Stalemate: How Obama's Iran Outreach Failed

Having concluded that President Obama's outreach has failed to halt Iran's nuclear program, the final weeks of 2009 find his Administration focused on mustering support for new sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Iran's rejection of the terms offered thus far by the U.S. and its partners has prompted Obama to largely revert to the Bush Administration's approach of ultimatums backed by sanctions -- with little obvious prospect of producing a substantially different result.

Obama campaigned for the presidency promising a game-changing diplomatic outreach, noting that President Bush's efforts had failed to prevent Iran from achieving a capacity to enrich uranium. But, under pressure at home and abroad from skeptics of engagement who insist that Iran is drawing perilously close to nuclear weapons capability, Obama gave his engagement effort only until the new year to change the game. With that deadline fast approaching, Iran's pushback against a deal that would require it to ship out most of its current enriched-uranium stockpile for conversion abroad into harmless reactor fuel has prompted many in Washington to score Obama's outreach effort a failure. "I don't think anyone can doubt that our outreach has produced very little in terms of any kind of positive response from the Iranians," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week.

(Watch a video of TIME's interview with Ahmadinejad.)

Now the Administration is turning to coercion through tighter sanctions in an effort to press Iran into changing its position. And Tehran's defiance is helping Washington make its case. A British newspaper recently published what it claimed was new evidence that Iran is developing weapons components, although the authenticity of the documents concerned has yet to be established. But Tehran's lack of cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency will likely compel even Russia and China to support some uptick in U.N. sanctions.

Still, while Moscow and Beijing may back some escalation of measures targeting Iran's nuclear program, they remain resistant to anything resembling the "crippling sanctions" previously threatened by Secretary Clinton. Their resistance, as well as that of Iran's key neighbors, to measures that would hurt ordinary Iranians, suggests that unilateral steps such as the legislation recently approved by the House of Representatives to choke off Iran's gasoline imports are unlikely to generate sufficient pressure to change Iran's behavior.

(See the top 10 Ahmadinejad-isms.)

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