Buying time on Iran
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

BERLIN - Last week, talks between Iran and the so-called EU-3 (Germany, France and Britain) held in Geneva expectedly resulted neither in a diplomatic breakthrough nor a breakdown, rather in a mutually beneficial decision to maintain the present status quo for a few more months.

In light of Iran's June presidential elections and Europe's concerns over a full-fledged crisis involving the United Nations Security Council, this was barely more than a stop-gap measure adding borrowed time to a precarious agreement signed in Paris last November, whereby the EU-3, as well as the European Union as a whole, pledged to provide concrete economic, nuclear and security support for Iran in exchange for the latter's freeze of its nuclear fuel cycle.

Now, after several months of diplomatic wrangling, EU diplomats have promised to offer a concrete plan of action on those promises within two months. The pertinent question is, of course, what can Europe offer, particularly on the security level, that may somehow appease Iran and thus forestall its declared intention to resume the suspended nuclear activities?

So far, Europe has failed to make any security initiative that would fulfill that portion of the Paris Agreement deemed significant by Iran, nowadays encircled by the American military superpower. Europe's Middle East security policy is channeled mainly through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Both these organizations are active in Iran's twin regions of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea basin, and, logically speaking, one must expect concrete EU proposals on how to fashion a security cooperation between Iran and these two security organizations.

At their recent Istanbul summit, NATO leaders expanded their security dialogue with the Middle East through their Istanbul Cooperation Initiative focusing on the Persian Gulf states. Yet this initiative is still in its formative stage, and, depending on the future eastward expansion of NATO, watched with suspicious eyes by Iran, China and Russia, this may or may not translate into a direct Iran-NATO dialogue. At any rate, the EU's negotiators now have a unique opportunity to propose precisely such a dialogue, the purview of which could conceivably include both Iraq and Afghanistan.

In light of Iran's official participation in the NATO summits of the past couple of years, such an initiative is not far-fetched and is, in fact, quite realistic, particularly since it would implicate Iran and the US in direct security dialogue, something which is long overdue given the extensive net of shared or parallel interests between the two countries in the oil-rich region infested with terrorism these days.

Simultaneously, the EU-3 should initiate a separate Iran-OSCE dialogue, which has an ever-bigger potential for tangible results, especially as it pertains to such issues as the environmental security of the Caspian Sea, focused on by OSCE recently, not to mention terrorism, narcotic traffic, and the like. OSCE-Iran cooperation could, without doubt, have salutary effects on the overall security climate of the region and act as a timely confidence-building measure between Iran and the EU. Such a cooperation could potentially extend to the discussion of a Persian Gulf cooperative security paradigm, as a touchstone for future multilateral security cooperation in the volatile region, which has been the scene of three major inter-state wars over the past quarter of century.

And yet, despite their present, on-going dialogue, NATO and OSCE remain separate organizations with potentially competitive interests, notwithstanding the US's traditional self-distancing from OSCE as the leading NATO member and, hence, any perceived Iran-OSCE cooperation in the Persian Gulf will likely raise red flags in Washington, which has invested huge political capital in this region for the sake of hegemonic leadership, especially in the geostrategic and military-security realm. And given the present hostilities between Iran and the US, the EU has little chance of persuading the US to nod to a meaningful Iran-NATO security dialogue.

Henceforth, the chances are less than auspicious that in a short two months from now the EU will be able to somehow pull a magic rabbit out of its security hat and provide Iran with a "firm security guarantee" stipulated in the Paris Agreement. Without such a guarantee, on the other hand, no amount of economic incentives will suffice to assuage the fears and concerns of Iran regarding the long-term menace of American power. On paper, the EU may want to sell itself as a timely buffer between Iran and the US, but in reality this may be more a case of wishful thinking born out of a desperate attempt to salvage the sinking ship of the EU's Iran diplomacy.

