Over the past four years, and especially under radical new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran has done its best to live up to President Bush's 2002 declaration that it is part of an "axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world."

Yet as Iran's leaders make incendiary statements and threaten to fully resume their nuclear program, the United States and Europe have done little to effectively defuse the threat.

The tired trans-Atlantic discourse has gone as follows: Those who favor aggressive action against the Iranian regime for its nuclear aspirations point to Ahmadinejad's crackdown on civil society, his purge of moderate diplomats from Tehran's embassies around the world and his recent statement that Israel should be wiped off the map. They also note with concern that Iran covered up its nuclear program for nearly two decades and that it has been disingenuous in its commitments to suspend this effort since it came to light in 2003.

Those who oppose a harsh response say that sanctions will only rally the Iranian population around the mullahs, further postponing democratic reform or revolution. Targeting nuclear sites, they say, is difficult because of their diffuse and secret locations.

This debate has pushed the West to a point of strategic weakness. To contend with Iran, the United States favors an awkward assortment of tactics: lukewarm endorsements for the European negotiations; intermittent, cryptic threats of military action; overbroad sanctions; and the diplomatic silent treatment. The European talks, for their part, lack clear momentum and teeth; European foreign ministers have been refreshingly strong in their rhetoric but without results. Most important, the U.S. and Europe have failed to bring aboard Russia and China, whose vetoes in the U.N. Security Council could obviate any meaningful multilateral response.

Tehran has masterfully exploited the limits of the U.S. and European approaches, pressing ahead with elements of its nuclear program, seeking strategic allies whom it can tempt with its vast oil and gas resources and further suppressing democracy at home.

For all Iran's claims that it wants a nuclear program for energy alone, its leaders seem interested only in results allowing it to enrich its own uranium — a dangerous proposition given the mullahs' history of deceit. In a testament to its true intentions, Tehran has been cool to Russia's recent proposal, backed by the United States and Europe, to allow the enrichment of Iranian nuclear fuel exclusively on Russian soil.

Rather than worrying about Iran's behavior alone — the regime may well remain undeterred at this point — the West should expand its strategic response in the following ways: