Envoy seeks nuke deal ‘gestures’
Overture to Iran comes amid high-stakes dueling pressures
BERLIN — France on Tuesday sent a top diplomat to Tehran to urge Iran to scale back its recently increased uranium enrichment activities.
France, Britain and Germany, which remain a part of a 2015 nuclear accord along with Russia and China, said they plan to convene a meeting of the signatories amid “deep concern that Iran is not meeting several of its commitments.”
They said the meeting to address Iran’s compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA as the deal is formally known, needed to be “convened urgently,” but they did not say when that would happen.
Europe is under pressure from the U.S. to abandon the accord entirely, as Washington did unilaterally last year, and it also is being squeezed by Iran to offset the ever-crippling effects of American economic sanctions.
That has left the Europeans’ soft-power approach strained to its limits at a time of increasing tensions in the Middle East.
“For the Europeans, it’s going to be difficult not to lose credibility in their position with Iran and also with Washington, by not being too soft, but at the same time acknowledging that there is some truth to what Iran is saying,” said Adnan Tabatabai, a political scientist with the Bonn-based CARPO think tank on Middle Eastern affairs.
They are forced to walk a fine line, trying not to escalate the situation on either side as they seek a resolution between Tehran and Washington, with French President Emmanuel Macron taking the lead for the three European countries, known as the E3, said Sanam Vakil, a researcher with London-based Chatham House think tank.
“What the E3 can do is kick-start diplomacy and diplomatic conversations,” she said. “They can potentially convince Iran to freeze its breach and prevent any further breaches while shepherding a process back and forth between Washington and Iran. Worst-case scenario is that nothing happens, but at least they’ve bought themselves time.”
Macron sent his top diplomatic adviser, Emmanuel Bonne, to Tehran, where he was expected to meet Wednesday with the country’s senior security official, Ali Shamkhani, according to Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency. Bonne hopes to try to “obtain gestures” from Iran to show they’re serious about staying in the deal, a French official said.
In a thinly veiled threat to Iran on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood in front of an F-35 stealth fighter during a tour of an air base and said one should “remember that these planes can reach every place in the Middle East, including Iran and certainly Syria.”