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t is thus more accurate to say that Russia is in an alignment, not an alliance, with Iran and Syria. Depending upon competing priorities and the vicissitudes of world politics, Putin will tack this way today, that way tomorrow. In the end, however, he will never sell out Tehran and Damascus in order to win compliments in Washington; if forced to choose, he will always side with the former against the latter, and will certainly leave them in no doubt that Russia is their most dependable friend in the United Nations Security Council.

It is this fact that makes Russia a revisionist power in the Middle East and the permanent adversary of the United States.

Whatever his preferences in an ideal world, in the here and now his goal is less to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon than to garner as much power and influence for Russia as he can. He is supportive enough of the United States and its key European partners to maintain credibility with them. On the key issue of stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, he is never so supportive as to be taken for granted.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told his Russian counterpart on Thursday that any oil-for-goods deal Moscow might strike with Iran could run afoul of U.S. sanctions.

"Secretary Lew reiterated our serious concerns regarding reports of a possible deal between Russia and Iran involving oil-for-goods," a Treasury representative said in a statement after Lew met with Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov.

Iran has about $100 billion in foreign exchange assets around the world, of which it will be able to draw $4.2 billion under last year's nuclear agreement with six world powers, a senior U.S. administration official said on Friday.

The official reiterated U.S. concerns about a recent Reuters report that Iran and Russia are negotiating an oil-for-goods swap worth $1.5 billion a month. Such a deal would significantly boost Iran's oil exports.

The administration official said it would not be good business to begin re-engaging with Iran now, because sanctions still made it very difficult to carry out transactions with the country and receive or make payments.

Vladimir Putin is also edging toward a deal with Iran that would make a mockery of the P5+1 interim agreement with Iran. News reports confirm that ”Russia could exchange nonmonetary goods for up to 500,000 barrels of Iranian petroleum each day under the possible arrangement, which may ultimately pave the way for as much as $20 billion in trade, insiders told [Reuters] for a Wednesday report.

The recent reports prompted Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) to write to President Obama on Monday telling him, “If Iran moves forward with this effort to evade U.S. sanctions and violate the terms of oil sanctions relief provided for in JPA, the United States should respond by re-instating the crude oil sanctions, rigorously enforcing significant reductions in global purchases of Iranian crude oil, and sanctioning any violations to the fullest extent of the law.”

Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a sanctions guru, is quoted as saying, “If Washington can’t stop this deal, it could serve as a signal to other countries that the United States won’t risk major diplomatic disputes at the expense of the sanctions regime.”

Government technocrats and bankers in Tehran, during interviews over the past week, voiced astonishment over just how much damage the U.S-led sanctions campaign on Iran has had on their economy over the past three years.

They said they didn’t believe European countries would back up Washington’s economic threats, due to the energy supplies and corporate profits they stood to lose.

These Iranians said they had been mistaken, and that Russia should be worried.

“If you look at this rationally there no reason why Russians would want to undermine the [nuclear] talks in any way but . . . at this point you can’t count on him [Putin] making calculations of cost and benefit,” says Robert Einhorn, a former US negotiator with Iran.

Fyodor Lukyanov, a foreign policy expert in Moscow, says he expects a tightening of Russian relations with Iran and more intensive supplies of arms to Syria, where Moscow has been propping up the Assad regime.

“Russia will see no reason at all to ease US troubles in the Middle East,” Mr Lukyanov predicts.

“We wouldn’t like to use these talks as an element of the game of raising the stakes, taking into account the sentiments in some European capitals, Brussels and Washington,” Mr. Ryabkov was quoted as saying. “But if they force us into that, we will take retaliatory measures here as well.

some experts on Iran sanctions said they would not be surprised if the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, took steps to revive delayed plans for a barter deal with the Iranians that would enable them to sell more oil, undercutting the pressure exerted on Iran by Western sanctions.

Iran’s foreign minister arrived in Moscow today to do a diplomatic victory lap with his Russian allies over America’s withering influence in the Middle East.

Historians will look back at the present moment with astonishment that Iran so skillfully outwitted the West. They will note the breathtaking naiveté of American and European officials who let a brutal theocracy undermine Western interests throughout the Middle East. At one of Iran’s most vulnerable moments, America threw the mullahs a life-line; an ill-conceived nuclear deal coupled with a complete inability to stop Syria, Iran’s closest ally, from continuing to slaughter en masse. Western diplomats speak optimistically of a deal with Syria in Geneva, while the region’s thugs use force of arms to impose their will.

Zarif’s visit to Russia comes days after a trip to Lebanon where he honored master Hezbollah terrorist Imad Mughniyeh. Does a “moderate” pay homage to one of the most ruthless terrorists in modern history, a man who killed hundreds of American and Jews around the world? Is there anything Zarif could do to forfeit his credentials as a “moderate”? Apparently not.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met Monday in Paris to plan for Syrian peace talks later this month.  The men could not agree on inviting Iran to join those talks.

"A country that has had a long-term relationship with Assad and with Syria has a huge ability to be able to have an impact if they want to have the right impact.  And the right impact, as has been decided by many nations, is to implement the Geneva One communique," Kerry said.

"We really are wasting an opportunity and setting ourselves up for failure by trying to either keep them out or condition their place at the table," Leverett said. "That just will not work."

debkafile’s Washington sources report that President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were shocked into realizing that their outreach to Tehran and Moscow may have gone too far when they saw both acting off their own bat on the most critical and burning Middle East affair without bothering to consult or even inform the US administration.

