Iran is taking advantage of this year’s U.S. presidential election to buy time to develop its nuclear weapons program, confident that the Obama administration wants to avoid provoking a foreign policy crisis ahead of the November vote, senior policy analysts and officials say.

James Carafano, a senior defense analyst with The Heritage Foundation, said U.S. officials should be highly skeptical of anything Iran says when it meets with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany in Iraq on Wednesday.