Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan flew to Iran in 2010 and persuaded the Islamic Republic to ship 1,200 kilograms of its enriched uranium—which accounted for roughly 70 percent of its stockpile—to Turkey in exchange for fuel rods to be used for a medical research reactor. The terms of that deal, signed by the foreign ministers of Iran, Turkey, and Brazil in Tehran on May 17, 2010, required Iran to deposit their enriched uranium in Turkey, where it would remain under IAEA observation.
“We went there to convince Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei,” Lula recently said of the deal, referring to Iran’s president and supreme leader at the time. “And after two days, we reached an agreement, one that was based on a handwritten letter that Barack Obama sent me.”
Though approved by President Obama, Lula’s efforts were then rapidly thwarted by the Israel lobby and their allies at Hillary Clinton’s State Department, which successfully lobbied Congress to levy sanctions against Iran, scuttling any deal. Had the Obama administration accepted those terms, the nuclear question that drives Israeli policy—and therefore U.S. policy—toward Iran, might have been resolved even without the Iran nuclear deal that Obama secured in 2015 and that President Donald Trump withdrew from three years later. Instead, Obama’s diplomacy with Iran was criticized by the Iran hawks and the Iranian nuclear issue, never fully resolved, became a pretext for the ongoing war, which will enter its fourth month this week.
On May 7, one day after meeting Trump at the White House, Lula held a press conference at the Brazilian embassy in Washington and told reporters he had handed Trump a physical copy of that aborted 2010 agreement. “For the second time,” he said, “I presented him with the agreement that Brazil and Turkey brokered regarding the Iranian nuclear issue.” The terms now under negotiation, mediated by Pakistan, bear a close resemblance to what Lula handed Trump.
Trump’s most recent stated preference is for Iran’s enriched uranium to be destroyed in place, inside Iran, or else “at another acceptable location,” under IAEA supervision. Drop Site News reported last week, citing a senior Iranian official, that although Tehran will not consider nuclear issues until after a first-phase agreement to end the war is signed, Iran would be willing to suspend enrichment above 3.6 percent for 10 years and dilute its existing higher-enriched uranium inside the country under international supervision, terms close to what Trump is now offering.
It is too early to say whether the emerging framework will hold, and too murky to assess what role, if any, Lula’s presentation of the 2010 document played in Trump’s change of mind. But the trajectory of the negotiations has moved toward Lula’s long-preferred terms regardless, away from maximalist demands for dismantlement and unconditional surrender of Iran’s stockpile, and toward the supervised, sovereignty-preserving framework he carried to Iran in 2010 and to the Oval Office earlier this month.
Lula has spent his third term positioning Brazil as a Latin American power capable of acting independently of a regional order defined by Washington—championing BRICS expansion, promoting de-dollarization, condemning the U.S.-backed Gaza genocide—gestures that have earned him confrontations with Israel and a recalled ambassador, but little else. On Iran, for the first time, Lula may now finally have a material outcome to show for his foreign policy efforts.
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It would only be the latest reversal of fortune for the seasoned Brazilian leader, who had arrived in Washington facing the most serious challenge to his power in years. After months of economic struggle, a running conflict with the Trump administration over tariffs and the imprisonment of Trump-family ally Jair Bolsonaro, and a corruption scandal involving Banco Master—one of Brazil’s most elite banks, found to have funneled millions to the families of allied politicians including Lula’s chief justice and chief censor Alexandre de Moraes—polls showed the Brazilian president tied or trailing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro ahead of elections in October.
Three weeks later, the crisis has largely inverted for Lula. The Banco Master corruption scandal, which had seemingly solidified his defeat in the upcoming election, has now instead consumed his leading opponent, with viral reporting by The Intercept Brasil revealing that Flávio Bolsonaro had solicited more than $10 million from Banco Master’s now-arrested owner, Daniel Vorcaro, to fund a hagiographic film about his father starring Jim Caviezel. The Trump and Lula governments, meanwhile, are now reportedly close to resolving their tariff dispute, with Brazil’s Minister of Development and Trade Elias Rosa saying on May 20 that the two countries are “moving toward an agreement.” And the Wall Street Journal reported days after Lula’s visit, that the Trump administration was preparing to temporarily reduce tariffs on beef imports by executive order, a major win for Brazil’s beef lobby, which had urged Lula to raise the issue with Trump.
If Lula’s 2010 proposal shapes U.S. diplomacy with Iran, it would be only his latest political victory, and could prove his most impactful yet.
