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Q: But what changes that now? I mean, Iran has been dealing with sanctions and isolation since --
MR. HADLEY: No, they haven't. On the contrary. Iran is very much integrated into the international community. We have had sanctions on Iran, but the international community has not, the Europeans have not. It's interesting, Iran is a different case than North Korea, which has already isolated itself. Iran has not. Iran has commercial relations, it has diplomatic relations, it sees itself as a regional power and a global power. And the question is whether it wants to go in a situation where the international community basically turns its back on Iran. That would be a situation we've never had before.
And, indeed, one of the things that has been, I believe, this President's achievement has been if you look at where we were with the Europeans in the 1990s about our views on Iran, it was not a shared conception. The Europeans, the Russians did not view Iran as a threat, let alone the strategic threat that it has become. And one of the things this President has done is get to the point where we have now the whole international community saying Iran is making a strategic challenge to us all by its support for terror, by its supporting Hezbollah, for the kinds of things we see in Lebanon, by the way it treats its own people, by its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Think about how difficult this crisis would be now if Iran had a nuclear weapon.
And what we're heartened by is the international community is beginning to understand what is at stake in the broader context of this current struggle. That's why the G8 report and statement was so important. That's why it's been interesting that Russia has gone from supporting Iran's nuclear program to, in recent years, cooperating with the rest of us in trying to rein that program in.
So there has been a sea change, and Iran needs to take that into account. It is really confronting the international community. And the international community is wakening to the challenge.
Q: Steve, two quick ones for you. One is, have you had explicit conversations with Japan and Germany about ultimately imposing international sanctions on Iran? . . .
MR. HADLEY: Secondly, in terms of sanctions on Iran, as you know, there was an agreement in the nuclear context that if Iran did not suspend its enrichment activities and reprocessing activities and come back to the negotiating table, that there would be action in the U.N. Security Council. There was a resolution, as you know, adopted a week ago, that says that if Iran does not comply with what the international community has asked of it by August 31, it will return to the Security Council under Chapter 7 and under a provision of Chapter 7 that envisions economic sanctions. So that is already on the table, with respect to Iran.
Q: So you think this consensus will hold, moving out of a nuclear context and into the Lebanon/Israel context?
MR. HADLEY: We would hope that it would. And we think it's interesting that in the middle of this Lebanese crisis we did have, I think, the United Nations Security Council did adopt, by a vote of 14-1 ,the resolution on Iran's nuclear program. And I think it was, in a way, fortuitous, that it was a signal to Iran, even in the Lebanese crisis, that the international community is united on the broader issue of Iran.
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