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ABSTRACT
Between 2003 and 2022, European Union policy towards Iran was the result of continuous course corrections made by EU institutions and member states to dodge internal disagreements and navigate the agitated waters of a region – the Middle East and the Gulf – mired in multipolar competition and beset by fragmented governance arrangements. A comprehensive review of official documents, relevant literature and interviews conducted with Iranian and European officials and experts demonstrates that a combination of prioritisation, compartmentalisation and multilateralisation kept EU foreign and security policy towards Iran on a fairly proactive and coherent course for almost twenty years. However, the forces unleashed by the United States’ withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal and more recently by Iran’s collusion in Russia’s war on Ukraine as well as the turmoil inside the Islamic Republic itself put the limits of the EU’s capacity to mitigate the effects of geopolitical rivalries, Middle Eastern fragmentation and intra-EU contestation on its Iran policy in sharp relief.
Acknowledgements
This article is an expanded and revised version of a report published within the JOINT project to which Steven Blockmans, Akin Unver and Sine Ozkarasahin contributed. JOINT has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N. 959143 (www.jointproject.eu). This publication reflects only the view of the author and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
Notes
1 Until 2009, when the Lisbon Treaty entered into force, simply High Representative (HR) for the Common Foreign and Security Policy.
2 Interviews were conducted between September and November 2021. The interviews were held under a strict non-attribution policy; interviewees were presented with a privacy disclaimer and orally agreed to speak with the author. Transcripts were kept with no reference to name, nationality or position of the interviewee. The indication of the position of the interviewees (‘official’, ‘senior official’ etc.) was agreed upon with individual interviewees.
3 For the greatest part of the period covered by this article (2003-20), the UK was an EU member state. After it left the Union, it remained part of the ‘E3’ group dealing with Iran’s nuclear issue in its capacity as a JCPOA signatory.
4 See, for instance, how Iran is construed in the strategic documents of Obama’s predecessor and successors: Bush (Citation2006); Trump (Citation2017); Biden (Citation2022).
5 Online interviews with French official, 28 October 2022 and German official, 11 November 2022.
6 While low-enriched uranium (LEU) or uranium containing 3-4 per cent of U235 (where U235 is the uranium isotope susceptible to nuclear fission) is sufficient for fuel used in reactors, the core of a nuclear device consists of highly enriched uranium (HEU), which is 90 per cent made up of U235, or plutonium, which is a by-product of the enrichment process.
7 A list of IAEA’s verification findings about Iran’s nuclear programme, as well as its concerns about undeclared nuclear particles detected in Iranian facilities, is available on the agency’s website; see IAEA (Citation2023).
8 Online interviews with a German and a senior EU official, 11 and 21 November 2022.
9 Online interview with a senior EU official, 22 November 2022.
10 Online interview with a senior EU official, 22 November 2022.
11 Interview with European official, 17 October 2022.
12 EU sanctions targeted two Iranian officials and a unit within Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence.
13 UNSC Resolutions 1737, 1747, 1803 and 1929 introduced and gradually expanded the UN sanctions regime.
14 Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal.
15 Data on EU-Iran trade is available on the European Commission website (European Commission Citation2023).
16 Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland and Sweden.
17 Interviews with Iranian officials, 11 and 12 September 2022.
18 According to a senior EU official, Germany and the UK increasingly doubted the need for compartmentalisation in fall 2022, whereas the HRVP, France and the US wanted to keep it (online interview with senior EU official, 22 November 2022).
19 A senior Iranian expert said: “The [E3] discourse, in particular, has become hardly distinguishable from that of the United States” (interview, 11 September 2022).
20 Online interview with French official, 7 November 2022.
21 Online interviews with French official, 28 October 2022; and German official, 11 November 2022.
22 As an Iranian official put it, the E3 “opposed Trump, not the US” (interview, 12 September 2022).
23 Two Iranian officials recalled that the JCPOA struggled to deliver economic benefits even prior to the US withdrawal (interviews, 11 and 12 September 2022).
24 Interviews with advisors to the Iranian foreign ministry, 12 September 2022.
25 This assessment was largely, though not universally, shared by the Iranian experts and officials interviewed for this article. According to a senior Italian official, the Iranians badly miscalculated that “they could extract more from the US and the E3/EU” following the Ukraine war; “demand for Iranian oil [in Europe] was in fact non-existent” (interview, 4 November 2022).
26 Interviews with European official, 17 October 2022; German official, 11 November 2022; senior EU official, 22 November 2022. However, the latter argued: “the nuclear track is dying on its own, not because of other issues”.
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Riccardo Alcaro
Riccardo Alcaro is Research Coordinator and Head of the Global Actors Programme at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI), Rome, Italy.