Iran sanctions come with high price

Not that Tehran doesn't deserve a much wider economic embargo, but to pass this resolution at the expense of alienating formerly traditional American allies, may not be worth the long-term price.

The State Department seems to have surmounted the primary loggerheads by convincing Russia and People's China not to veto the new sanctions.

By watering down the draft resolution and making the fourth set of sanctions on Iran less than a debilitating economic embargo, both Moscow and Beijing appear to have signed on. But at what price?

Yet beyond this obvious political calculus in the Security Council we see both NATO-ally Turkey and Latin American friend Brazil, vigorously opposing the Anglo/American/ French effort. Though neither country has a veto to stop the sanctions, they are nonetheless non-permanent members of the Council and wishing to show their political clout, if not really pique.

Just before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put forward a “tough new draft resolution” before the fifteen member Council, Iran in a political hat trick with Turkey and brokered by Brazil's populist President Lula da Silva, agreed to a deal which would see its enriched uranium materials transferred to neighboring Turkey.

The exchange is ironically quite similar to what the Obama team offered Iran last fall.

Now that Brazil's Lula and Turkey's Islamic-lite Premier

Recep Erdogan have, in their estimation defused the nuclear crisis with Iran, neither side looks fondly on what they see with U.S. Secretary of State Clinton deliberately deflating their diplomatic efforts.

What emerges as a problem is that the high octane political hubris in both Brasilia and Ankara has seen both countries tilt decidedly away from the USA and towards Iran and the Third World in general.

Though the mercurial Lula now in the last year of his presidency has long played the populist card internationally through pursuit of an assertive multi-directional foreign policy.

Turkey too, once a firm bulwark of NATO's southern flank over the past decade and increasingly so has defined its identity less as a proudly secular Muslim Republic and bridge between Europe and the Middle East, and more as an Islamic-lite government which happens to be in NATO.

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