Julian Borger’s global security blog today looked at how the Turkey-Brazil fuel swap deal with Iran was squashed with little ado by Hillary Clinton and the P5, and new sanctions agreed upon with suprising alacrity on the part of China and Russia:

More striking still was the agreement from Russia and China to push for the package so soon after the news of the Turkish-Brazilian-Iranian deal. In the eyes of Turkey and Brazil and other middle-ranking, emerging powers, all this embodies the inequity of the international system, in which control is concentrated in the hands of a few states who emerged winners of a war 65 years ago. Turkey and Brazil are non-permanent Security Council members with no veto, forever bit players in the global drama, their emollient peacemaking gifts wasted.

From the point of view of the P5, the Turkish-Brazilian intervention was a bungling bid for influence, in which leaders of both countries were suckered by Iranian flattery into thinking the impasse over Iran’s nuclear ambitions was a mere misunderstanding which they could resolve with a little sympathetic mediation.

An article in the Financial Times looks at the two country’s improbable diplomatic balancing act between welcoming the fuel swap and sanctions simultaneously: