SECRETARY CLINTON: Thank you, Senator, and thank you for your encouragement and support of our initiatives, particularly around women and girls. I appreciate that very much. With respect to Iran, I feel the intensity of our efforts very personally because I have been out there engaged in bilateral and multilateral diplomacy with countries that we are moving toward an acceptance of the need for greater pressure on Iran.
When President Obama came to office, he very clearly, and I think correctly, laid out what we needed to do. He said, look, we’ll extend our hand, but you have to unclench your fist. And from the very beginning, he said we will have a two-track process. We will engage, but it’s a two-way street. There has to be something coming back. And we will pursue pressure and sanctions in order to change behavior and to send as clear an international signal as possible that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons will not be allowed.
Now, I believe that because of the President’s policy of engagement, we are in a much stronger position today than we would have been in the absence of all of our efforts. We have kept the so-called P-5+1, which is the UK, France, Germany, China, Russia and us united until now. We have issued very strong statements with both Russia and China signing on, endorsing this dual-track approach. We have demonstrated to countries that are somewhat ambivalent, to say the least, about going against Iran what it is we are trying to achieve and pointing out the problems that Iran poses to them.
So just in the last month, I’ve attended a London conference on Afghanistan and Pakistan, but spent an enormous amount of time in bilateral negotiations with all of the major parties about Iran. I went to Saudi Arabia and Qatar last week. I’m on my way to Latin America next week. And Iran is at the top of my agenda. And in the Security Council, our negotiations are very intensely underway. There’s been an enormous amount of work done by the Treasury Department and the State Department to design sanctions that will be aimed at the Revolutionary Guard.
I think we’ve made tremendous progress with Russia and I believe it is due to the President’s engagement with Medvedev and our very clear, consistent message over this past year about the way we see Iran, which the Russians now are endorsing. With China, because of their dependence on Iranian oil, our arguments to them are somewhat different, that because of their dependence, they above all should be supporting a sanctions pressure track because an arms race in the Gulf that would further destabilize the major oil producers is not in China’s interests, and I think we’ve made a lot of progress.
Now, we don’t come out and do a press conference every time we have these meetings, but I have seen over the past year the attitudes about Iran evolve. So even countries that are still not sure they want to sign up to sanctions, they’re not sure they want to oppose them, they now understand why the United States views Iran’s behavior as a threat.
And finally, Senator, I want us to work in tandem as a United States Government, the Administration and the Congress together, focused on what are the smartest, toughest sanctions that can be legislated that will assist our efforts. Because we want to make sure that we don’t send wrong messages before we get everybody signed up to whatever we can achieve internationally.
