Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left, and Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
Even as U.S. officials report steady progress in winning support for a new round of U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran over the nuclear standoff, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prepares to welcome Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — and possibly also Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan — to Tehran for talks on a compromise. Are the two processes working at cross-purposes? Not necessarily.
Washington's U.N. ambassador Susan Rice said Thursday, May 13, that Lula's visit was "not impeding" progress toward a sanctions resolution, and other senior U.S. officials told reporters that the Brazilian's visit should be viewed as "the last big shot at engagement" with Iran. But the attempts by Brazil and Turkey to broker a new deal are based on strong opposition to further sanctions, which they believe will do no good. And then there are China and Russia, which have always held the key cards in the diplomatic game by virtue of their Security Council veto power and their close ties with Iran — and which share Turkey and Brazil's skepticism of the value of sanctions in resolving the dispute.
Still, that doesn't mean Moscow and Beijing won't vote for any new measures. "I hope that the Brazilian President will succeed," Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said Friday. "This may be the last chance before sanctions are adopted in the U.N. Security Council." European Union foreign-policy chief Catherine Ashton met with Chinese President Hu Jintao two weeks ago to, as she put it, "reinforce the message that we need a twin-track approach. Sanctions alone will not solve the problem, but to solve the problem, you need sanctions." The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded that it "does not oppose the twin-track strategy." Under that rubric, it could conceivably support some new measures, although carefully targeted and never of such magnitude that they close the door to dialogue. A negotiated compromise, rather than sanctions, is the goal of China's strategy — and to get there, it's positioning itself somewhere between Washington's bad cop and Lula's good cop.
China's stance suits Washington, at least as far as sanctions are concerned. The U.S. had threatened tough measures if Iran continued to defy Security Council demands that it suspend uranium enrichment pending resolution of transparency concerns over its program. Although any measures likely to pass will be significantly watered down, support for some kind of sanctions from Tehran's key trading partners in Beijing and Moscow would send a powerful message. It's the negotiated compromise that might present difficulties for Washington.
Lula is hoping to revive a new version of last October's deal negotiated with the Western powers and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), under which Iran would exchange a substantial portion of its existing enriched-uranium stockpile for nuclear fuel to power the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), which produces medical isotopes. Although Ahmadinejad had initially championed that deal as a great victory for Iran, he quickly retracted when it came under a hail of domestic criticism from both conservatives and reformists, spurred by Iran's intense postelection power struggle. Iran demanded to renegotiate the terms of the agreement, insisting that the exchange of reactor fuel for uranium occur on its territory, but the Western powers insisted the deal was off unless Iran agreed to immediately ship out the uranium.
The Western goal, primarily, was to remove most of Iran's stockpile, which could potentially be turned into material for a single bomb if it were secretly reprocessed. The TRR deal was viewed as a step toward an agreement under which Iran would relinquish the right to enrich uranium. But Iran is headed in a different direction, hoping to satisfy concerns over its intent in order to continue developing a civilian nuclear infrastructure that would put weapons capability within easy reach should it decide to build a bomb. And while Russia, China and much of the rest of the international community will demand that Iran satisfy IAEA concerns over the nature of its program, they don't share Washington's opposition to Iran's enriching uranium as part of its nuclear program.
U.S. officials hope Iran will accept a fuel-swap deal on terms acceptable to the West, but Tehran is clearly ramping up its diplomatic efforts to resuscitate a version of that deal less likely to be acceptable to Washington. Brazil and Turkey are reportedly proposing that Iran accept a compromise under which it agrees to the fuel swap on the territory of a friendly country like Turkey. Officials in Ankara said Prime Minister Erdogan would go to Tehran if there were a chance of concluding a deal and that the Turks were talking to both the U.S. and Iran to assess that possibility.
Iran, for its part, appears to be entertaining the possibility of accepting some new version of the TRR deal — the issue is being widely discussed in Iranian media right now, with a number of conservative voices associated with Ahmadinejad supporting such a move. While some Iranian analysts see it as simply tactical jockeying to take the wind out of the sanctions effort, others suggest Ahmadinejad may have embraced the approach to the nuclear issue favored by his pragmatic conservative and reformist critics of not relinquishing Iran's nuclear program but proceeding at a pace and in a manner that avoids creating a crisis with the West. Ahmadinejad may also be feeling more politically secure now that the challenge of the Green opposition presents less of an immediate threat. Those factors might make him more amenable to accepting a new version of the TRR deal, which, after all, was simply an interim confidence-building agreement between Iran and its critics.
Still, it remains to be seen whether Tehran and Washington can agree on new terms. Even the deal struck — and then abandoned — late last year did not deal directly with the U.N. Security Council demands whose defiance by Iran brought sanctions in the first place. So the new sanctions effort at the U.N. is unlikely to break the stalemate. It's very probable that the price of support from Russia and China for any new sanctions will be that the U.S. renew its own efforts to seek a diplomatic solution — and also send a message to Tehran to do the same.