President Obama said yesterday that Iran remains on an "unacceptable" course to nuclear weapons, despite its denials, and that the United States and like-minded countries will soon produce a set of punishing sanctions against the Islamic republic.
Obama and other administration officials expressed disappointment in Iran's latest move, a declaration that it will enrich uranium to a level that puts it on course to producing nuclear material that could be used to build a nuclear bomb. Yet Obama acknowledged that it remains unclear whether he can win sufficient support in the United Nations for tougher sanctions.
The confrontation with Iran is one of Obama's biggest foreign-policy challenges. It goes to the heart of his effort to limit the spread of nuclear-weapons technology and to offer to negotiate even with the fiercest adversaries of the U.S. So far his strategy has produced little except modest momentum toward a new U.N. scolding of the Iranians.
Obama accused Iran of posturing, but he pointedly did not close the door on his year-old offer of negotiations.
He spoke with reporters at the White House just hours after Iran announced that it had begun enriching uranium to a level sufficient to fuel a Tehran research reactor that produces medical isotopes for cancer and other patients. The United States and the international community are willing to accommodate Iran's need for the isotopes, but they have insisted that they be produced with reactor fuel -- uranium enriched to 20 percent purity -- manufactured outside of Iran.
Under a deal that an Iranian negotiator originally accepted in October, Iran would ship its low-enriched uranium to Russia for further enriching for use in the Tehran reactor. But the Iranians later balked and then rejected that arrangement. On Sunday, they announced that they would produce their own higher-enriched uranium, and yesterday, Iranian state television said that the process began in the presence of inspectors from the U.N. nuclear-watchdog agency.
"That indicates to us that, despite their posturing that their nuclear power is only for civilian use, that they, in fact, continue to pursue a course that would lead to weaponization," Obama said. "We are going to be looking at a variety of ways in which countries indicate to Iran that their approach is unacceptable. And the U.N. will be one aspect of that broader effort."
Nicholas Burns, a Harvard professor of diplomacy who spearheaded Iran policymaking during the administration of President George W. Bush, said that the Iranian actions have been deliberately provocative, apparently designed to draw attention away from expected protest marches Thursday to coincide with events marking the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
"They are motivated in part by a desire to change the issue back to the nuclear issue, away from the issue of a lack of democracy and of repression inside Iran," Burns said in a telephone interview. "Given what the Iranians have said over the last 24 hours, the Obama administration and the U.S. have no alternative but to move toward sanctions."
The biggest challenge to gaining meaningful new U.N. sanctions, he said, is persuading China to go along.
Obama said he was sticking to a two-track approach: offering to negotiate, while threatening further pressure. He said that the world would welcome an Iranian decision to accept U.N. demands that it live up to its nuclear-control obligations.
"And if not, then the next step is sanctions," he said. "They have made their choice so far, although the door is still open. And what we are going to be working on over the next several weeks is developing a significant regime of sanctions that will indicate to them how isolated they are from the international community as a whole."
Obama said that work to broaden economic sanctions applied by the U.N. Security Council is moving along quickly, but he didn't give a timeline.
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