Drawing on the author's personal experience, this book presents an insider’s chronology and analysis of the EU's role in the nuclear negotiations with Iran.
The European Union strives to be a global player, a "soft power" leader that can influence international politics and state behavior by wielding its commonly shared values of cooperation, the rule of law, respect for human rights, and fundamental freedoms. Yet critics argue that, despite these grand ambitions, the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) remains largely ineffective and incoherent. The Iranian nuclear program presented the European Union with a unique opportunity to assert its role as a global power. Whereas the CFSP is often chided for its lack of strategy, the field of nonproliferation and disarmament is one where European strategies do exist. As the European Union played an early and continuous role in attempting to persuade Iran to verifiably forgo developing nuclear weapons, the Iran example could be viewed a test-case for EU as a global actor.
As Chair of the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with Iran, Dr Tarja Cronberg had a ringside seat in the negotiations to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Drawing on her experiences leading delegations to Iran, interviews with officials, legislators, and opposition leaders in nearly every country participating in the negotiations, as well as reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency, parliaments, and independent experts, the author illustrates an insider’s chronological understanding of the negotiations. Intersecting history, politics, economics, culture, and the broader security context, this book not only delivers a unique and powerful analysis of this historic deal and the tortuous twelve-year multilateral pursuit of it, but draws from it pertinent lessons for European policy makers for the future.
This book will be of much interest to students of nuclear proliferation, EU policy, diplomacy and IR in general.
