Washington is unperturbed by a UN Security Council decision to postpone a meeting on Iran's nuclear program, saying that diplomatic efforts on the crisis "are heading in the right direction."
"Multilateral diplomacy takes some time," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said on Tuesday.
"These are serious, serious issues," he said, adding that despite the delay, "we believe the diplomacy continues to move in the right direction.""This is going to take a little bit of time," he added.
"But we are focused. We are patient. And we're working closely with the other members of the Security Council, as well as members of the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany.)
"We have been successful to this point in increasing the pressure on Iran," McCormack added, "because we have both a larger and larger coalition, larger and larger consensus on this issue and gradually ratcheted up the pressure."
"I would say, again, this is the normal -- this is the course of diplomacy," McCormack said.
The Security Council put off its scheduled meeting to allow more work on a Franco-British-drafted statement toward Tehran that takes into account Russian objections, a Western diplomat said, adding that no new meeting date had yet been set.
{{/usCountry}}The Security Council put off its scheduled meeting to allow more work on a Franco-British-drafted statement toward Tehran that takes into account Russian objections, a Western diplomat said, adding that no new meeting date had yet been set.
{{/usCountry}}Later on Tuesday, Assistant Secretary of State of Political Affairs Nicholas Burns called Monday's five-hour UN meeting "productive."
"I thought in many ways it was a productive meeting because it demonstrated what unifies all those countries," he said at a State Department press briefing.