President Barack Obama spoke often in his first year in office about the need for the international community to tighten sanctions against Iran.

On Sept. 25, 2009, Obama, in a joint meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, announced that the three countries had presented evidence to the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran has been building a secret uranium enrichment facility that would give it the ability to build a nuclear weapon.

Both Sarkozy and Brown said if serious change was not undertaken by Iranian leaders, they were prepared to implement further and more stringent sanctions.

But none of the three leaders spoke specifically about credit guarantees to Iran. And we couldn't find any public statements from Obama in which he talked in that level of detail about proposed sanctions.

For example, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech on Dec. 10, Obama spoke in more general terms.

"But it is also incumbent upon all of us to insist that nations like Iran and North Korea do not game the system," Obama said that day in Norway. "Those who claim to respect international law cannot avert their eyes when those laws are flouted. Those who care for their own security cannot ignore the danger of an arms race in the Middle East or East Asia. Those who seek peace cannot stand idly by as nations arm themselves for nuclear war."

But that doesn't mean the Obama administration hasn't pushed European leaders in private.

In late January 2009, the German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that German Chancellor Angela Merkel instructed the economy minister to crack down on federal export credit guarantees to German firms seeking to do business with Iran, according to a Reuters story. The German paper reported that the move was made in reaction to pressure from the United States and Israel. Nonetheless, Germany continues to be one of Iran's strongest trading partners, and exports to Iran have risen.

President Obama has not made this promise a public priority, but Merkel's move suggests that conversations are occurring behind the scenes. And so we'll move this one to In the Works.