(CNSNews.com) - In light of a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that says Iran does not have an ongoing nuclear weapons program, some experts think the United States must change its foreign policy towards Iran, but others say the status quo is the only option.

"The problem is that the administration has said that it does not want to change its policy towards Iran, or its rhetoric towards Iran even though the lay of the land has shifted," said Vali Nasr, an adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), during a conference call briefing with reporters on Wednesday.

Nasr added that "because of a lack of engagement" with Iran, the administration has created a "house of cards that is now falling down."

"There is a U.S. policy in the Middle East today whose focal point was - and remains - containment of Iran," said Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the CFR. "The notion that Iran should be contained, hopefully with the assistance of regional states, is not particularly new, nor imaginative."

He noted that this has been the strategy in dealing with Iran for almost 30 years.

The Bush administration's policies toward Iran included trying to persuade European governments and foreign banks to curb trade, investment, and credits to Iran, as well as a naval buildup in the Persian Gulf in an effort to contain Iran. While the administration says it is not planning on military action against Iran, it has not ruled it out.

"Washington's containment strategy is unsound. It cannot be implemented effectively, and it will probably make matters worse," said Takeyh. "The ingredients needed for a successful containment effort simply do not exist."

Takeyh and Nasr noted that the regional cooperation is unlikely to enforce a containment strategy. "Under these circumstances, Washington's insistence that Arab states array against Iran could further destabilize an already volatile region," Takeyh said.

Nasr added that because of the new intelligence report, Iran "might think that the military option is off the table, that the United States really can't make a case for war right now, and the sanctions will likely not be difficult, so Iran will likely continue what it's doing with a little more boldness and feeling that it has room to push."

Instead of containing Iran, they advocate for increased diplomacy to engage Iran, noting "dialogue, compromise, and commerce, as difficult as they may be, are convincing means."

But Ilan Berman, vice president for policy at the conservative American Foreign Policy Council, told Cybercast News Service, "The current strategy is the only one left, which is containment."

"If you're not going to militarily stop them from acquiring nuclear capability, if you've written-off the idea of regime change ... if we are no longer able to tell the Iranians that there are real costs involved with their nuclear development, then the best you can hope for is to arm the countries that are threatened by Iran and try to create some sort of sanitary cordon around Iran, so that when they do go nuclear it won't be such a catastrophic event," he said.

Berman added that if Iran did suspend its nuclear weapons program in 2003 as the NIE states, "that wasn't because of diplomacy and it wasn't because of sanctions - those didn't materialize until two years later. It was because they had a very healthy fear that they were next on the hit parade after Iraq. If that's the case, that's really a vindication of preemption as a policy on the part of the Bush administration."

Joe Cirincione, director for nuclear policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, however, noted that "neither coercion alone nor incentives alone are capable of decisively influencing Iran's behavior."

"Rather, the United States must simultaneously contain and engage Iran," he said in a recent policy paper.

"Such a strategy would strengthen the hand of those within Iran's ruling political establishment who believe that the current mutually destructive collision course with the United States is not in Iran's interest and weaken those who actively promote such a clash," Cirincione added.

"The strategy aims to convince the Iranian people that the foreign policy decisions of their government are wrong and that their government is to blame for Iran's economic problems," he said.

"It would marshal the sustained support of allies to maximize the chances that the United States achieves its objectives through negotiation while laying the groundwork for a long-term strategy of containment should the negotiations break down," Cirincione said.

"I think there shouldn't be too many changes," countered Bernard Finel, a senior fellow at the liberal American Security Project.

"We still have to be concerned about Iran's uranium enrichment activities and their failure to comply fully with requirements under the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), but I think that what [the NIE] does do is it lets us know that we don't have to rush into anything," he said.

Finel told Cybercast News Service that, in particular, the U.S. doesn't have to rush to use military force because "our policies are perhaps working.

"The approach of sanctions, of bringing the international community together and trying to put pressure on Iran to comply with expectations - all of these things seem to be working and we don't have to make any dramatic or drastic changes," he said.

"We should take advantage of the extra time we seem to have here to make sure we have a strong coalition going forward that has a consensus on what we should do about Iran - presumably, some sort of sanctions policy," Finel added.

But Berman called the NIE a "disaster."

"The NIE is enormously unconstructive," he said. "They were having enough trouble before the NIE convincing countries like Russia and China that they need to be serious, they need to implement sterner measures. After the [release] of the NIE, that task really just becomes impossible."

He Berman it becomes impossible because Moscow and Beijing will not sign on to a policy that even the U.S intelligence community doesn't.

"We need to maintain our policies, meaning serious economic pressure, broad-based economic pressure, diplomatic pressure, but we've taken away the sticks that would enable those things to be successful," he added. "We have less leverage than ever before to force the Iranians to behave. We have less leverage now, because we've shot ourselves in the foot."

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