Learning From a Troubled Experience – Transatlantic Lessons from the Nuclear Standoff with Iran

Abstract

With the US eventually embracing the European-devised ‘dual track’ approach comprising both sanctions and incentives, the transatlantic partners have currently reached a remarkable level of convergence on how to deal with the Iranian nuclear conundrum. Although EU--US unity might not be enough to solve the dispute, the experience of transatlantic cooperation on Iran offers some important lessons. It shows that strategic convergence between the transatlantic partners, or lack thereof, has a considerable impact on the way a crisis unfolds in an area in which both parties have a stake. It highlights the added value represented by European/EU political and economic assets in a situation in which US military options are both unlikely to have the desired effect and at grave risk of backlash. Finally, it sets an important precedent for a specific option for intra-EU and EU--US cooperation – the contact or lead group – that seems to suit the emerging multipolar world better than other, more institutionalised methods.

Notes

¹ For a short overview of EU–Iranian relations, see Kutchesfahani, Iran's Nuclear Challenge and European Diplomacy; Posch, “The EU and Iran”; Reissner, “EU–Iran Relations”.

² Depending on the level of enrichment: low enriched uranium is sufficient to produce energy power, while the core of a nuclear bomb is composed of highly enriched uranium.

³ Interview with a former E3 country member of the IAEA Board of Governors, Berlin, February 2009.

⁴ This is not to say that the United States and Iran had had no contacts at all. The Americans sought Iranian help to rescue US citizens held hostage in Lebanon in the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as to allow weapons to reach Bosnian Muslims during the 1992–95 war in Bosnia. The (arguably more significant) US–Iranian cooperation over Afghanistan in 2001–02 had already come to an end with President Bush's inclusion of Iran in the ‘axis of evil’ in his 2002 State of the Union address.

⁵ Statement by the Iranian Government and Visiting EU Foreign Ministers, 21 October 2003, http://www.bits.de/public/documents/iran/Tehran_EU_Iran_Agreement03.pdf.

⁶ Communication dated 26 November 2004 Received from the Permanent Representatives of France, Germany, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United Kingdom Concerning the Agreement Signed in Paris on 15 November 2004, INFCIRC/637, http://www.bits.de/public/documents/iran/Paris_Agreement_infcirc637.pdf; Statement by Javier Solana, EU High Representative for the CFSP, on the Agreement on Iran's Nuclear Programme, S0204/04, 15 November 2004, S0304/04, http://www.bits.de/public/documents/iran/solana_paris_agreement1504.pdf). At that time, the International Crisis Group provided an accurate analysis of the deal: Iran: Where Next on the Nuclear Standoff? ICG Middle East Briefing No. 15, 24 November 2004, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/Middle%20East%20North%20Africa/Iran%20Gulf/Iran/B015%20Iran%20Where%20Next%20on%20the%20Nuclear%20Standoff.ashx.

⁷ Among others, see Martellini and Redaelli, “A Strategy for Defeat?”, 69–77; Sauer, Coercive Diplomacy by the EU; and Roudsari, Talking Away the Crisis?; who insist on the structural weakness of the E3/EU negotiating strategy. Seyed Sajjadpour blames the Europeans for having yielded to the widespread tendency to look at post-revolutionary Iran from a “securitised perspective” inherently implying “that Iran's intentions are malicious” (“Evolution of Iran's Security Doctrine”, 22).

⁸ Interview with a senior E3 diplomat, London, April 2009. A European Commission official has acknowledged that, if talks with Iran were to seriously resume, the EU would need to offer a more advanced typology of agreement (interview in Brussels, June 2010).

⁹ Kile, “Final Thoughts on Iran”, 122–3.

¹⁰ Perthes, “Of Trust and Security”.

¹¹ Kile, “Final Thoughts on Iran”; see also Thränert, Ending Suspicious Nuclear Activities.

¹² For a critical discussion of Europe's leadership in the Iran nuclear dispute, see the conclusions of the roundtable organised by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms (Iran Watch Roundtable: An Assessment of Europe's Leadership in Confronting the Iranian Nuclear Challenge, 6 February 2008, http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/iran/iranwatch-roundtable-eu-0208.htm Iran Watch Roundtable). Round-table participants were Philip Gordon, Hans-Peter Hinrichson, Danielle Pletka, Simon Shercliff and Terence Taylor.

¹³ Denza, “The EU, Iran, and Non-proliferation”, 310–11.

¹⁴ IAEA reports on Iran, while stating that no evidence of military diversion was found, regularly complained that Iran was not sharing key information about the origin and purpose of certain technologies and material that, in theory, could have a military application. A summary of IAEA complaints can be found in The Age of Deception by the agency's former director general, Mohammed ElBaradei (112–47).

