Former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain serves as the Middle East envoy for the group, which is made up of the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations.
Ambassador Julie Finley, the United States' envoy to the group, said the Russian stance could undermine stability throughout the Caucasus, a region scattered with dangerous ethnic conflicts.
Wu Dawei, a Chinese envoy, said working groups would meet before that to discuss technical details for the North's next steps: declaring and disabling its nuclear programs.
The envoys said their group, known as the quartet, had taken "positive note of the announced intention" of the withdrawal schemes.
China's envoy, Hu Xiaodi, told the group that American plans for a missile shield make the militarization of space "an imminent danger," and urged countries to bar "all space-based weapons and all weapons attacking outer space targets from earth".
While the White House has worked behind the scenes to head off the Palestinian campaign, Mr. Obama himself has stayed conspicuously offstage, leaving the effort to State Department diplomats and to Tony Blair, the special envoy to the diplomatic group known as the Quartet, which comprises the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.
Several years of sometimes rancorous debate in an open-ended working group -- envoys call it the "never-ending working group" -- have failed to bring any voluntary changes in membership.
The overriding questions are whether it can agree on how to share out power and whether it can translate that agreement into effective mechanisms for administration inside Afghanistan.James Dobbins, the American envoy to non-Taliban groups in Afghanistan, is optimistic.
"We have agreed to try and negotiate free market access for least developed countries," he said, adding that envoys to the trade group have said they would discuss how to enact such changes.
A1 British Envoys Rebuke Blair A group of 52 former ambassadors and senior government officials sent a letter criticizing Prime Minister Tony Blair for his unflinching support for the Bush administration's approach to postwar Iraq and to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"You don't know the truth, or you don't want to know it," Mr. Micheletti angrily told a group of envoys from the Organization of American States, the United States, Canada and several Latin American governments who were in Tegucigalpa, Honduras's capital, this week on an unsuccessful mission to solve the impasse.
