Six days into his first big foreign trip, Barack Obama seems to have acquired a habit of brokering deals between feuding foreigners. Last week the US president helped squeeze a consensus out of Hu Jintao and Nicolas Sarkozy, his Chinese and French counterparts, on offshore tax havens at the G20 summit in London.

Then on Saturday Mr Obama repeated the formula to broker a deal between Abdullah Gul, president of Turkey, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Denmark’s prime minister, which enabled the latter to be approved as Nato’s next secretary-general.