US miscalculates on Iran-Turkey-Brazil agreement

The U.S. stance on the Brazil-brokered Turkey-Iran nuclear-fuel-swap agreement may look and feel like a windsock on a Spring day, but in fact it is the result of a simple miscalculation: when they strongly and repeatedly encouraged Brazil and Turkey to engage Iran in conversations about the swap deal, they fully expected these conversations to fail, boosting their drive for “crippling” sanctions by the Security Council.

When it started to look like Turkey and Brazil might actually succeed, Hillary Clinton tried to convince them not to negotiate anything, calling both Lula and Erdogan on the night of Wednesday May 12 to tell them that the U.S. had sure signs that the Iranians would not make any significant concesssions. Erdogan believed her, and cancelled a planned trip to Tehran to avoid embarrassment. Lula did not and went ahead with his year-long plans, forcing Mrs. Clinton to say publicly that the deal would fail in a last-ditch attempt to sabotage it, telling the Brazilian president that he would be made to look like a fool if he failed. On the eve of Saturday 14, when Lula reported the results of his conversation with Khamenei, Turkey’s FM Davutoglu made an urgent telephone call to Erdogan telling him that a deal was about to be closed and that he should come to Tehran to share the merits for it.

The rest is public: Erdogan cancelled the cancellation, the deal was signed, and Clinton was forced to quickly quit haggling about stronger sanctions and to accept whatever the Chinese and the Russians allowed her to accept in order to have them as co-sponsors of a wholly toothless draft sanctions “agreement”, so the U.S. could be seen to turn a failure into a triumph and Clinton could wave around a worthless piece of paper with Russian and Chinese signatures on it. The Russians and the Chinese FMs called their Iranian, Turkish and Brazilian counterparts to reassure them that nothing had changed, the Chinese FM declared that China still favored a negotiated solution and the Russian FM repeated their warning against unilateral U.S. and EU sanctions in violation of international law.

Today, May 27, Russia announced its full support t the BIT agreement. China and France should follow suit soon.

The deal is still on, and the sanctions are dead. Unless, of course, the Iranians take the U.S. bluff at face value and back off out of it. But nothing indicates they will.