WASHINGTON — The groundbreaking message to Iran that President Obama delivered by videotape on Friday was part of a strategy intended to emphasize a positive message to Iran in the prelude to that nation’s presidential election this summer, according to administration officials and European diplomats.
Among other measures being weighed are a direct communication from Mr. Obama to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, and an end to a prohibition on direct contacts between junior American diplomats and their Iranian counterparts around the world, the officials and diplomats said.
At least for now, the American strategy calls for an emphasis on diplomacy, in part out of concern that a more confrontational message that focused on Iran’s nuclear program might prove counterproductive in the political heat of the Iranian election season. The officials said that Mr. Obama had set aside for the next few months a quest for more punitive sanctions aimed at Iran.
After three decades of a freeze in American-Iranian relations, it appeared significant that Mr. Obama directed his comments not just to the Iranian people but to Iran’s leaders, and that he referred to Iran as “the Islamic Republic,” apparently indicating a willingness to deal with the current clerical government.
Iranian officials responded cautiously to Mr. Obama’s message. Administration officials say they have not given up on tougher sanctions for Iran, but have concluded that sending a positive message now offers more chance of success. One reason is that Russia in particular appears unlikely to support tougher sanctions until Mr. Obama demonstrates that he has first gone significantly further than President Bush did to engage Iran.
The administration’s first face-to-face encounter with Iranian officials could come in 10 days, when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will attend a conference on Afghanistan in The Hague. Iran is expected to send a delegation, and a senior administration official said Mrs. Clinton would probably greet Iranian officials on the sidelines.
The video from Mr. Obama that was released by the White House at 12:01 a.m. on Friday, with subtitles in Persian, coincided with the Iranian festival of Nowruz, a 12-day holiday that marks the new year in Iran.
“In this season of new beginnings, I would like to speak clearly to Iran’s leaders,” Mr. Obama said. “My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us, and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran and the international community. This process will not be advanced by threats.”
The Israeli government also sent a New Year’s message to the Iranian people on Friday, although administration officials and Israeli officials insisted that the gestures were not part of a coordinated plan. “I know we notified allies about our message last evening,” the White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said, but he added that he did not know if Israel had also notified the United States ahead of time.
Some experts said the fact that the American message was sent on the same day as Israel’s had the potential to dilute the effect of Mr. Obama’s message, by linking it to Israel, whose government has been much more hostile toward Iran.
In his own message, Mr. Obama made a point of saying that “the United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations.” The reference to Iran as an “Islamic Republic,” and the direct statement about not threatening Iran, diplomats said, offered a first clear signal from the Obama administration that it would not pursue a change of government in Iran.
“That wording is designed to demonstrate acceptance of the government of Iran,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former United States ambassador to Israel and author of “Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Diplomacy in the Middle East.”
“The message is dripping with sincerity and directly addresses one of the things they are most concerned about,” he said.
Mr. Obama went so far as to quote the medieval Persian poet Saadi. “The children of Adam are limbs to each other, having been created of one essence,” he said.
In Iran, officials were tepid in their initial response, saying that Mr. Obama’s message must be followed up with concrete actions to address past grievances, like the downing of an Iranian airliner in 1988. Ali Akbar Javanfekr, a high-ranking adviser to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, praised the effort to reach out to Iranians but said that Iran wanted more than words. “This cannot only be done by us, we cannot simply forget what the U.S. did to our nation,” he said. “They need to perceive what wrong orientation they had and make serious efforts to make up for it.”
But Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian-American expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that Mr. Obama’s message would force hard-line Iranian officials — like Mr. Ahmadinejad — to put up or shut up on prospects for better relations with the United States.
“What this message does is, it puts the hard-liners in a difficult position, because where the Bush administration united disparate Iranian political leaders against a common threat, what Obama is doing is accentuating the cleavages in Iran,” Mr. Sadjadpour said. “It makes the hard-liners look increasingly like they are the impediment.”
European diplomats applauded the move, but expressed dismay that President Shimon Peres of Israel followed with his own message to the Iranian people. “This is a real shame because the key effect should be Obama, and this dilutes from that,” said one European diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic rules.
Israeli officials have told the White House that by the end of the year, at the latest, Iran will have everything it needs if it decides to produce a nuclear weapon. The officials have hinted that Israel will take unilateral action against Iran if they believe Mr. Obama’s diplomacy is going nowhere.
Israel has also been pushing the Obama administration to consider new, tougher sanctions. Among those they advocate are a cutoff of refined gasoline to Iran — a sanction that Mr. Obama himself discussed as a last resort during last year’s campaign — and full inspection of all ships leaving Iran, to make sure they are not carrying weapons.
For the Obama administration, time for diplomacy may be short. Iran appears to have solved many of the technological problems that hampered its enrichment of uranium. Today its centrifuges appear to be running at high efficiency, according to reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency. It has already produced roughly the amount of uranium to make, with further enrichment, enough fuel for a single nuclear bomb.
Mark Landler contributed reporting.
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