Today's announcement that Iran has built a secret, illegal uranium enrichment facility may have been news to many, but it was not news to a handful of others in Washington, Paris, London, Tel Aviv or Vienna. Some have argued that the US has known about the site since its 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which asserted that Iran was not building weapons – an assessment which the administration says has not been changed. The site's existence was a topic of conversation in Israel last summer.
Indeed, officials told the New York Times that Iran's hasty announcement of the existence of the facility in a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Monday came as a result of Iran's realisation that the west had extensive knowledge of the facility.
What is clear, at the end of a carefully-choreographed month of global diplomacy, is that Iran is on the defensive and – for the first time in several years – finding itself compelled to make conciliatory gestures as Ahmedinejad's international pillars of support are undermined one by one.
Last year, Ahmedinejad enjoyed support from a global public tired of Washington's saber-rattling. But so far this year:
• Washington threw Ahmedinejad (and Obama's domestic critics) off-balance by agreeing to sit down for talks;
• Obama adjusted the US missile defense stance, exchanging an unpopular system that the Iranians knew would not constrain them for one that will;
• Ahmedinejad spoke to a near-empty UN chamber, finding himself forced to defend his regime's egregious human rights violations rather than go on the attack;
• Russia took the UN general assembly as an opportunity to lean closer towards the west's position, with hints of support for future sanctions against Iran if they prove to be necessary
• Brown and Sarkozy took the lead on pressuring Iran at the UN
• With Obama in the lead, the west re-took the initiative on global efforts toward disarmament that cast Iran in an unflattering light to the non-nuclear nations before which it postures as a champion
This morning's press conference in Pittsburgh pulls another prop out from under the Iranian regime's weakening international support. Obama has demonstrated that he has both momentum and international legitimacy on his side.
Experts speculate that Iran has more than one of these secret facilities and that while it may not have begun running uranium in those centrifuges, it could soon be doing so. If one facility is bombed, Iran will be able to construct a replacement. So building a system of surveillance and safeguards, with broad international support, is the best of a range of unsatisfactory solutions.
It's also worth remembering how all this relates to Iran's internal turmoil. Iran's democratic opposition has made it clear that it seeks to be part of the international community – and that it shares the strong nationalistic impulse to see Iran a nation with nuclear technology. Sending a clear message that the international community will partner with an Iran that embraces nuclear safeguards and agreements – and will reject an Iran that does not – will strengthen the reformers' hand.
Iran continues to pose a real security challenge that can neither be wished away nor bombed away. The week's events show that it is possible to construct an international coalition that puts Iran on the defensive and produces broad-based international support for the US understanding of what the threat is and how to combat it.
Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network in Washington DC.