Tehran's disclosure that it is building a second uranium enrichment plant near the holy city of Qum has derailed the Obama administration's already faltering efforts to engage with Iran. The United States will now cling even more tightly to the futile hope that international pressure and domestic instability will induce major changes in Iranian decision-making.

Many in Iran and the West assume that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election was the product of fraud. American Iran expert Flynt Leverett told SPIEGEL ONLINE that the irregularities likely weren't as bad as in Florida in 2000. Now, the US has to make the regime an offer.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad scored an overwhelming victory in the Iranian presidential elections held on Friday. Are you surprised?

President Obama's Iran policy has, in all likelihood, already failed. On its present course, the White House's approach will not stop Tehran's development of a nuclear fuel program - or, as Iran's successful test of a medium-range, solid-fuel missile last week underscored, military capacities of other sorts. It will also not provide an alternative to continued antagonism between the United States and Iran - a posture that for 30 years has proved increasingly damaging to the interests of the United States and its allies in the Middle East.

In the wake of Russia’s military incursion into Georgia, too many current, former, and aspiring U.S. officials are caricaturing the Russian state that was shaped and is still guided by Vladimir Putin as a revisionist aggressor. For Robert Kagan, John McCain’s neoconservative foreign policy adviser, as well as for long-time Democratic foreign policy hands Richard Holbrooke and Ronald Asmus, Russia’s actions in Georgia are comparable to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938.