At the moment, the EU's best hope is that a combination of "carrots" encompassing Iran's bid to join the World Trade Organization, or the current talks for a Comprehensive Trade Agreement between Iran and the EU, can somehow melt Iran's declared intention to resume its uranium-enrichment programs. Yet all the evidence from Iran suggests that time on Iran's temporary halt of its nuclear program is fast running out, and there is powerful public support for the resumption of this program, deemed as a "legitimate right".

Given the above, the coming fall may mean a date for the Security Council on Iran, after a much-needed summer lull in the Iran nuclear (proto) crisis, and this will have significant consequences for each of the EU-3 states, particularly Germany, which faces national elections scheduled for September, likely to result in a change of the guard from the current Red-Green coalition to a right-wing government led by the pro-George W Bush Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

Already, the CDU leadership, which vocally supported the US invasion of Iraq, is pre-positioning itself to an even more "Americanist" Iran policy for Germany, perhaps much to the chagrin of the French government, as well as Tehran, which has so far benefited from an emerging German foreign policy increasingly uncoupled from the White House. Should the German elections turn out as predicted, that would definitely be a bad omen from Iran's prism and, what is more, may spell doom for the future of Iran-EU talks, if it turns out that the Iranian tactic of maneuvering the EU against the US has completely backfired.

But, of course, Iran can always count on the "economic card" to soften the energy-dependent Europe that constitutes its main foreign trade partner, which explains the tactical value of Iran's pre-Geneva statements regarding Tehran's interest in up to 10 nuclear reactors from Europe. We may well imagine the effectiveness of such tactics, prompting corporate pressure on the EU-3 governments to go soft on Iran and to take advantage of the investment opportunity denied to the US corporations due to decade-old sanctions. This tendency has been counteracted in the US in the form of new, pending legislation that severely punishes foreign companies making huge investments inside Iran. Whether or not this legislation is enacted depends to some extent on the success or failure of the Iran-EU talks, deemed fragile by all those concerned, as well as on the next Iranian president.

Concerning the latter, most experts are hedging their bets on Hashemi Rafsanjani, former president and current head of the Expediency Council, who has already gone on record in a recent interview with the New York Times regarding his good intentions toward the US and prospects for normalizing relations with that nation. Considered a "realist" or "pragmatist", Rafsanjani may be the only establishment politician in Iran who can push US-Iran rapprochement expeditiously forward, yet this noble objective is now held effectively hostage by the nuclear crisis.

Unless both the US and the EU come to terms with Iran's nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) right to a low-grade uranium-enrichment program and agree to the implementation of this right under the full supervision of the UN's atomic agency, it is indeed hard to see how Iran's leaders could continue their current suspension of enrichment activities in the light of growing public sentiment in favor of rescinding this suspension. [1]

After all, the post-revolutionary system in Iran has always prided itself as a populist regime in tune with the sentiments of Iranians, many of whom consider Iran's national security so imperiled since the events of September 11, 2001, that they mandate Iran's drive to become a member of the "nuclear club", ie, acquiring the nuclear know-how for a break-out possibility if the national security calculus calls for it.

This may not necessarily be the voice of the majority in Iran right now, yet it would be rather foolhardy on the part of Washington and its European allies to ignore the pressure from below in Iran and focus solely on the politics at the top.

Note
[1] At the month-long NPT review conference in New York, Iran achieved a major diplomatic success by defeating US and European maneuvers to side-step disarmament and to focus on closing the "loopholes" of the international regime on non-proliferation when, in fact, these pertained to the "inalienable rights" of nuclear have-nots such as Iran to access peaceful nuclear technology. 

Irrespective of Iran's stance, vividly reflected in the powerful statement of Iran's envoy to the UN, Javad Zarif, at the end of the conference, the US media uniformly blamed Iran, and to some extent Egypt supporting Iran on its criticisms of Israel and on the idea of a Middle East nuclear free zone, as responsible for the conference's failure. But had the conference been a "success" from the US's vantage point, revamping Article IV of the NPT, then it may have spelled permanent doom for the regime in the long run as it would have introduced irreparable harm to the NPT as a vehicle of hypocritical, doublespeaking big powers.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and "Iran's Foreign Policy Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of World Affairs, co-authored with former deputy foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003.

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