"We're working with the 'EU-3' to hopefully convince the Iranians to abandon their pursuit of such a program," Bush said at a White House press conference. "And it appears we're making some progress."

"I've always believed that, obviously, the best way to solve any difficult issue is through diplomacy," the president said. "And in this case, France, Great Britain and Germany are handling the negotiations on behalf of the rest of the world, which is those nations which are deeply concerned about Iran having a nuclear weapon.

"Now, our policy is very clear on that, and that is that the Iranians violated the NPT agreement, we found out they violated the agreement, and therefore they're not to be trusted when it comes to highly enriched uranium or highly enriching uranium.

"And therefore our policy is to prevent them from having the capacity to develop enriched uranium to the point where they're able to make a nuclear weapon," he said.

Bush added that a decision to allow Iran to apply for WTO membership "seemed like a reasonable decision to make in order to advance the negotiations with our European partners."