In outlining his four-point initiative for resolving the Iran crisis to EIR’s May 15 Roundtable, former Turkish Foreign Minister and former Prime Minister of Türkiye, Ahmet Davutoglu, proposed that the “Tehran Agreement” signed by Türkiye, Brazil and Iran in May 2010 could be a viable model for resolving the nuclear part of the Iranian crisis today. “According to this agreement, enriched uranium would have been deposited in Türkiye in exchange for fuel for a peaceful nuclear program in Iran,” he explained. Davutoglu, then Foreign Minister, together with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan and Brazilian President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, had negotiated the agreement.
The text of that Tehran Agreement was handed personally to President Donald Trump by Lula da Silva, when he met Trump at the White House on May 7, Lula reported to journalists at his post-meeting press conference.
Lula recounted his role in securing the agreement: that he had gone to Tehran in 2010 to meet personally with the then-Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei, with the Iranian Assembly and with many members of Congress, and had then “spent an entire day talking with [then-Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad to convince them that Brazil wanted to help them enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, just as Brazil does, in accordance with our Constitution.”
Both Davutoglu and Lula report that President Barack Obama had sent a letter to the Brazilian and Turkish heads of state before it was signed, supporting the terms of the agreement, but then rejected it when Iran agreed to it.
Lula recounted the pressures from Western powers that he not visit Iran to reach any such agreement. He got calls from President Obama, from then-German chancellor Angela Merkel; “everyone was against me going to Iran, saying that Iran didn’t keep its word.” When he stopped in Moscow on his way to Iran, then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told him: “Hey Lula, Obama called here asking me to convince you not to go, because the Iranians aren’t trustworthy.” He continued onto Qatar; “when I arrived in Qatar, the Emir told me the same thing: “Hey Lula, Hillary Clinton called here asking me to convince you not to go to Iran.”
And after the agreement was signed, “Obama and the European Union decided to increase the sanctions against Iran,” he reported, which sank the agreement. Why did they do that? “Perhaps because the country that had made the deal was a third-world country—a country that isn’t part of the elite group of nations—so how did those poor human beings manage to achieve something we couldn’t?,” Lula ironized.
As for President Trump, Lula reported that he had told Trump that the 2010 agreement “is much better than the one they made a while back” and asked him to read i Trump had responded he would read it that night.
Did he? There’s a chance: the agreement is short.