CAIRO, Egypt – Iran is running out of friends and allies in the international community through its stand off with the International Atomic Energy Agency over processing uranium for nuclear weapons.

In a last-ditch effort yesterday to salvage negotiations at the nuclear agency in Vienna, the Associated Press quoted an anonymous diplomat as saying that Iran has privately offered to suspend large-scale enrichment for two years, but only if it retains the right to enrich on an experimental basis.

That offer appears to be in response to negotiations with Moscow over recent months. But yesterday Russia’s foreign minister denied that his country was offering any new deal for Tehran.

Meanwhile, Vice President Cheney speaking before the largest pro-Israel lobby in America, said there would be “meaningful consequences” if the country continued to defy the world. Even China’s Foreign Ministry yesterday urged Iran to cooperate with the IAEA.

China is believed to have provided yellowcake to Iran in the mid-1990s for test purposes.

High stakes negotiations opened at the IAEA in Vienna on Monday regarding a proposal to refer Iran’s violation of the nuclear nonproliferation Treaty to the U.N. Security Council. Those negotiations – not to mention a last minute Russian offer to enrich Iran’s uranium on its soil – have failed to yield a compromise.

Yesterday Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, demanded the international community compensate his country for their suspension of uranium processing in 2003. Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Ministry warned Europeans not to take America’s side in their dispute.

That tough talk was matched in Washington by the vice president. “The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course the international community is prepared to impose meaningful consequences,” Mr. Cheney said before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee yesterday. He also stressed, as the president has, that “all options are on the table,” diplomatic code for possible military action.

While that message has been repeatedly delivered by the president and senior officials in recent months with regards to Iran’s enrichment of uranium, the timing of the vice president’s speech is significant. Less than two miles away in Washington, Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was meeting with Secretary of State Rice at Foggy Bottom.

Mr. Lavrov and his government have since January played good cop to America and Europe’s bad cop role with Iran. The IAEA has already technically voted to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council, but nonetheless Russia has tried hard to avoid the showdown and launched its own negotiations with the Iranians offering Iran a deal that would allow some small scale experimental research if it agreed to heed by its earlier agreement to suspend this activity on a large scale.

But Mr. Lavrov yesterday said publicly that his government had not offered a last minute proposal to Iran. “There is no compromise new Russian proposal,” he said. “All our contacts with Iran, with European troika, with the United States, with China, and with others, including the director general of IAEA, were about finding a way to implement the February decision by the board of governors of IAEA.” Russia is not exactly a neutral player in this drama. Throughout the 1990s, its scientists were loaned to Iran to help rebuild the Bushehr nuclear reactor decimated in the Iran-Iraq war.

President Bush last month offered his public support for the Russian proposal and the role it was playing in the talks. Yesterday Ms. Rice reiterated that view. But she also said, “There needs to be a way to provide for civil nuclear power that does not have a proliferation risk. And we think that both in the way that Russia has structured the Bushehr reactor deal and in this new proposal that this could be achieved.”

On Monday, an undersecretary of state for political affairs, Nicholas Burns, told delegates at the IAEA session in Vienna that Iran had crossed “an international red line,” when it began reprocessing uranium on a mass scale in January.

The Bush administration is already viewing some alternatives to the efficacy of diplomacy or sanctions. Last month, Ms. Rice announced that America was making $75 million available for opposition groups in Iran. The submissions for that grant money are due on July 31. A State Department official yesterday said that no recipients could be affiliated in any way with the regime or a group listed as a foreign terrorist organization.

This last criterion would rule out any overt funding for the People’s Mujahadin of Iran, a group that aligned in the 1980s with Saddam Hussein and has launched violent attacks on police stations and other government officials in Iran.