Because NPT conferences operate by consensus, which any one state can block, a final report requires the threading of many needles. Only two previous conferences, in 1985 and 2000, even concluded with such documents. This year, Iran came to play the spoiler, starting with a defiant opening speech by President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. The Iranian delegation made a last-minute bid to forestall consensus by asking Egypt to convene a meeting of the NAM countries the day before the conference ended; Egypt, refused. Unwilling to be isolated, Iran signed the final agreement. Tehran made no concessions on its apparently inexorable march toward nuclear-weapons capacity; an NPT review conference is not the setting for such high-stakes diplomacy. Nevertheless, the Obama team, always searching for evidence, however tenuous, that its engagement policy has helped realign global opinion on Iran, can cite the non-aligned countries' pragmatism in the face of Iranian intransigence as a new data point.

There is, it's true, much less than meets the eye in the 64 "action" points of the final document. France and Russia adamantly opposed the idea of a new treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons and requiring their abolition by a specific date (and Britain and the U.S. weren't enthusiastic either). Instead, the report said, the conference "notes" a suggestion by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that "proposes ... consideration" of such a treaty. The conference also recognized "the legitimate interests of non-nuclear-weapons States" in having the weapons states agree to things they wouldn't, in fact, agree to, like lowering the "alert status" of weapons to allow more time for a decision in the midst of a crisis. In his nuclear posture review, released in April, Obama also refused to make this concession.

But that's how consensus documents sound: You slice the salami finer and finer until you've reached a razor-thin point of agreement. The specific commitments matter less than the fact of commitment.

Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, puts the case negatively: "Given all the stresses and strains on the treaty at the moment, what would the effect be on our ability to deal with these challenges if these countries could not come to agreement on a final document?"

John Duncan, Britain's ambassador for multilateral arms control and disarmament, states the positive case: "What is described in this document is a political process," rather than a set of outcomes. Recognizing the "legitimate interests" of others is not an eloquent dodge, Duncan says, but a pledge to be held accountable. And that, he asserts, is something genuinely new.

In the recent past, of course, states have asked to be held accountable on fully funding development assistance, or reducing their carbon output, or stopping atrocities abroad, and haven't so much as blushed when they failed to make good. That's the limitation of the contractual approach to international affairs that Obama holds dear. But consider the alternative: the truculent John Bolton was not about to win concessions on nonproliferation, or anything else for that matter, from developing nations. Thanks to Obama's expressions of good faith -- in the New Start treaty with Russia; in his nuclear posture review, however compromised; in his speeches at home and abroad -- those states were willing to make pledges on nonproliferation they had never made before. Bolton and others of his ilk, whom I described in my column last week as Hobbesians, would say that such pledges aren't worth paying for. A Lockean like Obama would say, at the very least, that you cannot know until you try.

Modest achievements are just about the only kind multilateral diplomacy offers. And because such agreements require innumerable compromises, they're easier to attack than to defend. Obama's commitment to "the international order," so prominent in the recently released National Security Strategy, requires a measure of trust, but it also rests upon a willingness to accept small, incremental improvements, and thus, at least at its best, upon a prudent sense of how much you can hope to move the world beyond your borders. There is more "realism" in the slow and often frustrating effort to promote international norms than there is in the self-defeating battle cry of "you're with us or you're against us."

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