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BBC MUNDO RADIO
A day after Iran announced a uranium-swapping deal aimed at fending off a U.S.-led effort to impose tough new United Nations sanctions, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Russia, China and European countries have agreed on a series of new punishments for the Iranians if they do not agree to stop enriching uranium.
"This announcement is as convincing an answer to the efforts undertaken by Tehran over the last few days as any we could provide," Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during a hearing on the New START pact the U.S. recently signed with Russia. Clinton said she spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov earlier in the morning about finalizing the draft resolution for the U.N.
Later in the day the U.S. introduced a Security Council resolution that would impose new economic sanctions targeting Iran's Revolutionary Guard -- which oversees the country's nuclear programs -- and other financial, commercial and military agencies with links to the program. The resolution has the backing of fellow veto-wielding Security Council members Russia, China, Britain and France, as well as Germany.
U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said the resolution is aimed at giving the world "greater teeth" to persuade Iran to halt nuclear-related activities that could help Iran build an atomic weapon, especially the enrichment of uranium.
Clinton's announcement, following months of often discouraging negotiations among key members of the U.N. Security Council, comes as the Senate itself is considering new unilateral sanctions on Iran. It was welcomed by Democrats and Republicans on the committee.
"While we acknowledge the sincere efforts of both Turkey and Brazil to find a solution regarding Iran's standoff with the international community over its nuclear program, we are proceeding to rally the international community on behalf of a strong sanctions resolution that will, in our view, send an unmistakable message about what is expected from Iran," Clinton said.
For Brazil and Turkey, which currently hold seats on the Security Council, the deal announced Monday was an expression of trust in Iran that threatened to derail or at least delay the sanctions effort.
The agreement envisions the shipment of 2,646 pounds of low-enriched uranium out of Iran in exchange for a later delivery of 265 pounds of more highly enriched uranium. In a joint declaration with Iran, they called the deal "a starting point to begin cooperation and a positive, constructive move forward among nations."
But neither country wields the veto power of permanent Security Council members.
And there is little or no trust in Iran among the U.S., the European Union and Israel, which saw Monday's accord as the latest in a series of Iranian diplomatic feints seeking to delay Western efforts to end Iran's enrichment of uranium. In the past six months, Tehran has been accelerating its enrichment, one of the key processes in creating an atomic weapon.
Russia and China -- each with a history of seizing on any diplomatic ambiguity to justify their reluctance to punish Iran -- initially signaled cautious support for the pact, fueling speculation that the Iranians had again found a way to thwart Washington and U.S.
"We don't believe it was any accident that Iran agreed to this declaration as we were preparing to move forward in New York," Clinton told senators today with a note of triumph absent from Obama administration statements Monday. "With all due respect to my Turkish and Brazilian friends, the fact that we had Russia on board, we had China on board and that we were moving early this week, namely today, to share the text of that resolution put pressure on Iran, which they were trying to somehow dissipate."
One reason for the Russian and Chinese support may be that there is plenty of ambiguity in Monday's agreement.
It resembled a uranium-swapping deal Iran reached with the West in October, but that it denounced a short time later. Under that earlier agreement, Iran would send low-enriched uranium out of the country and halt its own enrichment activities. In return, it would receive the more highly enriched uranium Tehran says it needs for civilian use but in a form that would be difficult to further enrich, or purify, to the level needed for nuclear weapons.
The October deal itself was considered just a confidence-building measure, a way to delay the so-called nuclear breakout that would mean Iran has joined the atomic-weapons club. And Washington and European allies -- as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency -- have been pushing Iran to come back to that agreement, with the sanctions effort aimed at forcing Iran to do so.
The problem with the latest proposed pact is that loopholes undercut much of its confidence-building potential, while Iran has already moved closer to the breakout threshold during the intervening seven months.
Even a uranium exchange under the October deal "would take place today under very different circumstances," notes the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington group that tracks nuclear proliferation.
Iran's enrichment activities have picked up, and the removal of just 2,646 pounds of low-enriched uranium is "not as attractive" to the West since in October that represented the bulk of its stockpile, which has now grown to almost twice that much, ISIS adds.
At the same time, Iranian scientists since February have been enriching much of the country's current stockpile of uranium hexaflouride gas to a level that is nearly 20 percent U-235 -- the purity level of the uranium would receive under the deal with Turkey and Brazil. But this batch would apparently still be available to purify up to weapons-grade levels of 80 to 90 percent.
Nor does the latest pact ease any of the IAEA's concerns about other aspects of the Iranian nuclear program that indicate that Tehran has military rather than civilian goals in mind.
Another important motivation for Russia and China now may be Israel, which views any Iranian nuclear breakout scenario as a threat. Israel already has little confidence in U.N. efforts to deal with Iran's nuclear program, and if it lost all faith could take matters into its own hands with a military strike as it did against an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a special Cabinet meeting today to discuss the deal. It ended without official comment, but the Jerusalem Post reported that the government sees the deal as "a ruse" that could succeed in delaying sanctions.
The new Security Council unity might be as much a message to Israel as it is to Iran.
