U.S. strategy on Iran switches to Plan B

It was a blunt exchange with the bitter bite of the ideological battles between talk-show hosts Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly — except the sparring partners were Hillary Rodham Clinton and Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

"We see that the government of Iran, the supreme leader, the president, the Parliament, are being supplanted, and that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship," snapped the U.S. secretary of state while visiting Qatar on Monday. In Tehran, Ayatollah Khamenei snarled back: "Now the Americans, once again, have dispatched their agent as a saleswoman to the Persian Gulf to spread lies."

That's a far cry from the policy of engaging Iran that President Barack Obama pursued so hopefully when he took office (although administration officials insist their door is still open). At a moment when the U.N. nuclear agency is suggesting, for the first time, that Iran is seeking nuclear-weapons capability, does Obama have a coherent strategy toward Tehran?

I think it made sense to try engagement, even though the odds were daunting. Obama sent warm messages to the Iranian public and two letters to Khamenei offering to reset relations. The ayatollah didn't answer. Perhaps anti-Americanism is too essential to the regime's worldview.

We'll never know what might have been had Iran's rulers not rigged the June elections and provoked the country's most serious political unrest since the revolution. The leadership is now so deeply divided that it's unlikely to revamp its nuclear policy or relations with the "Great Satan." The Revolutionary Guards — an aggressive military force that controls much of Iran's economy, along with its nuclear and foreign policies — seem to be calling the shots.

In such circumstances, the White House had no choice but to activate Plan B: pursuit of harsher international sanctions to curb Iran's nuclear program. But, having offered engagement, Obama has a better chance of getting U.N. Security Council members on board.

"They can't say this administration didn't open the door," said Nicholas Burns, who worked on the Iran issue as undersecretary of state in the last Bush administration. "Now Obama is in a much stronger position to say, 'Those guys wouldn't meet us at the table.' He has a lot more authority."

Yet, even if Russia agrees to new sanctions (a possibility) and China acquiesces (more iffy), many experts ask whether sanctions will change the regime's behavior.