December 31 has come and gone, and with it the deadline set by the Obama administration for Iran to respond to the latest offer on its nuclear program. Where does the United States’ policy on Iran now stand? Recent reports have come out that the administration is preparing to go once again to the UN Security Council in February to seek sanctions.

However, these are unlikely to be of the “crippling” kind that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised last year. While there is a movement in Congress to slap sanctions on Iran’s energy sector, the administration has shown no appetite to support it. According to one official, “We have never been attracted to the idea of trying to get the whole world to cordon off their economy.” Instead, the US is apparently gearing up for “targeted sanctions” – measures, that is, directed at specific regime elements, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

On the basis of past experience, it is highly doubtful that this move will actually convince the Iranian regime to drop its quest for nuclear power, and most probably weapons. The shift from “crippling” to “targeted” sanctions reflects Washington’s continued inability to marshal support for stronger measures, such as targeting Iran’s energy sector.

Moreover, one suspects that when push comes to shove, the Obama administration will find it easier than its predecessor to resign itself to a nuclear Iran. Many observers already concluded as much in July, when Clinton remarked that Washington would extend its defense umbrella over the Middle East. Furthermore, commentators close to the administration are working to create an intellectual climate in which “containment” of nuclear Iran is viewed as the wisest policy.

Those pushing in the media for a tougher policy certainly have their work cut out for them. On December 23, The New York Times ran an op-ed by Alan J. Kuperman, the director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the University of Texas, Austin, arguing that the US faces the stark choice of either mounting a military strike against Iran or acquiescing to the country’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

The piece elicited an immediate and heated response. Critics claimed the Times was “mainstreaming the mad Iran bombers,” as one publicist, Marc Lynch put it. Such a lapse by the Times required vigilance and pushback from saner voices, warned the academic Stephen Walt.

The episode revealed a recurring peculiarity in the American approach to diplomacy. “Engagement” (in other words talks with Iran) and “pressure” are conceived as distinct and sequential stages, instead of mutually reinforcing, simultaneous tools in a coherent diplomatic strategy. The Obama administration reinforced this interpretation last spring by announcing that, before applying pressure, it would seek to engage Tehran. In this way, the administration and sympathetic analysts blur the distinction between “engagement” as a strategy and as a tactic.

The administration claims that its diplomacy is designed to change the terms of debate in Tehran. It argues that its outreach effort has “had an unsettling effect on people in the [Iranian] regime,” as one unnamed official said. That may well be true; Obama’s engagement policy has sparked a debate in Iran about how to respond to Washington. Nevertheless, it is also true that deadlines have passed and the centrifuges keep spinning. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rejection of American overtures demonstrates that whatever discomfort American diplomacy has caused him, it hasn’t forced him to compromise in any fashion.

The purpose of diplomacy should be to provide those in Tehran willing to compromise in the nuclear standoff with convincing arguments that a blind commitment to the nuclear program will prove too costly for Iran. It is difficult to understand how the current policy will do so, given that it is, for all intents and purposes, a continuation of a failed policy.

Meanwhile, outside the administration, the rush seems to be to completely eliminate options for a tougher policy – even when, ironically, it was reported that the administration used the threat of an Israeli strike against Iran to get China to support a strong statement on Iran at the Security Council. This approach has not only decreased leverage while inflating Iranian perceptions of success, it has also created other problematic perceptions and dynamics in the region, where the US remains the guarantor of the existing security architecture.

The mere fact that the United States, however unconvincingly, was using the threat of a military strike by Israel to move its own agenda forward was itself a disturbing sign of abdication of superpower responsibility. As the perception of unchecked Iranian defiance grows, so too will the perception of a retreat from Washington’s primacy. This fact has implications across the region, from Afghanistan to Lebanon, where American interests decree checking the advance of Iran’s alliance system.

These issues have largely been ignored by “engagement” proponents. Other problems, such as the nuclear proliferation that will ensue as a result of an Iranian nuclear weapon, have been, similarly, downplayed.

Three years ago former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger posed a key question: “[P]ressure – the attempt to induce a decision the other party had not chosen initially – is a necessary component of almost any negotiation… If sanctions cannot move […] Iran, then what can? How else can the permanent members of the Security Council […] prevail, except by making clear the consequences of intransigence?”

Kissinger’s question remains unanswered today. The situation inside Iran has offered the Obama administration a number of possible cards, which it has yet to play in an effort to expand policy options beyond a military strike. The current path of watered-down, or even “targeted”, sanctions is unlikely to succeed. So the question remains: What now? When will one be able to say that engagement has failed?

Tony Badran is a research fellow with the Center for Terrorism Research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.