Iranian versus US Diplomacy: Chess versus Checkers

Dan Drezner sums up the latest US-Iranian developments, with Iran announcing it reached a nuclear fuel swap deal brokered by Turkey and Brazil, followed by the US rejecting the deal, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announcing today that Russia and China has agreed on a new round of UNSC sanctions against Iran.  Drezner asks why Russia would agree to sanctions and comes up these possibilities:

I'd suggest three possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive:

1)  Russia is genuinely unpersuaded that Monday's deal is anything more than marginally useful;

2)  Russia is just as annoyed as the United States at the young whipperrsnapper countries rising powers of the world going rogue in their diplomacy.  Russia is, in many ways, more sensitive to questions about prestige than the United States;

3)  Cynically, there's little cost to going along with the United States on sanctions that will have very little impact on the Russian-Iranian economic relationship.

While #1 and #2 are potential factors, I'm more persuaded by #3 from Russia's perspective. I commented on Drezner's post, and will elaborate here.  This is an embarrassment for the Obama WH, and Hillary Clinton was clearly trying to strengthen a weakened negotiating position with this announcement. The US is thirsty for some sort of Russian cooperation; if the Russians can sprinkle some water here and there over the administration, it keeps them invested in the UNSC process where Russia can act like the great power it believes it should be. Moreover, it allows them to keep an eye on US-Iranian developments. With the US bogged down in endless rounds of UNSC diplomacy, Russia can buy time to reassert itself in its near periphery, or link its cooperation on Iranian sanctions for a tacit agreement on its sphere of influence.

If the administration concluded it would never get Russian and Chinese cooperation for meaningful sanctions, it may have looked at hard-hitting unilateral petroleum refining sanctions, the sort that Russia clearly warned the administration about a few days ago.  In this scenario, while Russia would most likely play the spoiler by investing in Iran's energy sector, in the long run, it's simply not smart for the Russians to up the ante with the US who despite the economic downturn, is still the #1 economic and military power, and can still reinvigorate its BMD deal with Poland or the Czech Republic. The last thing Russia wants is for the US to have more bargaining leverage with Iran which unilateral sanctions may very well bring, and for the 2 powers to come to some sort of regional bargain without Russia.

Unsurprisingly, the WSJ is critical of the administration's diplomacy in today's opinion:

The double embarrassment is that the U.S. had encouraged Lula's diplomacy as a step toward winning his support for U.N. sanctions. Brazil is currently one of the nonpermanent, rotating members of the Security Council, and the U.S. has wanted a unanimous U.N. vote. Instead, Lula used the opening to triangulate his own diplomatic solution. In her first game of high-stakes diplomatic poker, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is leaving the table dressed only in a barrel.

STRATFOR, which is mostly apolitical, is pointing out that Iran has a stronger negotiating position vis a vis the US with this announced deal in a short video:

I'm hoping the administration has a secret Door #2 to prove me wrong, but I'm doubtful. Using strong muscular sticks, particularly if peeves other major powers, just doesn't seem to be in their DNA.