US President Barack Obama said on Wednesday that it was “very important” for the international community to pursue dialogue with Iran and North Korea “to persuade them to renounce nuclear weapons.”
Obama was speaking after talks with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano in Rome, ahead of the start of the Group of Eight summit in the town of L’Aquila.

“It is very important for the world community to speak to countries like Iran and North Korea and encourage them to take a path that does not result in a nuclear arms race in places like the Middle East,” Obama said.

But Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seems to have another opinion…

In an interview late Tuesday, Clinton claimed that Washington would call for “even stricter” sanctions against Tehran if the Obama administration’s policy of engagement with Iran failed.

The United States will call for “even stricter sanctions on Iran to try to change the behavior of the regime,” Clinton said. Washington remained concerned about what she called Iran’s “pursuit of nuclear weapons,” which could “be very destabilizing in the Middle East and beyond,” Clinton told the private television network Globovision.

“We would ask the world to join us in imposing even stricter sanctions on Iran to try to change the behavior of the regime,” Clinton said in the interview, which was broadcast late Tuesday.

“We have seen in the last weeks that Iran has not respected its own democracy,” Clinton claimed in another interference in the Iranian affairs following the Presidential election that saw President Mahmoud Ahamdinejad return to power. “It has taken actions against his own citizens for peacefully protesting,” Clinton claimed, referring to street demonstrations challenging the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“I think it is not a very smart position to ally with a regime that is being rejected by so many of their own people,” Clinton said in the interview. The administration of President Barack Obama, Clinton added, thinks “it is not in the best interest” of the world to be doing business with Iran that would “promote the regime… that is not smart.”