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Recently, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton pressured Brazil's president Lula da Silva to join the US in imposing new sanctions against Iran. Lula rebuffed Clinton, saying it's "not prudent to push Iran against a wall". This is not what Clinton wanted to hear from a country that holds a rotating seat in the UN Security Council and is lobbying for a permanent one. Subsequently, in Tel Aviv, Lula shocked Israeli leaders by refusing to visit the tomb of the father of Zionism, Theodore Herzl. In May, he goes to Tehran to meet President Ahmadinejad, a move that a US newspaper described as "unworthy of a country that aspires to be considered an equal among the world's leaders". Is Lula behaving like a world leader?

Mocked by Brazil's chatterati for his fractured...