Tehran and Moscow persuaded the UN Secretary to take the initiative for the first time on a hot-button issue without regard for the US bar on participation in the Syria peace conference. They argued that the Americans would not make a fuss for fear of upsetting the nuclear accord on the very day that Iran began upholding the deal.

At the same time Secretary of State John Kerry is warning that terrorists are fueling unrest across Iraq and Syria, he is now reaching out to a country his own department for decades has singled out as one of the prime sponsors of terrorism.

"You have a forest fire that's raging and you're calling in some of the arsonists ... to discuss the best way to put it out," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group. "It's mind-numbing."

Sawsan Jabri, spokeswoman for the anti-Assad, U.S.-based Syrian Expatriates Organization, cited Iran's continued support of the Syrian government "with weaponry and fighters" in questioning Kerry's comments.

In a further sign of improving relations between Tehran and the West, Britain and Iran have re-established diplomatic ties that were broken in 2011.The decision was reached on the sidelines of nuclear negotiations in Geneva that include the United States, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany.

The agreement represents a failure, not a triumph, of diplomacy.

The Geneva deal, in short, did not address the nuclear threat at all.

while the Obama administration maintains that the military option is still on the table in case Iran does not comply with the new agreement, that threat is becoming less and less credible.

THE GOOD

1. Iran has to roll back the most weapons-ready elements of its nuclear program.

2. Iran agreed to freeze many, but not all, of its nuclear activities.

Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor of Kayhan newspaper and voice of the Supreme Leader, bragged to the Wall Street Journal that “if the right to enrich is accepted, which it has been, then everything that we have wanted has been realized.”

The administration is already going into a full-court press against further sanctions.

Obama’s trail of national security fumbles, as Dan Twining recounts, undercut his “trust me” appeal: A diplomatic “reset” with Russia that has freed that country to directly undermine U.S. interests by arming Bashar al-Assad’s regime, blocking sanctions against both Syria and Iran at the U.N. Security Council, blackmailing Ukraine into walking away from the path to Europe and deepening the Russian army’s occupation of Georgia; A self-declared “pivot” to Asia that has left many of America’s friends and allies doubting whether the commitment of resources and high-level attention matches the country’s rhetoric; A sleepwalking approach to the Arab Awakening that has accomplished the neat trick of alienating both allied Arab regimes and the Arab street, earning America even more enmity (if that was possible) across the political spectrum in pivotal countries like Egypt; A diplomatic agreement on Syria that transformed Assad from the target of military attack to a partner in peace even as his army continued killing his fellow citizens, making a mockery of U.S. “red lines” and leaving America’s allies incredulous; and A diplomatic agreement with Iran that does little to diminish its latent nuclear capacity or its state sponsorship of terrorism, producing the sharpest break in American relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia in a generation.

Speaking in Washington on Thursday, [Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron] Dermer said negotiations in Vienna between Iran and the P5+1 – the US, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany – risked leaving Iran “a threshold nuclear power” that would move them back from “two months, where they are today, to maybe two or three months further” from a nuclear  weapon. . . . Also addressing  the forum at the Mandarin Oriental hotel, Representative Ed Royce (R-CA), chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, spoke of what successful policy on Iran might look like. “Failure is anything short of having a verifiable way to dismantle the nuclear weapons program,” he said. “Failure  would be allowing Iran to proceed with an [intercontinental ballistic missile]  program.”

“Iran is trying to portray itself as a country prepared to make fundamental concessions, but at the same time it is preserving the core abilities in both routes it is developing for a nuclear weapon.”

Menendez said at the Washington Forum of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “No one wants a diplomatic solution more than I do. But it cannot be a deal for a deal’s sake. And I am worried they [Obama and his advisers] want a deal more than they want the right deal.”

The lifting of economic sanctions will create an economic superpower with malevolent, anti-Western aspirations.

Boeing, French oil company Total and German industry group BDI see vast opportunities in the Iran market, and the surge of European, Chinese and American investment into Iran will be remindful of the Gold Rush that created modern California. Once those euros, yuan and dollars are in, political pressures will make it tough to re-impose western economic sanctions.

The U.S. trump card has been its unique grip on the global banking and payments system, but China’s success in recruiting European allies to join its Asian Infrastructure Bank demonstrates that Asian alternatives to U.S. dominated western financial institutions will soon emerge.

IT WAS historic: everyone can agree on that. But whereas some say the deal done in Vienna this week between Iran and six world powers plus the European Union was a breakthrough that keeps nuclear proliferation at bay and begins to mend a 36-year feud with America, others are convinced it was, as Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, says, a “stunning historic mistake” that sets up Iran as a nuclear power and finances its aggression abroad. Which of those is closer to the truth depends on two things: the quality of the agreement and its effect on Iran’s behaviour.

the critics risk holding out for a bargain that never comes. Backers play down the Iranian regime’s antagonism towards America and Israel, its determination to exert influence abroad and its willingness to use violence. They place too much reliance on a transformation of the Iranian regime that may never come about.

With or without an agreement, the world is stuck with an Iran that continues to run a big nuclear programme and remains slippery and dangerous. The real test of the deal is whether it is better than the alternatives. It is.