Posted 06:45 PM ET
Iran: The U.S. is spending endless time and diplomatic capital pushing for more economic sanctions to stop Tehran from building nuclear weapons — a strategy that won't work even if it's somehow put in place.
The president is doing all the things recommended by the professional diplomatic geniuses who see the United Nations as the Master Key to all global problem-solving and the dream of world peace.
He offered Iran unconditional talks at the highest level. Iran said no. So next came building support for intensified multilateral sanctions against the Islamofascist regime.
The way the president is doing this is an internationalist's dream: Instead of throwing America's weight around and making secret deals, he invited all the heavy hitters to Washington and sat them at a roundtable while the news cameras rolled.
True global democracy, led by a U.S. president who doesn't believe in American might — that'll solve the Islamist nuclear threat.
But it isn't solving it.
Somehow, all those ingredients — the Obama charm, all that collective power sitting together in one big room as the peoples of the world watch faithfully, and the threat that Iran poses being so obvious to all — aren't a recipe for multilateral action.
China and Russia, who hold veto power in the U.N. Security Council, oppose any ban on investments in Iran's energy sector and will resist measures to seize cargo with materials aiding Iran's nuclear activity. Moscow and Beijing may not even go along with fully sanctioning Iran's thuggish Revolutionary Guard, under the rationale that not everything it does is bad.
Current Security Council members Brazil and Turkey have made it clear that they oppose more sanctions against Iran.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who hosted a visit last year by Iran's dubiously re-elected president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is visiting Iran next month.
Lula and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan have cooked up a plan for a "negotiated solution" to avoid new U.N. sanctions against Iran, and President Obama is reportedly considering it.
On top of that, a sanctions vote in the Security Council will have to wait until June at the earliest because a Non-Proliferation Treaty conference is scheduled for next month at the U.N. in New York.
Who's chairing the conference? Why, Lebanon, whose government is riddled with members of Hezbollah, the terrorist organization financed by ... Iran.
The U.S. can't even get India to support sanctions. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says he told the president "we don't think sanctions really achieve their objective" because "very often the poor in the affected country suffer more" than "the ruling establishment."
