Richard Gowan
Richard Gowan is an Associate Director at NYU's Center on International Cooperation and a Senior Policy ...
Iran: the true test of EU foreign policy
February 2012
In all good spy films – such as the recent adaptation of John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – there is a moment in which the audience finally grasps who has really been double-crossing whom. All the sub-plots devised to conceal the truth are suddenly irrelevant. The final showdown comes into view.
Something like that is happening today in the world of European foreign policy. Since the Iraq war, the EU’s members have dazzled and confused observers with false clues about the bloc’s priorities. The Union has taken on operations from Congo to Afghanistan. Policy-makers have argued over whether the Union is a humanitarian actor aiming to help the UN or a nascent military player out to rival NATO.
There have been times when Europe’s immediate goals were obvious enough, as in the former Yugoslavia. On other occasions, as when the EU deployed a one-year peace operation to Chad, it looked rather unfocused. Many analysts have argued that the Union lacks a grand strategy to guide its actions.
But behind all this activity and rhetoric, a deadly serious issue has remained central to Europe’s efforts to cobble together a foreign policy: Iran. Now, with the Middle East in turmoil and Israel considering military strikes against Iranian nuclear installations, the EU’s credibility as a global actor is in the balance.
Iran’s atomic ambitions were the strongest motivating factor for Britain, France and Germany to deepen foreign policy cooperation after the Iraq debacle. The “EU3” were concerned both by Iran’s intentions and by the risk that the U.S. might use force against Iran. In December 2004, they launched new negotiations with Tehran, which had broken an earlier deal on uranium enrichment a year before. Most other EU members were willing to let the troika take a lead, although Italy was irritated by its exclusion.
Iran looked a crisis that (i) the EU could actually do something about and (ii) truly mattered globally. As Steven Everts (now an adviser to EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton) noted in early 2004, Iran also offered a chance to show the unilateralist Bush administration that “a different and more nuanced strategy can deliver better and more sustainable results.” Sure, there was still a lot to be done in the Western Balkans, but this felt like old news. And yes, it was wonderful that EU-flagged forces could now deploy to African crises, but these were not first order priorities for most European governments. Iran was the real thing.
The then EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana also seized on the importance of the Iran file, leading a series of negotiations to try to dissuade Tehran from continuing its nuclear programme. Over time, the Bush administration came to display a grudging willingness to follow Europe’s diplomatic lead. The Obama administration initially adopted a European-style strategy of engagement with Iran – so much so that some EU leaders, such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, were concerned that the US had gone soft.
When Catherine Ashton took over from Solana at the end of 2009, analysts questioned whether she would have such a prominent role on Iran. While the US was now prepared to manage the diplomatic process – putting its weight behind a drive for sanctions at the UN – the Iranians looked increasingly recalcitrant. Murmurs of Israeli military action were mounting. Tomas Valasek of the Centre for European Reform in London wondered whether the EU was approaching “its last hooray on Iran.”
Ashton has in fact kept up her predecessor’s role as a primary negotiator with the Iranians. She has made a point of working with Turkey on the issue. Even her many critics in Brussels grant that she has handled this issue as well as possible under increasingly difficult circumstances. But as the Middle East has become unstable and the Iranians have remained uncooperative, diplomatic options have shrunk.
The EU has now agreed to an oil embargo on Iran (as I noted last month, it can do some damage) but there is a very high risk that the situation will spiral out of control. The Americans, Europeans and their Arab allies are locked in an ill-disguised battle with Iran to shape the future of its ally Syria. In January, British and French vessels sailed alongside an American aircraft carrier through the Straits of Hormuz, the vital waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf that the Iranians have threatened to block.
The crisis is coming to a head. US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta has reportedly spoken of the “likelihood” of an Israeli strike on Iran soon. Years of pain-staking European diplomacy may soon be rendered null and void. And all that good stuff about the EU doing peacekeeping, leading the world in development aid and shaping the norms of the international system suddenly feels rather irrelevant.
If the Iranian crisis does end in military action – especially if US forces become engaged – the EU will be sent into a diplomatic tail-spin. A huge amount of European energy has been devoted to averting this scenario. We are approaching a test for European foreign policy that may dwarf everything since Iraq.