As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com October 14, 2009:

By Peter Feaver

Secretary Clinton’s recent visit to Moscow provides another opportunity to do a midcourse assessment of Iran policy. The assessment is bleak. Very bleak. The “mission accomplished” banners that Obamaphiles were unfurling when the Russians hinted at a greater openness to sanctions look a bit more faded and ironic today in light of reports that the Russians are back to their old script of opposing sanctions as an impediment to negotiations.

I argued earlier that the key intermediate objective of the negotiations with Iran was getting Russia (and China and the European in-laws) on side to impose tougher economic pressure on Iran. Without such leverage, negotiations were very unlikely to succeed.

Of course, the overall objective of those negotiations is to get the Iranian regime to abandon its nuclear weapons program. The Obama team, like the Bush team before it, believes that the only way the Islamic Republic will do so peacefully is if the United States can exert serious economic leverage over the regime so a compromise deal looks attractive — hence the urgency of the intermediate objective of establishing such leverage.

Read the full article here