Audrey Young: Being good mates moves Key down the priority list

Barack Obama. Photo / AP

In the world of international summiteering, the dull but indispensable grey officials who do the backroom work are now made to appear daring by calling them "sherpas".

US President Barack Obama uses the term earnestly and often when he refers to the work that needs to be done between his pioneering "nuclear security summits".

Argentina is hosting the next "sherpas" meeting to prepare for the next summit in Seoul in 2012.

What is evident is that New Zealand's differentiation as an anti-nuclear leader in the world - which earned Prime Minister John Key a place at the summit - is not such a big deal.

That's what happens when the US President is simpatico.

For Key, positioning New Zealand at the vanguard of the anti-nuclear movement does not matter in the way it matters to Labour.

Much more important to him is that New Zealand's anti-nuclear credentials are providing an unexpectedly good platform to improve the relationship even further on other fronts.

He was able to press New Zealand's case on trade with Vice-President Joe Biden and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Key is expected to get an invitation to the White House this term but Obama's changing plans and priorities do not make that a certainty this year.

The fact that New Zealand is now such a good friend, has a relatively clean Government, and that there are few issues of contention means it is not a priority for the US leader.

Obama's next focus is the five-yearly review of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in New York next month which went nowhere five years ago.

In the cavernous Washington Convention Centre yesterday he declared: "For the first time, preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism is at the top of America's nuclear agenda which reaffirms the central importance of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty."

His campaign is of proportions greater than Everest but one that has been carefully planned, set out exactly a year ago in Prague.

With a little more perseverance, and a triumph or two, perhaps Obama will become known as the Ed Hillary of nuclear disarmament.