What happened on Monday in Tehran was so new, so alien to the categories we use to divide the world into easily digestible fragments, that there was bound to be some confusion and misunderstanding.
After all, how were we to interpret the news that Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had spent 18 hours sitting down with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and had struck a deal with him, a deal that involved Iran handing some of its uranium to Turkey in exchange for refined reactor fuel?
Brazil and Turkey managed to accomplish Monday exactly what the United States and its allies had tried and failed to do last October, a swap of potential weapon-making uranium for safer reactor-fuel stuff – in fact, they had struck a deal on even better terms, assuming (and it is a large assumption) that Iran actually carried out its end. But doing it involved sidestepping the U.S.-led sanctions negotiations, entering friendly negotiations on good-faith terms in the midst of a hostile confrontation with a country the major powers fear.
Friday, the Brazilian-Turkish deal seemed to have been snubbed by these powers when the United States persuaded the United Nations Security Council, including China and Russia, to impose another round of symbolically loaded, but not very punishing, sanctions on Iran. There were angry noises from Ankara and Brasilia.
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