Obama spoke to his French and British counterparts on Tuesday morning. Obama: Give diplomacy a chance

President Barack Obama focused his efforts Tuesday on exploring a diplomatic solution that would forestall a U.S. military response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons, as the Senate delayed a vote to authorize the use of force against Bashar Assad’s regime.

The news came amid a flurry of diplomatic activity, as the United States, France and the United Kingdom all committed to work with Russia and China through the United Nations to reach an agreement along the lines set by Russia — requiring Bashar Assad’s regime to declare its chemical weapons and hand over control to international monitors.


As some of the details of a potential agreement were discussed in public, Secretary of State John Kerry announced plans to travel to Geneva on Thursday for face-to-face talks with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov.

The action came as Obama met with Senate Democrats and Republicans at two separate lunches and prepared to deliver an evening address to the nation on Syria — a speech that was scheduled when the president was publicly delivering a drastically different position, urging Congress and the American people to back a military response to Assad.

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The president is expected to express an openness to the diplomatic process Tuesday night, while still making the case for military action in the event that talks fall through. Obama sees the potential for diplomatic action as a “win-win,” a senior administration official told POLITICO, either leading to a non-military solution or demonstrating that the United States has exhausted all options other than the use of force. At that point, the administration might be better able to convince the American people, Congress and the international community that military strikes are the only way to protect Syrians from Assad’s regime.

Senate leaders have agreed to delay a vote on the use of force, but made clear that force remains an option. A White House official said the president told lawmakers that his administration “would spend the days ahead pursuing this diplomatic option with the Russians and our allies at the United Nations.” At the same time, though, he will continue to work with members of Congress on “authorizing language that will further strengthen diplomatic efforts.”

“We’re going to continue to work moving forward on this but keeping pronounced — and I pronounce it now — that the credible threat of our doing something about this attack is going to remain,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) said after the president’s 75-minute meeting with Senate Democrats. Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) added that a Senate vote on the use of force would be delayed until next week, at the earliest.

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Efforts to reach an agreement at the UN began Tuesday, as France proposed a Security Council resolution that Russia quickly dismissed as “unacceptable.” Russian President Vladimir Putin said he would only move ahead at the UN if Obama would agree to renounce the use of force to respond to Syria.

“Certainly, this is all reasonable, it will function and will work out, only if the U.S. and those who support it on this issue pledge to renounce the use of force, because it is difficult to make any country — Syria or any other country in the world — to unilaterally disarm if there is military action against it under consideration,” Putin said, according to Russia Today.

Kerry seemed to buck that offer Tuesday, as he insisted that an agreement come with repercussions.“We need a full resolution from the Security Council in order to have the confidence that this has the force that it ought to have,” he said during a Google Hangout. Any UN resolution must have “consequences if games are played and somebody tries to undermine this.”

( VIDEO: Timeline of Syria crisis response)

The Security Council had scheduled a meeting for 4 p.m. ET at Russia’s request, but then cancelled it, also at Russia’s request. Earlier Tuesday, the White House announced that United States, France and the United Kingdom had all “agreed to work closely together, and in consultation with Russia and China” on a plan that would ensure the “verifiable and enforceable destruction” of Syria’s chemical weapons.

Syria’s foreign minister responded by saying that his country is interested in joining the Chemical Weapons Convention and will declare all its chemical weapons as part of an agreement to put them under international control. The announcement marked the first time Assad’s regime has admitted possessing chemical weapons.

Kerry said that Syria must “go further” than just following through on those initial steps and cooperate with Russia “to work out a formula by which those weapons could be transferred to international control and destroyed.”

( VIDEO: Ben Cardin: Russian plan 'best possible outcome')

It also comes as a bipartisan group of senators work on a proposal that would call on the Security Council — which includes Russia and China — to pass a resolution asserting that Bashar Assad’s regime used chemical weapons. Their plan would require a U.N. team to remove chemical weapons in a specified time frame that, if not achieved, could trigger the use of military force.

Though the administration and lawmakers are open to working out a diplomatic agreement, they’re moving forward with skepticism. “I think you have to take it with a grain of salt initially,” Obama told NBC News in one of six TV interviews he conducted on Monday. “We have to be skeptical because this is not how we’ve seen them operate over the last couple of years.”

Kerry told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that while a diplomatic resolution is “ideal,” it won’t indefinitely stall military action. “This cannot be a process of delay,” he said. “This cannot be a process of avoidance.”

While Obama and Kerry are both voicing caution about a deal, they haven’t been shy about taking credit for the proposal, saying on Monday and Tuesday that they discussed the idea last week with their Russian counterparts.

Obama and Putin first discussed the proposal more than a year ago, at the June 2012 G-20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, and have returned to it in subsequent meetings since then, without any resolution, a senior administration official told POLITICO.

Kerry, meanwhile, brought up the idea in an April meeting with Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov “at the time hooked to the notion that all shared an interest in avoiding collapse of the institutions of the state,” the official said. Kerry and Lavrov’s discussions progressed at another meeting, during which they discussed replicating the nuclear program-removal model used in Libya in 2003.

Since then, Kerry and Lavrov “have been talking fairly intensely about the role Russia could play as a facilitator,” the official said, and have spoken by phone nine times since the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack outside of Damascus. Obama and Putin had a similar discussion last week at the G-20 in St. Petersburg.

The administration is also arguing that the president’s threats of military action were key in bringing about a potential settlement.

“Let’s be clear, what we’re seeing with the Russian proposal and Syrian reaction has only come about because of the threat, the credible threat of U.S. military action,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday on MSNBC. “Before this morning, the Syrian government had never even acknowledged they possessed chemical weapons. Now they have.”

The White House said that Obama spoke to French President Francois Hollande and British Prime Minister David Cameron to discuss the plans to move ahead through the U.N., and France and the U.K. have confirmed their plans.

France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said his country will initiate the Security Council resolution process on Tuesday, and stipulate that U.N. action include a condemnation of the use of chemical weapons in Syria. The plan would “bring fully to light” Syria’s chemical weapons program and come with “very serious consequences” if Syria were to block the U.N.’s efforts to set up weapons inspections and seize control of the destruction of the weapons.

Carrie Budoff Brown, Burgess Everett and David Rogers contributed to this report.