(CNSNews.com) – Almost a month after the Obama administration’s most recent deadline passed for Iran to respond to international demands on its nuclear programs or face “tough” sanctions, the likelihood of multilateral action against Tehran looks as remote as ever.
 
Last week, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Philip Crowley told a briefing at the State Department briefing that the U.S. was “developing a list” of options that could be taken, both at the U.N. Security Council as well as in conjunction with allies outside of the U.N. framework. Crowley called them “steps that can be taken in a coordinated way on a national basis.”
 
But, as some E.U. member states are hesitant to act in the absence of U.N. approval.
 
“The sanction instrument is a very blunt one, so it should be used with extreme care,” Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt said in Brussels, where E.U. ministers met on Monday.
 
Estonia’s Urmas Paet said that for sanctions to be effective, all Security Council permanent members would have to agree. The permanent members are the United States, China, Britain, France and Russia. They and Germany – the so-called P5+1 – have been leading efforts to negotiate a resolution to the nuclear standoff.
 
“If there is no agreement in the U.N. Security Council there won’t be any sanctions,” acknowledged the French minister for European affairs, Pierre Lellouche, after the meeting.
 
The French government has been supportive of sanctions, and Lellouche expressed frustration with the situation, noting that six years of negotiations with Iran had gone nowhere – “all the West’s proposals have been rejected.”
 
He said that sanctions were necessary and urged E.U. countries to “work together” on the issue.

There was less urgency from the E.U.’s new foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, who deferred to the U.N. body.
 
“We just have to wait and see what comes out of the discussions of the Security Council,” she said after the talks in Brussels.
 
Looking to New York for a breakthrough is not promising: China’s resistance to further sanctions against Iran – three sets are already in place – has if anything become firmer, and its lack of enthusiasm about the negotiating process ever more obvious.
 
When the P5+1 met in New York last weekend to discuss the issue – a meeting already postponed since December because the Chinese said they could not make a meeting then – Beijing sent a low-level diplomat, in contrast to more senior officials representing the other five nations.
 
Although the participants agreed that Iran had responded inadequately to the P5+1 overture and President Obama’s “outstretched hand” by the year-end deadline, discussion on new sanctions was blocked by China’s junior representation. Instead, the group agreed to confer again by phone by the end of January.
 
‘Unified’
 
Last month White House press secretary Robert Gibbs stressed that the year-end deadline was “very real.”
 
Despite the lack of movement over the ensuing weeks, the administration continues to characterize the international community as “unified” on the issue.
 
In an interview with Time magazine, Obama offered Iran as one of “the examples of where I think our foreign policy team has gotten the right strategy and has executed well even though the outcomes are still uncertain.”
 
“On Iran, one of our trickiest foreign policy challenges, we have held the international community together, both in our engagement strategy, but also now as we move into a dual-track approach. Which is, If they don't accept the open hand, we've got to make sure they understand there are consequences for breaking international rules,” he said.
 
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said after meeting with Ashton last week that the international community was “unified in its resolve” on the Iranian issue.
 
China has an increasingly important economic relationship with Iran, which provides around 15 percent of its Chinese oil imports. (Russia, which is also heavily invested in Iran, has been vacillating on the question of sanctions.)
 
Beijing says it advocates a peaceful resolution of the nuclear issue through diplomatic negotiations, so as to maintain the validity of the international nuclear non-proliferation system.
 
“There still exists room for concerned parties to make diplomatic efforts,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told a press briefing several days after the inconclusive New York talks.
 
“I believe this is the right path,” he added, calling for the countries involved to be more flexible and pragmatic.
 
Divided ‘camps’
 
Tehran has made no secret of its aim to divide the international community over the nuclear issue – not just China and hopefully Russia versus the West but also within the Western bloc.
 
The head of Iran’s atomic energy body, Ali Akbar Salehi, told the Iranian ISNA news agency last week that there were two schools of thought regarding the issue in the West.
 
“One of these camps is acting with a little more wisdom and has understood that they should pursue an interactive policy toward Iran, and the other camp is influenced by international Zionism and [is] trying to implement a confrontational policy and to make problems for everyone,” he said.
 
Salehi predicted that the former approach would ultimately prevail.
 
Iran says its nuclear programs are designed for peaceful research and electricity-generation purposes only; the West believes it is trying to acquire the ability to build atomic weapons.
 
Over the past five years the international community has offered Iran three proposals of incentives in return for its cooperation on the nuclear issue. It rejected the first two, in 2005 and 2008.
 
The third deal, offered last year, would allow Iran to send most of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia and France for conversion. This would enable the Iranians to then pursue their stated peaceful nuclear activities using the converted fuel rods, while calming fears that it planned further enrichment to levels that would be required in a weapons program.
 
Tehran rejected the proposal, dismissed the end of December deadline, and offered what it called a counter-proposal: the West should either sell nuclear fuel to Iran, or exchange nuclear fuel for Iran’s LEU in small batches rather than all at once.
 
The Iranian proposal would defeat the purpose of the original plan, which is to deprive Tehran of most of its uranium stockpile to ensure it cannot enrich sufficient amounts to high enough levels for use in making weapons. As such, it is unacceptable to the West.
 
Iran has announced a deadline of its own: if its negotiating partners do not accept its counter-proposal by the end of January, it will announce plans to further enrich its uranium stockpiles itself.
 
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told reporters on Sunday that Iran could expect “good news” on the subject in early February.