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Has the EU Got Its Iran Strategy Right?
24/07/2007 By Richard Youngs
The European Union (EU) has played an important and valuable role in keeping alive negotiations and engagement with Iran. Its delicate mix of dialogue, incentives and pressure has rightly been seen as an archetype of the nuanced and multifaceted presence, the EU’s foreign policy can bring to bear.
This certainly represents more than the kind of passive ‘soft power’ invariably (if often inaccurately) attributed to the European Union’s international identity.
As further decisions on the tightening of sanctions now approach, the challenge for the EU resides in ensuring that its objectives with respect to Iran’s nuclear programme do not undermine longer term aims. There is at least some doubt that the extent of the EU’s focus on the nuclear dossier addresses the symptoms more than the underlying roots of tensions between Iran and the West.
Arguably, the EU has expended political capital on a policy goal of containment that looks unlikely to be sustainable over the long term, even if modest concessions are won from Tehran in the short term. And it has pursued its nuclear diplomacy in a way that undercuts a focus on factors that might unlock a more firmly rooted degree of engagement and cooperation between Europe and Iran.
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Keywords
Diplomacy European Union Iran Middle East and North Africa Nuclear weapons Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)Bio author: Richard Youngs
Democracy promotion. EU foreign policy.