¹⁵ While uranium enrichment remained frozen from late 2003 to January 2006, other related activities, most notably uranium conversion into gas and centrifuge production and testing continued until November 2004. Uranium conversion was re-activated in August 2005.

¹⁶ The IAEA board resolution that declared Iran in non-compliance with its transparency obligation and hinted at a possible involvement of the Security Council was adopted on 24 September 2005 (Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Resolution Adopted on 24 September 2005, GOV/2005/77, http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Board/2005/gov2005-77.pdf).

¹⁷ The UN Security Council has adopted six binding resolutions requiring Iran to suspend uranium enrichment and intensify cooperation with the IAEA: 1696 (July 2006); 1737 (December 2006); 1747 (March 2008); 1803 (March 2008); 1835 (September 2008) and 1929 (June 2010). Four of these resolutions – 1737, 1747, 1803, and 1929 – imposed sanctions.

¹⁸ One commentator has described the E3/EU action as a shift from “mediation to coalition building in order to lay down the foundation for a sanctions-based strategy” (Harnisch, “Lessons for EU's Iran Diplomacy”).

¹⁹ On the rationale of the sanctions track, see Posch, “What Next?”

²⁰ In the words of a former E3 foreign minister, “We [the E3] were all too aware that our role could be reduced to bridging the gap between the US and Iran […] and in a way we did it” (interview in Berlin, March 2009).

²¹ See Bonham and Heradstveit, “The Axis of Evil Metaphor”. For a personal account of Iran's attempt to engage the US in Afghanistan after the ousting of the Taliban, see Dobbins, “Negotiating with Iran”.

²² Press reports started to mention the May 2003 Iranian offer much later (see, among others, G. Kessler, “In 2003, US Spurned Iran's Offer of Dialogue”, The Washington Post, 18 June 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/17/AR2006061700727.html). European and American diplomats confirmed the news both in off-the-records interviews (including with this author) and openly (James Dobbins, the US special envoy to Afghanistan following 9/11, speaks of it in “Negotiating with Iran”, 157). Bush administration officials countered that the two-page document was not authoritative (Litwak, “Living with Ambiguity”, 101–2).

²³ Interviews with E3 and EU officials, Berlin, London and Brussels, February 2009, April 2009 and June 2010.

²⁴ For an interpretation of the E3/EU initiative as a “convenient buffer”, see Harnisch, “Minilateral Cooperation and Transatlantic Coalition-building”, 3. On the US impact on the process that led to the formation of the E3 group, see Linden, Die Initiative der EU-3, 53–6.

²⁵ Interview with a former US State Department Official, London, April 2009.

²⁶ The United States also lifted its veto on Iran's application for WTO membership and said it was willing to sell replacement components to Iran for its decrepit airline fleet. On the US 2005 change of tack, see Rudolf, Amerikanische Iranpolitik.

²⁷ The General Framework for Objective Guarantees, Firm Guarantees, and Firm Commitments, March 2005, http://www.bits.de/public/documents/iran/EU-3_Iran_0505.pdf

²⁸ Prior to the Iranian presidential election in June 2005, an E3 diplomat outlined a formula that, he says, the Iranians found acceptable. It implied Iran giving up enrichment on an industrial scale until the economic need for nuclear power actually emerged, which meant a situation in which Iran would already possess at least ten-twelve light water reactors and would be unable to find sufficient reactor-grade fuel on the international market. In the meantime, Iran would be allowed to run R&D enrichment facilities with a maximum of twenty centrifuges (a nuclear programme of industrial scale usually employs at least 50,000 centrifuges, although only around 3,000 are theoretically needed to build a bomb). The E3 did not discuss the matter at length, however, as the British government believed that the US would not accept it. The European diplomat admitted that there was no guarantee that the new Ahmadinejad administration would have agreed to the proposed formula (phone interview with a senior E3 official, London, April 2009).

²⁹ Interview with a former E3 foreign minister, Berlin, March 2009, and an EU official, Brussels, June 2010.

