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On Thursday a big meeting involving the United States, Russia, The United Kingdom, France, China and Germany is supposed to be held in New York to discuss another round of sanctions on Iran for its alleged noncompliance in coming clean about its nuclear program. Washington had spent the past two weeks increasing its rhetoric against Iran and was intending for this meeting to add another layer of pressure on the clerical regime in Tehran.
But the Russians have quite thoroughly sabotaged those plans. In a rather blase manner, the Russian delegation announced on Wednesday that the six-nation meeting on Iran had not been included in Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s U.N. General Assembly agenda. A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman earlier said, “We see no ‘fire alarm’ which would require us to put off other things in the extremely busy week of the U.N. General Assembly and meet in emergency (session) on the Iranian nuclear problem.” In other words, the Russians simply couldn’t be bothered by the issue.
It is no surprise that the Russians are attempting to scuttle U.S. policy on Iran. After all, playing defense for Tehran in the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) requires very little effort on Moscow’s part to take the steam out of Washington’s pressure campaign. Compared to finishing Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant or shipping S-300 air defense systems to Iran, blocking votes in the UNSC is a low-cost way for Russia to prevent a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement that would allow the United States to free itself from the Middle East theater and focus on a Russian threat in Eurasia.
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