Rivals split on U.S. power, but ideas defy labels

New look at engagement
With the endgame slowly playing out in Iraq, the potential confrontation over neighboring Iran and its nuclear program has emerged as the No. 1 case study in how Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain would use diplomacy and the threat of military force against a hostile state. Based on their careers and their statements, Mr. McCain’s threshold for pre-emptive military action seems lower than Mr. Obama’s.

For each candidate, the debate over Iran has been somewhat treacherous. Mr. Obama knew his interest in pursuing diplomacy could leave him vulnerable to criticism as a potential appeaser; Mr. McCain, known for his “Bomb Iran” ditty, had to demonstrate that he would not be trigger-happy.

In the end, both men have proved more comfortable in declaring that they would never allow Iran to become a nuclear weapons state than in explaining how they would obtain the leverage to stop Iran’s nuclear program peacefully. And neither has dealt publicly with the harder question of what to do if Iran assembles all the fuel and components needed for a weapon but stops just short of actually making one.

Mr. Obama’s declaration that he would engage Iranian leaders without preconditions has dominated the debate and opened him to Mr. McCain’s accusation that he is a naïf, willing to give legitimacy to the Iranian regime. Mr. Obama has backtracked a bit, arguing that he never suggested that the first meetings would be at the presidential level, and that preconditions are less important than “careful preparations.”

When pressed, Mr. Obama has said that “we will never take military options off the table” and that he would not give the United Nations “veto power” over deciding to strike nuclear facilities.

The harder question is how to force Iran to give up its uranium enrichment quickly, before it produces enough material to build a weapon — a threshold American and European intelligence officials say may be crossed fairly early in the next presidential term. Mr. McCain has been more vociferous in emphasizing that “we have to do whatever’s necessary” to stop Iran from obtaining a weapon. In 1994, when North Korea was at a similar stage in its nuclear weapons program, Mr. McCain said on “Meet the Press” on NBC that if diplomacy failed to shut down the country’s production facilities within months, “then yes, military air strikes would be called for.”

But in a post-Iraq world, Mr. McCain has been more circumspect. He no longer talks about “rogue state rollback,” the phrase he used in 2000 to describe a strategy of undermining governments like those in North Korea, Iran and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Mr. McCain said in interviews last year and early this year that risking military action against Iran might be better than “living with an Iranian bomb.” Recently, he has expressed more interest in changing Iran’s behavior than changing the government, and has said that his Beach Boys ditty was a bad attempt at humor: “I wasn’t suggesting that we go around and declare war.”

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But the main prescription Mr. McCain has offered relies on gradually escalating economic sanctions, the same path taken by the Bush administration. So far that strategy has been a complete failure: Iran has 3,800 centrifuges, up from a few hundred experimental centrifuges when the administration began, and enough, in theory, to make a bomb’s worth of fuel in a year.

Questions to both campaigns in the past few weeks have yielded another example of role reversal. While Mr. McCain seems willing to consider that Iran might someday be trusted to produce its own nuclear fuel, Mr. Obama does not. The director of foreign policy for the McCain campaign, Randy Scheunemann, said that if Iran was in compliance with United Nations resolutions, “it would be appropriate to consider” letting it produce uranium under inspection, which Iran has said is its right.

Mr. Obama’s position is closer to the zero-tolerance approach adopted by the Bush administration. “I do not believe Iran should be enriching uranium or keeping centrifuges,” he said in an e-mail message passed on by aides.

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Mr. Obama does seem more willing to dangle in front of the Iranians a “grand bargain” that would spell out benefits — diplomatic recognition, an end to sanctions — as a reward for halting its enrichment of uranium and allowing full inspections of the country. Richard J. Danzig, considered a candidate to be secretary of defense in an Obama administration, said Mr. Obama was willing to “put out a more positive side to the agenda to lead the Iranians toward making the right choices here.”

But Mr. Obama has also been more specific in describing the kind of sanctions he might reach for if the Iranians continue on the current path. “If we can prevent them from importing the gasoline that they need, and the refined petroleum products, that starts changing their cost-benefit analysis,” he said.

Some experts have counseled caution about such an approach, one that the Bush administration has stopped short of taking. A blockade, however, could constitute an act of war, and most experts believe Iran could respond in kind by cutting off oil exports, increasing prices and leading to shortages.

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