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In 2010, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan and his Brazilian counterpart, Lula da Silva, scored a major diplomatic victory. After 18 hours of marathon negotiations, Turkey and Brazil succeeded in getting Iran's acceptance for a nuclear swap deal. Only 8 months earlier, the same government in Tehran had rejected a similar deal in negotiations with the U.S., Russia and France. But to Turkey and Brazil's surprise, their diplomatic victory was rejected by the Barack Obama administration. Three years later, the U.S. and Iran were back at the negotiating table and this time, a historic interim deal was reached.
But why did diplomacy succeed in 2013? Why did the same American administration, that rejected the Turkish brokered deal in 2010, shift in favor of diplomacy in 2013? This essay will shed light on some of the factors that rendered the nuclear standoff with Iran ripe for a diplomatic solution.
Erdoğan and Lula's Brief Moment of Triumph
In May 2010, the Obama administration was finally on the verge of passing a UN Security Council resolution sanctioning Iran's nuclear activities. But at the last moment, Washington miscalculated the diplomatic skills of two up-and-coming states - Brazil and Turkey - and their desire to demonstrate their ability to take on diplomatic challenges usually reserved for the great powers. Erdoğan and Lula proved that it was wrong to assume that diplomacy with Iran was pointless.
On May 15, 2010, Lula da Silva traveled to Iran with an entourage of some three hundred Brazilian businessmen. Soon thereafter, Erdoğan and his energetic Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, joined Lula in an effort to convince Iran to ship out its low-enriched uranium (LEU). Two days later, Lula and Erdoğan stunned the U.S. and the world - they had a deal.
Contrary to expectations, and arguably to the hopes of some, they succeeded in convincing the Iranian government to agree to a deal based on the American benchmarks, where 1,200 kilograms of Iranian LEU would be sent out in one shipment and Iran would receive fuel pads for its Tehran Research Reactor roughly twelve months later. For a moment, it looked as if diplomacy had succeeded after all. But what could have been viewed as a diplomatic breakthrough - with Iran blinking first and succumbing to American demands - was instead treated as an effort to sabotage the new and higher objective of imposing sanctions.