³⁰ See the Proposal to Iran by China, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the European Union Presented to the Iranian Authorities on 14 June 2008 in Tehran and the accompanying letter (http://www.bits.de/public/documents/iran/P5+1letter120608-iran.pdf). The Arms Control Association has disseminated a text of the E3/EU+3 June 2006 offer apparently prepared by the French Foreign Ministry (Elements of a Revised Proposal to Iran made by the E3+3, http://www.armscontrol.org/pdf/20060606_Iran_P5+1_Proposal.pdf). As one of the anonymous reviewers of this article, to whom the author is grateful, pointed out, had the Europeans refused to involve the UN Security Council in early 2006, the United States would have been faced with a binary choice between military confrontation and engagement with Iran. Given the chaos in Afghanistan and Iraq, the reviewer claims, the Bush administration could not but have chosen engagement. This is a provocative reading of the events, which however fails to take account of the fact that, first, the Europeans were themselves frustrated with Iran's stubbornness and, second, they did not believe that the US could really be forced to engage Iran. In the Europeans’ view, having brought the Bush administration on board, in spite of the many caveats it had put on its participation in the E3/EU+3 process, was to be considered a significant achievement.

³¹ The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, §§ III and V, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/nss/2006.

³² The author is grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for this information.

³³ J. McGlynn, “The Day the US Declared War on Iran”, Asia Times, 31 March 2008, and C. Hand, “Target Iran”, Asia Times, 11 April 2008.

³⁴ “US Imposes New Sanctions on Iran”, BBC News, 25 October 2007. Mark Fitzpatrick has listed all Bush administration Iran policy changes between 2005 and 2008 (The Iranian Nuclear Crisis, 63).

³⁵ This was the sub-text of his TV address to the “Iranian People and Leadership” delivered during Persian New Year's Day celebrations on 19 March 2009 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/video/The-Presidents-Message-to-the-Iranian-People). Obama backed up his public overture with two private letters to Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei prior to the June 2009 elections (“Obama sent Second Letter to Khamenei”, The Washington Times, 3 September 2009).

³⁶ For an analysis of the Geneva deal and the potential consequences of it floundering, see Fitzpatrick, “Fragile Promise of the Fuel-swap Plan”.

³⁷ Interview with EU Council and European Commission officials, Brussels, June 2010.

³⁸ “Clinton Blasts Brazil-Turkey Approach to Iran”, Radio Free Europe, 28 May 20010, http://www.rferl.org/content/Clinton_Blasts_BrazilTurkey_Approach_To_Iran/2054978.html.

³⁹ As it turned out, he and his partners within the E3/EU+3 knew of the deal in advance and, going against the advice of such partners as France, Obama had sent a letter to his Brazilian counterpart, President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, in which he recalled the basic content of the fuel swap included in the Geneva deal (a similar letter was allegedly sent to Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but has never been made public). Obama's move was controversial. The US president was criticised because the letter could be viewed as a US ‘go ahead’. State Department officials, however, insist that the letter's purpose was not to give guidelines as the United States had neither requested the mediation by Brazil and Turkey nor was in a position to deny them the right to strike a deal with a third party. They maintain that Brazil and Turkey were aware that the deal they were negotiating did little to address the E3/EU+3's specific proliferation concerns. US State Department, Background Briefing on Nuclear Non-proliferation Efforts with Regard to Iran and the Brazil/Turkey Agreement. 28 May 2010, http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2010/05/142375.htm.

⁴⁰ UNSCR 1929 was approved on 9 June; President Obama signed the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act into law on 1 July; EU sanctions were enacted with EU Council Decision 2010/413/CFSP on 27 July 2010.

⁴¹ An EU official involved in Iran's nuclear dispute from the very beginning described current EU–US cooperation on Iran as “full strategic convergence” (interview in Brussels, June 2010).

⁴² The confidential cables of US diplomats dealing with Iran published by WikiLeaks on 28 November 2010 confirm that Obama's tactics were a key element in securing support for his sanctions plan (“In Arab World and Beyond, Deep Distress over Iran”, International Herald Tribune, 29 November 2010, 1 and 4–5).

⁴³ The shift in the US debate over Iran can be appreciated by listening to Obama's annual messages on the Persian New Year's Day (Nowruz). Contrary to his much publicised 2009 TV address to “the Iranian people and leadership”, in 2011 Obama addressed only the Iranian people, commending their courage in opposing a repressive regime and explicitly comparing the Iranian Green Movement opposition with the pro-democracy protesters in Egypt and Tunisia (http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/03/20/president-obama-s-nowruz-message). For a pointed criticism of Obama's Iran policy, see F. and H. Leverett, “The Middle East's New ‘Cold War’”.

⁴⁴ According to Harnisch (“Minilateral Cooperation and Transatlantic Coalition-building”), minilateral cooperation is generally unable to transform into multilateral cooperation. Empirical evidence shows, however, that the interface between minilateral and multilateral levels was hampered by the ambivalent approach of the Bush administration rather than by the difficulty in minilateral action turning into multilateral cooperation. Strongly supportive of the ‘core’ group practice are, among others, Keukeleire, EU Core Groups, and Schwegmann, Kontaktgruppen und EU-3-Verhandlungen.