Nuclear Test

Although the American ambassador to Brazil, Thomas Shannon, tried to restore calm by denying it, the Iranian issue has provoked an open and direct confrontation between Brasilia and Washington.

Even as President Lula, Chancellor Celso Amorim, and [Foreign Affairs] Advisor Marco Aurélio Garcia try to celebrate the agreement with Iran and Turkey to trade low-enriched uranium for fuel, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are mobilizing the U.N. Security Council to ignore the agreement and impose a new round of sanctions against the Iranian regime.

It’s a moment of high tension. Though the United States has gained the unconditional support of France and Britain, Brazil is still struggling to prevent the other two members of the council from rallying behind sanctions: Russia and China, which are considered by Hillary to be pro-sanctions and by Amorim to be against them. The world waits anxiously for the stance the Russians and Chinese will take: directly, without intermediaries or interpretations.

On top of this lurks a considerable danger: whether Iran will decide to build an atomic bomb. Did you ever imagine that such a thing would fall into the hands of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad? Not only the Middle East, but the whole world would come to incalculable risk.

The Iran-Brazil-Turkey agreement, as Amorim never tires of repeating, was drawn up along the terms that the United States and its followers themselves proposed to the Iranians at the end of last year. At the time, it came to nothing. Now, with Brazilian intervention, there has been an advance.

The problem, as Hillary Clinton says, lies in two questions that are not specified in the terms of the agreement: the ability of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) to carry out inspections — a fundamental security consideration; and the declaration (or threat?) by an Iranian minister that, with or without the agreement, Iran will continue enriching uranium to 20 percent. In other words, he implicitly bolstered the sense that the agreement is an accessory and does not eliminate the threat of the bomb.

As Ambassador Shannon, who finds himself in the middle of the hurricane, has said, the Brazilian effort has merit, but the result “is not enough” to eliminate doubts and fears.

Brazil has gotten involved out of a desire to occupy a leadership role on the world scene and ended up at odds with the United States. Perhaps the whole idea was to get into a fight with the big boys in order to feel like one of them.