The current Iranian government is racing towards the wall with its foot on the accelerator. There has been no adjustment whatsoever in government spending since the price of oil came down and the global financial crisis hit late last year. As a result, Iran is racing through its foreign exchange reserves. I don't see any change in policy happening until well after the next presidential election on June 12. And the record of what happened when Iran ran into serious economic difficulties in the early 1980s and mid-1990s is that in both cases, it was only after Iran was completely out of money that they made the slightest changes in economic policy—and then had to make dramatic changes in their policies. It looks likely that that will once again be what we see.
So in some ways we're in a race for time. If we can, through UN sanctions and other actions, slow down Iran's nuclear program, then Iran is going to run out of financial reserves and not have enough income to finance the extraordinarily inefficient government spending that is going on at the moment. That would be an excellent moment for saying to the Iranians that Iran's geostrategic situation was not so strong and that they would do well to compromise with the outside world.