After trying for years to prevent having its nuclear program judged in the UN Security Council, Iran has shifted course and decided to confront the council head on.
Iran is gambling that the 15 members, who plan to take up the Iranian dossier this week for the first time, will be too divided to inflict meaningful punishment.
Sanctions against Iran, the second-largest oil producer in OPEC, could further destabilize the oil markets. Military force, at least for the moment, is unlikely, with US troops stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So Iran's leaders have stopped trying to woo the world and now say they want the process to take its course.
"Let the Security Council review the dossier directly," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told reporters in January, defending the reopening of the uranium enrichment facility in Natanz for what Iran describes as research.
"Since we have a clear logic and we act according to the law, we are not worried," he said.
In Tehran on Monday, Ahmadinejad portrayed Iran's position not as obstinate or rigid but as a reflection of strength.
"We know well that a country's backing down one iota on its undeniable rights is the same as losing everything," state television quoted him as saying.
"We will not bend to a few countries' threats, as their demands for giving up our nation's rights are unfair and cruel," he said.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader and the country's ultimate authority, who once stood before the UN and branded it "a paper factory for issuing worthless and ineffective orders," has also endorsed the strategy.
In remarks to leading clerics last Thursday, he vowed to "resist any pressure and threat," adding, "If Iran quits now, the case will not be over."
Avoiding action in the Security Council was at the heart of Iran's decision to open negotiations with France, Britain and Germany in 2003 and to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency access to its nuclear sites, according to Hassan Rowhani, who was replaced as Iran's chief nuclear negotiator after Ahmadinejad took office last year.
"At that time, the United States was at the height of its arrogance, and our country was not yet ready to go to the UN Security Council," Rowhani said at a closed-door session of Iran's ideological policy makers last September, as he was leaving his post.
Consideration of Iran's case by the council would give the US more power over Iran's fate, reduce the influence of the Europeans and expose Iran's missile program to new scrutiny, Row-hani said.
"The most important promise" the Europeans gave Iran, he said, "was that they would stand firm against attempts to take this case to the UN Security Council."
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