The Current Discussion: Rate Obama's first performance on the international stage on a scale of 1-10, and tell us why you think so.

Mr. Obama ought to be assigned a grade of six out of ten for his smiling performance at the G-20 meeting in London. He proved he could keep his word and be a good listener. He appears to have taken up the challenge of being humble mechanic and accident supervisor after a massive road pileup with many (unsold) cars, trucks, unemployed bodies and goods are either bound for the scrap heap, intellectually challenged schemes, unemployment or trauma about complex insurance policies (the AIG and government guaranty varieties) or more sacrifices. It was in such atmosphere that Mr. Obama and 19 other leaders gathered to formulate an action plan, come up with at least 21 different opinions and ideas and a heap of other suggestions about the equivalent of installing seatbelts, airbags, anti-lock brakes and traffic signs on such road. Alas, they all gingerly avoided the other massive train wreck, the environment. Mother nature does not offer bailouts.

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The Current Discussion: The U.S. will lift travel restrictions on Cuba, but leave the larger trade embargo in place. Is that a smart move? Does it go far enough? Too far?

If five phrases could summarize shallow thoughts and frame failed, self-defeating politics of the last fifty years, the term economic sanctions will be one of them— along with the wisdom of projecting raw military power, using nuclear weapons, declaring the end of history, and leaving financial markets to self-regulation. Simply put, economic sanctions are self-defeating in the Global Age. It has never worked when visibly practiced (against Cuba, USSR, Serbia or Iran), or when fudged and fabricated of threats and negative, hyper-subjective postures (China and India until 1990s, pro-socialist France and Italy in 1970s, or Iran and Zimbabwe these days). There is no record of capitulation by a sovereign state since the second World War just because America decided to ban its own people from doing business or have contact with that country.

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The Current Discussion: Today is "Genocide Remembrance Day "in the Armenian community, a particularly strained time of year for Turkey and Armenia. What's a realistic first step forward toward reconciliation for each of these countries?

Bad blood has always been part of human history, in folk stories or epic tales with two sides to an event repeated in, say, ancient Greece and their Trojan Wars. However, Greek society eventually graduated towards philosophy and rationalism to search for roots and causes of tales, myths, reality and behavior. About 12-13 years ago, the Turkish Republic emulated this historical graduation towards a search for rationalism and a rethink of its relations with Greece, albeit out of necessity to appease Greece during its (now aimless) EU candidacy talks. Those talks closed the book on differences and abrasion during the days of the Ottoman rulers. And it might now be time for Turkey to duplicate that realization for Armenia, and work towards yet another duplication of Entente cordiale and a change of heart about events that happened prior to the birth of the Turkish Republic.

Concurrently, Armenia must fast-forward to the 21st century, where all Armenians must understand that the history of the region is dotted with violence and atrocities: the invasion of Persia by Turkic or Arabs, Crimean Wars, The Russian Civil Wars, and two World Wars. All conflicts eventually end, and Europeans have managed to set aside the seas of blood between them and converge their common values into a framework of co-existence. History proves that insisting upon a certain version of tales told eventually fades away.

To this regional observer, however, the genocide issue seems to be a mere frame and a probable starter for Armenian émigrés from Anatolia to revisit their more contemporary sufferings in living memory and the losses that they experienced during the Turkish civil war in 1960s and 1970s. This is likely to be the hidden agenda of an eventual a la Turca mock-up of an Entente cordiale.

And what can Mr. Obama, the hyper-advertised Zeus but really a beleaguered Messiah, do about an age-old conflict in far and away places as part of his charm offensive in Islamic lands? Precious little in all probabilities, for the true and fundamental reason that such steps do not yield votes in Kansas for an American politician. Thus it might be best left to the locals to let them solve their problems and let Europeans nudge the sides towards a discussion table and a forum to chew the fat.

As the world has observed in Palestine and the Arab-Zionist conflict, the Pakistani Picnic, the Darfur case, the Bosnia stalemate, the Rwandan carnage or the Cambodian cull, the Washington spin on the issue tends to trump facts as the hype rises to headlines and skewed interpretations via lobbies and spin meisters transform it all to a Friday night high school football skirmish, away from reality and truth. Hence, the American president might be well advised to skirt Herculean motions and shallow multi-tasking endeavors, especially where it deals with history far from the attention span of the electorate.