UNITED NATIONS — The Obama administration has managed to buy time and may have staved off an embarrassing and politically awkward showdown over Palestinian statehood at the United Nations. It may also have maneuvered itself into a corner.

The U.S. and the rest of the international diplomatic Quartet of Mideast peacemakers endorsed specific timelines for restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks Friday. The U.S. hopes that new talks aimed at drawing a Palestinian state will persuade the Palestinians to put their separate bid for full statehood recognition at the U.N. on hold.

At the same time, committing to those detailed deadlines raises potentially unrealistic hopes for success and locks the administration into a process that will play out as President Barack Obama fights for re-election.

Seeking to avert a confrontation over the Palestinian U.N. bid, the Quartet members — the U.S., EU, U.N. and Russia — issued a statement urging the Israelis and Palestinians to return to long-stalled negotiations and reach an agreement no later than the end of next year. There are interim deadlines for progress on certain issues.

The statement made only passing mention of the Palestinian statehood matter that seized world attention at the annual U.N. General Assembly this week. It also glossed over many of the most difficult issues that the Israelis and Palestinians must face on a tight deadline.

Within 30 days, the Quartet said, the Israelis and Palestinians should agree to an agenda and parameters for peace talks and produce comprehensive proposals on territory and security within three months. The Quartet said it then expected the parties to “have made substantial progress” within six months. To encourage or prod the two sides at a particularly difficult moment, it said Russia would host an international conference at some point in the process.

For the U.S. the Quartet statement was a small victory after intense negotiations that failed to stop Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas from formally seeking statehood recognition for Palestine.

The U.N. route to statehood is vehemently opposed by Israel, which wants a say in how and where the future state is drawn. The United States, as Israel’s strongest ally and chief defender at the U.N., has acted as bulwark. That put the Obama administration at odds with the Abbas government it supports and on the wrong side of public opinion among Arab and Muslim publics Obama has courted.

Yet more problematic could be that the envisioned timeline places what will be the most difficult points of contention on the negotiating table in the middle of the 2012 presidential election.