Iran's Nuclear Power Play

Imagine a pious Muslim faced with a ban on fabricating a certain kind of weapon. He is committed to obeying unquestioningly the fatwas of his religious leader and yet discovers that producing such a weapon, or threatening to do so, is a strong lever for gaining benefits from a powerful group living in the neighborhood. Replace "a pious Muslim" with "Iran," and "a powerful group" with the 25-member European Union (EU), and the above sentences aptly sum up the current Iranian-EU relationship.

Enriched by millions of daily encounters in bazaars, Iranians are adept at bargaining and confident in the knowledge, acquired over centuries, that skillful bargaining and brinkmanship go hand in hand. This is what just happened in Paris between the officials of Iran and the EU troika – France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The subject was Tehran's nuclear program; the occasion, the run-up to the finalization of an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report for its 35-strong board of governors on Nov. 15. The Iranians dragged out the bargaining until the last minute before initialing a deal subject to the approval of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) in Tehran.

It was a deal that was meant to prepare the way for further negotiations. Iran has agreed to suspend its uranium enrichment and reprocessing programs until a "grand bargain" is reached in which the EU guarantees nuclear, political, and trade concessions in return for Tehran's indefinite suspension of the same programs. Though negotiated by the troika, the agreement's ownership lies with the European Union as a whole. To the undisguised relish of the Iranians, this deal killed the Bush administration's pet plan to refer the Iranian case to the United Nations Security Council for censure or the possible imposition of sanctions for its alleged breaches of the IAEA nuclear protocol.

Both Iran and the EU have a stake in seeing that the next round of negotiations, starting on Dec. 15, succeeds. By clinching a deal with the European Union, the Iranian leadership aims to achieve two strategic objectives: improve Iranian living standards through a Trade and Cooperation Agreement with the EU, and forestall the Bush administration's "hegemonistic designs" by widening of the political gap between the United States and the European Union over Iran.

The EU threesome has stayed firmly on the Iranian diplomatic path, despite American pressures, in order to protect the interests of its companies which already have lucrative contracts in Iran's oil and gas industry and are hopeful of securing more in the future.

Countering American Hegemony

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Islamic Republic's opposition to the imperial ambitions of the two superpowers narrowed to the winner of the Cold War: Washington. At a joint press conference with visiting Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev in February 2000, for instance, Hassan Rouhani, secretary-general of Iran's SNSC, summarized his country's foreign policy in this way: "Cooperation among Iran, Russia, India and China is very important if one hopes to confront the hegemonic policies of America."

That was one year before the arrival of George W. Bush in the White House, his unveiling of a thoroughly unilateralist foreign policy based on "preventive" force, the ominous inclusion of Iran in his "Axis of Evil," and, of course, his illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. That, in turn, led French President Jacques Chirac to articulate a competing vision of a multi-polar world in which the United States, the European Union, China, India, and Russia all would be poles. In this context, it was no accident that Paris was chosen as the venue for the recent Iranian/EU negotiations.

In Iran, even diehard conservatives now agree that developing cordial relations with the European Union is an effective and necessary way to curb Washington's designs on their country. They are also realistic enough not to underestimate the power of the Bush administration: It successfully pressured Japan to withhold its signature on a $2 billion deal to develop the enormous Azadegan oilfield in Iran, and the EU to suspend its nine-month-old negotiations with Tehran on the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA).