Clinton warns Iran: talk to us about your weapons or face isolation

Iran must decide whether to come to the negotiating table or face crippling isolation, the United States warned yesterday as pressure mounted on Tehran over its suspected nuclear weapons programme.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, issued the warning as President Obama prepared for a make-or-break week for his ambitious foreign policy agenda.

“We have made clear our desire to engage Iran,” Mrs Clinton said in a major speech before the United Nations General Assembly in New York next week. “Iran must now decide to join us in this effort. There will be accompanying costs for Iran’s continued defiance: more isolation and economic pressure.”

Hopes of building an international consensus on dealing with Iran have soared, with Russia acknowledging yesterday that it owed Washington its co-operation after the decision to move the planned American missile shield away from its western border.

The timely emergence of damning new assessments of Tehran’s nuclear intentions and capabilities from the UN’s own nuclear agency could be a powerful weapon against those playing down the threat.

Mr Obama and leaders from Britain, China, Russia, France and Germany, working as the “E3+3” group on Iran, will meet next week on the sidelines of the General Assembly to decide on a strategy for nuclear talks beginning on October 1 in Turkey.

Mr Obama’s most crucial encounter will be his one-on-one meeting with President Medvedev of Russia during the assembly. World leaders will also rub shoulders in Pittsburgh at the G20 meeting at the end of the week.

Russia has strongly opposed the kind of punishing economic sanctions for Iran that Mr Obama’s European allies are now agreed on if Tehran persists in its refusal to halt uranium enrichment.

There were encouraging signs from the Kremlin last night that its posture could change. It said that the decision to abandon the eastern missile shield placed Russia in “a more sensitive and responsible position because we are expected to respond”.

In an interview with Swiss media, Mr Medvedev also recognised the debt now owed to Washington. “The fact that they are listening to us is an obvious signal that we should also attentively listen to our partners, our American partners,” he said.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said the US was focused on two demands: Russian backing for UN sanctions on Iran if required, and the scrapping of the delivery of an air defence missile system to protect Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Russia has a contract with Iran to sell it S300 missiles for deployment at its nuclear facilities. The delivery is on hold — the result of US and Israeli pressure on Moscow — but Israel has warned that it will not hesitate to strike if the missiles are dispatched.

That raises the fear of a hasty strike by Israel before other avenues are exhausted, as well as damaging the prospects for a successful US strike in the future if the military option becomes unavoidable.

Complicating the diplomatic efforts in New York will be the presence of President Ahmadinejad, who will be giving his annual speech to the assembly. He sparked outrage last year with an anti-Semitic rant blaming the global financial crisis on a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, will also be there, his first year in attendance. Mr Obama is also a debutant at the assembly, where he will become the first US president to chair the UN Security Council.

The occasion is a special session on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, a long-time Obama preoccupation, and he will be hoping to make bilateral progress with Mr Medvedev on that issue, too. Russia and the US have yet to agree on a replacement for the original Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that expires in December. The redeployment of the missile shield could help to clear that logjam.

If all of that were not enough to preoccupy him, Mr Obama plans to use the assembly as the stage for the next move in his Middle East peace plan. The White House wants to bring together Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, and Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, for their first face-to-face encounter.

Mr Obama is hoping that progress on Iran may help to soften Israel and its Arab neighbours, whose co-operation will be crucial to any peace process. Link...