As long as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad indulges in confrontational politics with the West and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld equates doubters of his anti-terror strategies with Nazi appeasers, as he did this week, a conflict worse than what has already occurred in Iraq is on its way to the Middle East. The best option for those who see the world differently than either of these two is to stall long enough for them to lose influence.

Today marks the United Nations Security Council deadline for Tehran to suspend its uranium-enrichment program or face sanctions. President Ahmadinejad’s nuclear reaction Tuesday was that “no one can stop us.” That is a bluff but, like all good bluffs, it is based on reality: What nation is willing to risk the lives of thousands of its citizens to confront Iran in an armed struggle over the possibility that it may someday have this WMD? (The answer, evidently, is the United States, if Donald Rumsfeld had his way.)

A useful new assessment of Iran by Chatham House (The Royal Institute for International Affairs) in London begins with this statement: “There is little doubt that Iran has been the chief beneficiary of the war on terror in the Middle East. The United States, with Coalition support, has eliminated two or Iran’s regional rival governments – the Taliban in Afghanistan in November 2001 and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq in April 2003 – but has failed to replace either with coherent and stable political structures.”

The Bush administration is correct when it argues that building stable governments takes time, certainly more than a couple of years – though it would be more assuring if the situations in Afghanistan and Iraq were at least moving toward stability rather than their current paths to chaos. But given the administration’s unanticipated difficulties created by the war on terror and yielding the subsequent rise of Iranian influence, more threats, more dismissing of ideas outside of Rumsfeldian belligerence, more, in short, of the tactics that created the current situation are less than productive.

Yet standing by while Iran develops nuclear weapons over the next decade also is unacceptable. For the nations hoping to prevent Iran from joining the world nuclear-weapons club the better route may be through China and Russia, which have more influence in Iran and have, so far anyway, supported the U.N. attempts to stop the weapons development in Iran.

The advantages of urging these two nations to lead talks with Iran are that it shifts the focus away from suspicions about the United States in the Middle East, it provides more time to seek solutions to the instability in the region and it provides an opportunity for the United States to gather more intelligence about Iran, which by several accounts is currently quite shallow.

Admittedly, it is also a form of stalling – but sometimes that’s the best deal available.