Iran's President Sparks Fears of New Isolation

"Ahmadinejad now really represents a reversion back to the Khomeini days," Sick said. "And that's a stunning, shocking surprise."

Some analysts suggested that Ahmadinejad, who came to the presidency with no foreign policy experience, might simply be in over his head. Elected on a populist economic platform, the former Tehran mayor cast himself as an ordinary Iranian intent on reviving the ideals of the revolution.

"His image of the world is still very, very local," said Hadi Semati, a Tehran University political scientist who is a resident at Washington's Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Some critics cite evidence from across Iran that the new government is struggling to master the levers of power.

Four major ministries, including the oil ministry, remain without new leaders after the conservative parliament rejected Ahmadinejad's choices. Tehran's stock exchange has lost a third of its value since his election, which profoundly unsettled business circles. And Ahmadinejad's interior minister irritated consumers last month by hinting that Iran might ban imports of goods from Britain and South Korea in retaliation for their IAEA votes.

"All over the country, people believe he does not have the ability to handle the problems," Davoud Hermidas Bavand, a professor of international law at Tehran's Supreme National Defense University, said of Ahmadinejad.

On the nuclear issue, Ahmadinejad's policymaking power is limited. As president, he is only one of a dozen members of the Supreme National Security Council, which fashioned the negotiating positions that foreign diplomats have grudgingly described as skilled.

"He's only one voice in the room," Sick said of Ahmadinejad, "and his voice would right now carry less than any other in that room."

But there are indications that the president's confrontational stance is deliberate. In a field of half a dozen presidential candidates, only Ahmadinejad rejected rapprochement with the West. And when he arrived at the United Nations in September, he offered Secretary General Kofi Annan not the new ideas he had promised to help stave off confrontation over the nuclear issue, but a legalistic defense of Iran's right to nuclear technology.

Annan was stunned, according to notes taken by a member of Annan's staff and two other people who attended the private meeting. "It's time to act like a statesman," he told Ahmadinejad.

After his U.N. speech, Ahmadinejad was asked, through a series of contacts between his staff members and European officials, not to repeat the argument in a speech several days later. Instead, he included three references to Iran's intentions to enrich uranium.

"We gave him 24 hours to rewrite that speech, and instead of choosing softer language that could have saved the diplomatic process, he just toughened it up," a senior European official said.

On Friday, Annan canceled a planned trip to Tehran. "The secretary general and the Iranian government have mutually agreed that this is not an appropriate time for him to travel to Iran," the chief U.N. spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said, according to news services. "In light of the ongoing controversy, it would have been difficult to advance the agenda that he had wanted to discuss with the Iranian leadership."

In Tehran, a Foreign Ministry source contended it was Iran, not Annan, that wanted the trip rescheduled "to a more appropriate time in the future," the official Iranian news agency reported.

Staff writer Dafna Linzer in Washington contributed to this report.