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By David Gardner in London

The apparent breakthrough Turkey and Brazil have negotiated with Iran to export the majority of its stock of low enriched uranium to Turkey in exchange for the western powers supplying medical isotopes for Tehran’s experimental reactor could dissolve into yet another false diplomatic dawn in the nuclear stand-off between Iran’s theocrats and the West. Yet, it might just be a triumph that prevents an armed conflict with Iran.

Were, say, Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, as it has threatened to do, that could trigger a convulsive chain of reprisals across an arc stretching from eastern Afghanistan to the Strait of Hormuz – funnel for nearly half the world’s oil exports – up the western shore of the Gulf into Iraq and across to the Levant including, of course, Israel. Hence the urgency of President Barack Obama’s policy of engagement with Iran, and the preparation of new UN sanctions as an alternative to war.

Brazil and Turkey, newly confident and semi-detached western allies, are both temporary members of the Security Council and, if this works, will have demonstrated that the UN body is not just the P5 – the permanent members and nuclear powers with veto rights: the US, Russia, China, France and the UK – but the G20 too. Both Brazil under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan have started trying to punch their regional and international weight.

Lula, soon to step down as Brazil’s president, has only recently taken to the international stage, reflecting Brazil’s confident emergence as an economic powerhouse. Turkey’s activist foreign policy in the wider Middle East – baptised “zero problems with the neighbours” – is designed both to reassert its role as a regional power and transform a combustible regional stalemate that does not look as though it can long endure without explosion. The conflict over Iran’s nuclear ambitions is but one part of this stalemate but is recognised by everyone in the region as a potentially deadly trigger.

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