The Trail
Copyright 2008
Wednesday, July 16, 2008 1:41 PM

By Glenn Kessler Barack Obama and John McCain have both reacted quickly to the news that the Bush administration has agreed to send a senior envoy -- Undersecretary of State William J. Burns -- to international talks this weekend with Iranian officials on its nuclear program. But they reached very different conclusions about what the administration's new gambit means. The McCain campaign said it was an example of effective multilateral diplomacy and knocked, again, Obama's idea of directly engaging with Iran. Here's a statement from Randy Scheunemann, the campaign's director of Foreign Policy and National Security: John McCain supports multilateral diplomacy and multilateral sanctions to dissuade Iran from its nuclear ambitions. Unlike Senator Obama's unilateral approach based on unconditional and direct presidential diplomacy, which would make preemptive concessions to Iran that our European allies do not wish to make, Senator McCain believes working with our allies presents the best chance