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QUESTION: Are there any differences between the Europeans and the U.S. on the financial pressures on Iran and the way to exert these pressures?

MR. MCCORMACK: I saw the story I think you're referring to this morning. Look, I think that the concern is that the -- that European governments are expressing have to do with their legal requirements. They have a set of legal requirements that they have to abide by and I'm not sure I would call that resistance to discussing or cooperating on these various measures. But they have requirements that they need to meet and we're going to continue talking to them about those. I think that there is a -- certainly a political will to talk about these subjects and I think that they understand what's at stake and they understand the importance of maintaining a unified front and squeezing out any of those illegitimate activities that might be accruing under the cover of legitimate activities in their financial system.

So we're talking to the Europeans. You have different sets of laws, different sets of past behaviors in this regard. You have different sets of commercial relationships. So it's not a one-size-fits-all question. You have to do it individually.

But regardless of what the individual states or the European Union might be doing right now, you see European as well as other international businesses making business decisions based on investment risk and reputational risk about whether or not they are going to finance or invest in Iran, a country that is now under Chapter 7 resolutions. So those are a set of decisions that are taking place outside of the discussions that we're having government to government. Of course, we also provide information to individual businesses, but they make their own decisions about what kinds of investments they're going to make.

When you're talking about, for example, investments in or financing for oil and gas ventures, which is the biggest -- by far the biggest part of the Iranian economy -- while we are not in the UN Security Council resolution targeting the oil and gas sector, there is certainly a collateral effect in terms of the financial institutions willing to finance or invest in these kinds of projects. Because especially in that field, the people who are making these investments -- these investment decisions, we are talking about payoffs on investments extending over a decade, two decades, three decades. And they have to take into account what is -- what are the political risks of making those sorts of investments. What sort of stability is there going to be in this investment? Here we have a country that's under Chapter 7 resolution. We don't know if they're going to be under more sanctions in the future given their pattern of behavior. But those are a set of decisions that are made by business, separate and apart from government.

QUESTION: Yes, but New York Times quotes a UN senior official -- U.S. senior official saying that the European response on the economic side has been pretty weak, so it's not really the -- does it mean that there are --

MR. MCCORMACK: Everybody is going to --

QUESTION: -- differences between --

MR. MCCORMACK: Sylvie, look. Everybody is --

QUESTION: -- the U.S. Administration?

MR. MCCORMACK: Look, Sylvie. Everybody is going to move at their own pace. Okay? Individual European states are going to move at their own pace. I was trying to make the point that there is not a cookie cutter here, there's not a turnkey operation in terms of these types of issues. Each -- the EU has its own laws and regulations and each of the individual member-states of the EU have their own set of banking and finance regulations, and you have to deal with that. You have to deal with those realities. You have to deal with the political realities within each of those countries. You have to deal with the fact that each of those individual countries will have different sets of commercial relationships. So you might have to work with them a little bit more because this is a much bigger decision for one country versus another country.

That doesn't mean that we don't think the overall -- everything is heading in the right direction. We believe it is. We believe that the existing Security Council resolution has been extraordinarily effective, I think even more effective than we would have thought it would have been. So this will, again, move at a certain pace. There's a certain rhythm to it. Each of these individual countries will move, again, at a different pace.

QUESTION: So if somebody is impatient, it's not the State Department?

MR. MCCORMACK: I don't -- there's nothing wrong with being impatient. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being impatient given the stakes. And certainly we are going to continue to push and prod. People are going to continue to push and prod us. But that's to be expected given what's at stake here: Iran getting a nuclear weapon. Nobody wants to see that.

QUESTION: In terms of the oil and gas sector, I mean, you said that one of the collateral effects is that financial institutions won't back some of these projects. But Shell and a Spanish company, for example, are moving ahead, so that flies in the face of your argument that it's --

MR. MCCORMACK: Individual -- no, but individual -- well, look at the empirical data. If you look at various banks -- I'm just -- at this point, I'm just relying on press reports. If you look at major European-based banks, they have either greatly reduced or even, in some cases, stopped dealing with the Iranian Government and that's just based on press reports that I've seen.

You're going to see other businesses make different business decisions. They might have a different appetite for risk in terms of their investment decisions. I mean, that just goes -- it makes my point that these businesses are going to make their own individual decisions and it's all going to be based on their own appetite for risk -- political risk, investment risk, your reputational risk, all of those things. It all goes into making a decision to invest large sums of money in these various sectors.

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