Tehran seeks to reset
relations By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
In the current tumult of diplomatic
maneuvers ahead of the crucial Baghdad talks on
Tehran's nuclear program between Iran and the P5+1
nations scheduled for May 23, reflected in
multiple "cold" signals from the West, Iran and
France are poised to reset their troubled
relations if certain conditions are met.
This much can be seen in the surprise
three-day Tehran visit by Michel Rocard, a former
French prime minister, less than two weeks after
the stunning presidential victory of his socialist
colleague, Francios Hollande, who will introduce
his cabinet on Wednesday.
Although dubbed
as a "private visit", Rocard's high-profile
meeting with top Iranian officials and lawmakers
has clearly unnerved the United States and Israel,
which worry that Paris may no longer
toe Washington's line on
Iran, as it did for five consecutive years under
the right-wing Nicolas Sarkozy.
On the
surface, Hollande's government will undoubtedly
maintain unity of purpose with the US, the United
Kingdom and Germany, the other Western powers
involved in the P5+1 Iran nuclear talks (along
with Russia and China), insisting that Iran must
"fulfill its international obligations".
In reality, however, Hollande and his
foreign policy team will be more inclined to echo
Moscow's diplomatic approach, crystallized in its
"step-by-step" proposal that reportedly calls for
a temporary suspension of Iran's
uranium-enrichment program and gradual lifting of
sanctions against Iran in exchange for its
enhanced nuclear transparency.
Concerning
the latter, on Monday and Tuesday, Iran and the
top officials of the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA), the United Nations' nuclear
watchdog, are holding crucial talks aimed at
reaching consensus on resolving the agency's areas
of concerns about Iran's nuclear program, such as
suspicion of nuclear-weapons related activities at
the Parchin military complex.
In a
conversation with the author last week, Iran's
envoy to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, dismissed
Western media reports regarding "certain
activities" at Parchin as pure propaganda and
insisted that the IAEA's own reports about Parchin
pertain to 10 to 12 years ago - and if Iran had
any intention of "cleaning up" any evidence it
would have done so long ago and not waited until
now. The chances are the two sides will reach
an agreement on a modality for further cooperation
and the IAEA will be permitted to visit Parchin
and, most likely, conclude that there is nothing
suspicious, just as it has on two previous
occasions.
For sure, the Iran-IAEA talks
are an important mood-setter for the Baghdad
meeting and, if successful, could shift the
momentum in Iran's favor, much to the chagrin of
the US and Israeli Iranophobic politicians and
pundits who want to derail the Iran nuclear talks
by forcing Western governments to adopt a hardline
approach toward Tehran. [1]
The latter
appear to be making some headway with the European
Union, whose foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton
was in Tel Aviv this month and subsequently made a
rather hawkish statement regarding stopping Iran's
nuclear weapons program, in sharp contrast to her
more conciliatory behavior during and especially
after the April nuclear talks in Istanbul. As
expected, Tehran has reacted negatively to the
pre-talk pressure tactics, warning they could
damage the prospects of the Baghdad talks. Iran
insists its nuclear program is solely for peaceful
purposes.
The French connection It is in this volatile and highly uncertain
environment that Paris and Tehran are now engaged
in the preliminary stages of exploring the option
of improving relations, which are intimately
connected to a whole set of other relations and
considerations. These include France's
pre-commitment to the EU's current coercive
approach toward Iran, which will culminate in the
EU's oil ban on Iran in July if the Baghdad talks
fail to made tangible progress.
In that
event, heightened tensions with Iran will simply
translate into added economic woes for the
troubled eurozone that can ill-afford the shock
waves of an Iran crisis causing higher oil prices.
Optimistically, however, France and Iran
may be on the road to a new chapter in their
relations if the Iran-IAEA talks bear fruit and
set the stage for more concrete progress in
Baghdad. Then, France, which downsized its embassy
in Tehran last December, may reverse course by
restoring full embassy facilities, and Iran might
also reconsider its decision to suspend oil
shipments to France.
Although France
received only 3% of its oil imports from Iran,
there is no reason why this can't increase if the
countries manage to reset their relations.
Not only that, Hollande is apt to discover
a serious partner in dialogue in Tehran with
respect to a number of key regional issues, such
as Syria, Lebanon and Afghanistan, in the light of
Hollande's campaign promises to withdraw French
forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2012.
The big question is whether or not the
candidate-turned-president Hollande, who has no
prior foreign policy experience, will be able to
withstand pressure from fellow North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) members led by the US
to reconsider his campaign promises.
Hollande's first foreign policy test will
be at the NATO meeting in Chicago this month that
is bound to be preoccupied with the question of
Afghanistan's growing instability, not to mention
Syria's escalating civil war.
Another
important issue, which has raised the ire of
Moscow, is NATO's planned anti-missile defense
shield in Europe as well as modernization of
NATO's nuclear delivery capability by relying on
new US bombers.
A trend in Europe is that
compliant right-wing politicians who have
forfeited European national security into American
hands are on their way out, and a more
self-assertive EU is on the rise that could detach
itself from the American-Israeli militaristic
modus operandi.
NATO's nuclear
modernization policy is coming under fire from
some European pundits, who have labeled it as
"expensive and unnecessary", although a more apt
description might be dangerous.
The
Western military assumption - that they can go
about beefing up their nuclear arsenal and
capabilities and, worse, rely on them for foreign
policy purposes, while at the same time holding up
the banner of anti-proliferation and demanding
other nations to simply consent to their nuclear
hegemony without an iota of resistance - is a
tissue of naive Euro-centrism that lacks
credibility with much of the rest of the world.
This is especially true about the Middle
East, where Israel continues to receive critical
nuclear-weapons related technology from the West
while simultaneously portraying itself as a victim
of Iran's fictitious "nuclear threat". (See Israel
stokes the Iran threat Asia Times Online, May
8, 2012.)
Given the above, the new
socialist government in France is caught between
conflicting priorities, given the long-standing
French socialists' support for Israel. But, with
today's Israel led by right-wing and some
"messianic" politicians, to paraphrase criticism
of some top Israeli intelligence officials
critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the
worst thing that Paris could do would be to
endorse Netanyahu's warmongering approach toward
Iran. This would have serious adverse consequences
for the European economy if left unchecked.
A more prudent French approach, reflected
in Rocard's trip to Iran, is to build bridges with
Tehran and thus act as a positive influence in
resolving the Iran nuclear standoff through wise
diplomacy, thus compensating for the current
falling rate of diplomatic wisdom vis-a-vis the
dangerous Iran crisis. [2]
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