Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Celso Amorim recently wrote in the Guardian about the 2010 Tehran Declaration – an event that’s resided in the memory hole for some time:

As president and foreign minister of Brazil, in the first decade of this century, we held talks with US presidents and senior Iranian officials in an attempt to build peace, which we believed to be what mattered most to the peoples of Iran and the United States.

Together with Turkey, we negotiated with Iran the Tehran declaration, following a request by Barack Obama himself, made at the margins of an expanded G8 summit in 2009, in Italy.

This agreement, celebrated in 2010, hailed by disarmament experts from around the world, including former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, had the potential to bring a peaceful solution to the complex issue of the Iranian nuclear program.

Beyond making the world a safer place, we were helping the two countries, staunch enemies since the 1979 Islamic revolution, to develop a peaceful and mutually respectful coexistence, as expressed by President Obama.

Unfortunately, domestic and foreign policy factors in the United States prevented its adoption at that time. A few years later, however, Obama signed a similar agreement with the Iranian government, later abandoned by Trump.