UNITED NATIONS — President Barack Obama’s administration will engage in “direct diplomacy” with Iran, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said Monday.
Not since before the 1979 Iranian revolution are U.S. officials believed to have conducted wide-ranging direct diplomacy with Iranian officials. But U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice warned that Iran must meet U.N. Security Council demands to suspend uranium enrichment before any talks on its nuclear program.
“The dialogue and diplomacy must go hand in hand with a very firm message from the United States and the international community that Iran needs to meet its obligations as defined by the Security Council. And its continuing refusal to do so will only cause pressure to increase,” she told reporters.
Her comments, reflecting Obama’s signals for improved relations with America’s foes, came shortly after meeting with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on her first day in her new job.
Iran considers the U.S. the “Great Satan,” but a day after Obama was sworn in, leaders signaled they were “ready for new approaches by the United States.”
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said his country would study the idea of allowing the U.S. to open a diplomatic office in Tehran, the first since 1979.
Rice said the U.S. remains “deeply concerned about the threat that Iran’s nuclear program poses to the region, indeed to the United States and the entire international community.”
“We look forward to engaging in vigorous diplomacy that includes direct diplomacy with Iran, as well as continued collaboration and partnership” with the four other permanent members of the Security Council — Britain, China, France and Russia — plus Germany, Rice said.
“And we will look at what is necessary and appropriate with respect to maintaining pressure toward that goal of ending Iran’s nuclear program,” she said.
In recent years, Iranian and American officials have negotiated in the same room on talks about Afghanistan that involved other countries’ diplomats. They have talked face to face in Baghdad, but the agenda was limited to Iraqi security.
But the differences run deep. They include U.S. suspicions about Iran’s nuclear program, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats to annihilate Israel and Tehran’s support for Hamas.
Rice met with Ban to present her credentials. She said they spent 45 minutes discussing climate change, poverty reduction, U.N. peacekeeping, nuclear nonproliferation, Sudan and the Middle East.
