The Steep Hill To Sanctions

J.E. Dyer calls the Qom announcement a "sophomoric maneuver" and contends that Obama will have a weak hand during negotiations:

To justify tougher sanctions, Obama needs to go beyond depicting Iran as opaque and duplicitous, well-documented traits that have yet to persuade other nations to approve tougher action. He needs, in fact, to make the explicit case that the Qom site, among other factors, demonstrates that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. Yet his own intelligence community reiterated as recently as Thursday that it still assesses Iran as having suspended its nuclear-weapons program in 2003.

From Obama’s narrowly staked position, he is unlikely to persuade Russia, China, or other leading nations to endorse a tougher posture with Iran. Jennifer has noted Medvedev’s clarification on the Russian position, which is basically that it has not changed (and certainly not because of Obama’s policy reversal on missile defense). China’s representatives at the G-20 conference affirmed that the Qom revelation had not altered Beijing’s opposition to toughened sanctions. Nor is support likely to come from Iran’s major oil customers (and, increasingly, general-trade partners): Japan and India.[...] During a global recession, support for effective sanctions on a major oil producer is improbable outside of Western Europe and the British Commonwealth.

Dyer also points out that Iran was under no formal obligation to disclose the Qom site because it was more than 180 days from becoming operational.