Spent a couple days working on a piece about what comes after outreach to Iran. The answer, printed in the Washington Independent, is multilateral sanctions and… outreach to Iran.

Two senior administration officials, Undersecretary of the Treasury Stuart Levey and Undersecretary of State William Burns, have for months quietly assembled working groups across the government to determine what a sanctions package might contain. The groups examine Iranian vulnerabilities across a variety of economic sectors, “everything from energy to IRGC [the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, an influential and ideological branch of the Iranian military] to financial sector” activity, said a knowledgeable U.S. official who requested anonymity to discuss the unsettled contours of administration policy. The House of Representatives last week approved a bill giving Obama new authority to enact additional unilateral sanctions on Iran’s energy imports.

Basically, France becomes president of the U.N. Security Council in February and then the effort will begin in earnest. It would take a major diplomatic breakthrough very soon to change the administration’s calculus of necessity.

So is this a prelude to war? Not as far as I can tell. First, the last thing the Obama administration wants is another war, certainly not with Iran. Second, as Obama indicated in his Nobel speech, the administration is going to maintain a posture of talking with Iran anytime the Iranians desire. (Although I should say I don’t see what would compel Iran to talk under a more-punitive policy if it’s not prepared to talk under a less-punitive policy.) Third, and take this for what it’s worth, the sanctions architects aren’t in that headspace:

The European diplomat framed military action against Iran in opposition to the sanctions, not as their inevitable successor. “Some are afraid sanctions are a first step toward a more confrontational mode, but in fact all Europeans have the view that sanctions are a way of avoiding escalation,” the diplomat said. For years, the Israelis have threatened to attack Iran over its nuclear program.

The piece also has some stuff in there about what it means to jettison a longed-for diplomatic effort — or, I guess, more accurately, place it on the backburner — after a year’s worth of Iranian rejectionism. I guess you can debate whether the administration ought to have given the Iranians no longer than a year to come to terms with the outreach. And I can see that argument. It’s been 30 years of rhetorical hostility, containment, incitement and confrontation, and the Iranian political system is fucked up beyond all recognition and hardly in a position to deal with a diplomatic sea change.

But everything the administration did with regard to Iran was (a) light year beyond that of every president since Carter in terms of moving toward a less bellicose posture; and (b) the Iranians ridiculed Obama at every turn while continuing to lie about their nuclear program and pursuing an intense campaign of internal brutality. I don’t know what multilateral sanctions can really accomplish. But the process that led to them, while hardly flawless, is a responsible one.