Obama Mulling Iran Sanctions For January

The Jerusalem Post reports that the "Obama administration is looking to early January as the time to press for a new round of United Nations sanctions against Iran for its continued defiance of demands to explain its nuclear ambitions, US officials said Friday. As US President Barack Obama's year-end deadline looms for Iran to comply with demands to prove its atomic activities are peaceful, the administration is reaching out to European allies, Russia and China to win support for new penalties at the UN Security Council after the council's membership changes January 1, the officials said. Senior US diplomats, including US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and her chief deputy James Steinberg, raised the urgency of the matter with European foreign ministers at high-level meetings in Athens, Greece, and Brussels, Belgium, this week ahead of a summit of European leaders. The sanctions package is not yet 'coherent,' one official said, but may include UN penalties aimed at elements of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the United States already has applied, and on Iran's petroleum industry, which the Obama administration is considering."

I appreciate the fact that the Obama administration may be taking the threat from Iran a little more seriously if they do indeed intend to press for a new round of sanctions in January. Though I am very skeptical that sanctions alone will deter Iran from pursuing their nuclear ambitions, I also wonder why our government should wait until January to rally other nations to join in sanctioning Iran, as December seems like a fine month to me in that it is one month sooner. Tweet