Brazil’s Iran Diplomacy Worries U.S. Officials

As President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva heads to Tehran this weekend to make what many Western diplomats consider a last-ditch attempt at persuading Iran to temper its nuclear ambitions, officials in Washington have expressed concern that the effort could backfire, helping the Islamic republic to block — or at least delay — the United States and its allies from imposing sanctions.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has warned that Mr. Ahmadinejad might use his talks with Brazil to stall for time in order to move Iran closer to developing a nuclear weapon. “We will not get any serious response out of the Iranians until after the Security Council acts,” she said Friday.

Brazil opposes sanctions as ineffective and likely to intensify the conflict. As a developing country that has defended its own nuclear aspirations against international pressure, Brazil strongly identifies with Iran.

Celso Amorim, the Brazilian foreign minister who represented the country at the United Nations when the United States used inconclusive evidence to build a case against Iraq, has described this weekend’s talks as an effort to prevent that from happening again.

But the effort is hardly a selfless one, analysts say, arguing that Mr. da Silva sees the Iran talks as a way to stand against American dominance and advance Brazil’s emergence as a major player on the international stage.

In that new role — which rests largely on Brazil’s position as South America’s largest economy — the enormously popular Mr. da Silva has challenged the United States on everything from trade and climate change to last year’s coup in Honduras to Washington’s longstanding embargo against Cuba.

But the dispute over Iran has generated an unusual amount of friction, and Brazilian officials worried that failing to achieve progress in this weekend’s talks could cast Mr. da Silva as an amateur and scuttle his country’s pursuit of a permanent seat on the Security Council. Critics in Brazil have also questioned why Mr. da Silva has embraced Iran in recent months at the risk of alienating the United States.

“There is a sense in Washington that a lot of this is a product of the tremendous confidence that Lula has in himself, that he believes he is a wizard that can perform miracles and accomplish what others have tried and failed to do,” said Michael Shifter, the president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy research group in Washington.

On Friday, that confidence was on display when Mr. da Silva told reporters in Moscow that his chances of success were “9.9” out of 10. At the same news conference, Russia’s president, Dimitri A. Medvedev, put the Brazilian president’s chances at 30 percent.

Earlier in the week, Mr. da Silva scolded the world’s most powerful nations on Brazilian television, saying that none of the heads of state pushing hardest for sanctions had spoken directly with Mr. Ahmadinejad.

“Why doesn’t Obama call Ahmadinejad,” Mr. da Silva asked, “or Sarkozy, or Angela Merkel, or Gordon Brown,” he said of the leaders of France, Germany and, until recently, of Britain, three of the countries that strongly support sanctions against Iran.

“People aren’t talking,” the Brazilian president added. “I’m going there to talk.”

Publicly, the Obama administration has wished Brazil luck in the talks, though officials add that they are hardly optimistic about the outcome. One senior State Department official said Iran was likely to show the same intransigence it had shown in previous negotiations.

“This is Brazil’s one big play,” said another American official. “If it fails, the Security Council will move forward with sanctions, and they will expect Brazil to be there with them.”

At the United Nations, some diplomats said the trip by Mr. da Silva had cast a shadow over the talks since they started in early April, because it gave both China and Russia, which have shown little real enthusiasm for sanctions, reason to continue emphasizing the diplomatic track.

The text of the resolution could go to the full 15 members of the Security Council in the next few weeks, diplomats said. Since Brazil holds one of the rotating seats on the Council, its support for sanctions is crucial for the kind of unanimous vote that the Western powers want.

The disagreements over Iran were evident at the end of March, when the United Nations convened a meeting to focus on rebuilding Haiti.

During a news conference at the end of the meeting, Mrs. Clinton hailed the international support for sanctions on Iran. But Mr. Amorim, Brazil’s foreign minister, made it clear that his country believed negotiations would be more effective. Mrs. Clinton shot back, saying endless talks had failed to get Iran’s attention. France’s foreign minister echoed her comments.

Then Haiti’s president, René Préval, interrupted, saying, “Do I need to develop a nuclear program so that we come back to talking about Haiti?”

The differences over Iran aside, American and Brazilian officials said the dispute had not stopped their two governments from reaching new agreements in other areas, including the first military cooperation pact in more than three decades, and a deal that ended a longstanding dispute over American subsidies to cotton farmers.

Matias Spektor, a Brazilian scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that nuclear nonproliferation was a particularly delicate issue for Brazil because, in the face of American opposition in the 1970s, it established a secret effort that developed the capacity to enrich uranium.

Brazil did not sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty for another decade, Mr. Spektor said. The country’s latest Constitution prohibits the use of nuclear materials for military purposes.

Mr. Spektor recalled a comment by a high-ranking Brazilian diplomat who told him, “When Brazil looks at Iran it doesn’t only see Iran, it sees Brazil too.”

Julia Sweig, also of the Council on Foreign Relations, said Brazil was exercising its own version of what America often did.

“Americans believe that only they can cast themselves halfway around the world to refashion events on the ground, and expect the international community to defer,” she said. “Brazil, too, and for similar reasons, is motivated to insert itself on an issue seemingly beyond its natural interest.”