suggests that the regime has put the pro-reform genie back in its bottle for now. But the fact that prominent Iranians – including two former presidents – boycotted the ceremony shows that many remain deeply dissatisfied about the way the country is run, particularly with regard to Tehran's stand-off with the West over its nuclear programme.
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