April 5 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama waded into a diplomatic stalemate for the second time on his European trip and once again succeeded in bringing his more senior peers into harmony.

With a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit facing potential deadlock yesterday over Turkey’s opposition to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as the next head of NATO, Obama brought Rasmussen and Turkish President Abdullah Gul together for a talk.

After an hour-long session, they rejoined the summit with beaming faces that telegraphed the result: Turkey would drop its objections in exchange for a promise from Rasmussen to “ensure the best relations possible between NATO and the Muslim world” -- and shut down a Kurdish TV channel if Turkish claims of links to terrorism were proven.

At a news conference afterward, Obama said his debut on the international stage had convinced him that “political interaction in Europe is not that different from the United States Senate,” where he served before entering the White House.

“There’s a lot of -- I don’t know what the term is in Austrian -- wheeling and dealing, and people are pursuing their interests, and everybody has their own particular issues and their own particular politics,” he said in response to an Austrian reporter’s question.

For all Obama’s success in conciliating the Danes and Turks, the NATO summit was far from an unblemished triumph for the new U.S. president.

Obama Falls Short

Obama fell short in his bid to win strong support from NATO allies for his new strategy to combat extremists in Afghanistan. NATO allies agreed to send only an additional 5,000 non-combat troops and trainers to Afghanistan.

Obama called it a “down payment” and noted more than once to reporters that the gathering had not been “a pledging conference.”

In the short term, it will still be U.S. troops in harm’s way -- and in the most dangerous regions of Afghanistan.

Steve Flanagan, a European specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the commitment for 5,000 non-combat trainers for the military and police was a “tepid” NATO response.

“It’s the basic minimum,” Flanagan said. “The hard part of the mission is going to become more and more a U.S.-led coalition. You still have the NATO flag but when you look at the numbers, it’s not a great division of labor.”

Less Than Expected

“It’s really a lot less than some people would have expected, given the euphoria over Obama,” he said. “Europeans just aren’t willing to put in that much more.”

With the mixed outcome at the NATO summit, the White House sought to put the most positive spin on the meeting as it trotted out National Security Adviser James Jones to brief reporters aboard Air Force One on how Obama pulled off his latest success at diplomatic mediation.

Coming into the summit, Turkey’s opposition to Rasmussen was strong and well-known, including its anger at Rasmussen for his defense of the Danish media’s right to publish anti-Islamic cartoons that provoked Muslim outrage in 2005.

Yet German Chancellor Angela Merkel said April 2 she was “firmly convinced” that an agreement on Rasmussen as NATO secretary-general would be reached at a leaders’ dinner in a posh casino in Baden Baden, Germany.

It was at that dinner several hours later that Obama, realizing that an agreement would not be reached, made his move, aware that the controversy, if unresolved, would dominate the next day’s plenary session.

Help from Berlusconi

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi also helped, at one point conferring by cell phone for a half-hour with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Earlier in the week, at the G-20 summit in London, Obama also used personal diplomacy to push through an agreement on regulations and emergency aid that cleared the way for a broad effort to combat the global recession.

In his briefing, Jones did not provide details of the negotiations between Obama, Gul and Rasmussen.

“Turkey’s position was never against the individual or against the country,” Jones said. “It was primarily about the fact that they wanted to have their views and their concerns properly articulated in ways that the rest of the alliance should understand.”

Turkey was given at least two NATO jobs, including a deputy to the deputy secretary general, who is an Italian, the New York Times reported, citing unidentified senior European diplomats.

Promises to Turkey

Turkey was also promised that two blocked chapters of its accession agreement to join the European Union would move forward, and that Rasmussen would publicly address the concerns of the Muslim world about his response to the cartoons, possibly as soon as Monday, according to the Times.

Jones, a retired general who served as NATO commander from 2003 to 2006, said the resolution “bodes well for the future of the alliance,” adding that he had never attended a high-level NATO meeting “where there’s been as much good feeling and goodwill towards each other around the table.”

Obama’s diplomatic skills are sure to be tested again. That’s because many NATO issues are “cumbersome” and “very difficult and protracted,” Jones said.

“We won’t know the success of the trip for some time to come,” said Stephen Pifer, former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for President George W. Bush and now an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

To contact the reporters on this story: Hans Nichols in Strasbourg, France, at hnichols2@bloomberg.net; Edwin Chen in Strasbourg, France, at echen32@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: April 4, 2009 18:51 EDT