World Powers to Discuss Iran Strategy Tonight

Foreign ministers from the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany plan to meet tonight in London to discuss the next stage of the Iranian nuclear crisis, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, Oct. 5).

Efforts over the past few weeks by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana have failed to persuade Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program and other sensitive nuclear activities.  The U.N. Security Council and the six nations gathering tonight have demanded such a freeze.

The United States is pushing for the council to enforce its own demand by initiating a series of incremental sanctions against Iran.  Washington faces opposition on the council and plans to seek common ground this evening, the Post reported. 

“We’ve done the Solana effort and now we’ll have to move to sanctions,” U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday.  “That’s the ministers’ role.”

Still, it appears unlikely the council would adopt any sanctions in the near future.

“I believe that until diplomatic means are exhausted, sanctions would be too radical,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Warsaw.  “We have to do everything to persuade Iran to begin negotiations. … The issue needs to be resolved diplomatically” (Robin Wright, Washington Post, Oct. 6).

If the ministers can agree to a common strategy, they could try to implement it in the Security Council as early as next week, Agence France-Presse reported.

“I expect the Iranian dossier to re-emerge in New York in the course of the next week,” British Ambassador to the United Nations Emyr Jones Parry said yesterday (Agence France-Presse/Sharewatch.com, Oct. 5).

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