Dependent for Soft Power: US-EU Relations After Killing the Iran Deal

By Victoria Bauer

This blog post was written for the course "Current Issues in Global and EU Affairs", which took place from February 12-April 30, 2018.

Earlier in May 2018, President Trump killed the Iran Deal which sends a strong message that the United States does believe that Iran’s nuclear programs are peaceful and nothing to worry about despite what the international community thinks and Europe’s best interests to keep the deal alive. Historically this issue has been problematic since 2003 after the US attack on Iran and how European leaders want to handle the situation. Smith and Steffenson describe the origins of the Iran Deal as such:

“During 2003–4, differences surfaced between the EU member states and the US over how to handle nuclear weapons programs in Iran. These tensions reflected a longstanding divergence of approaches, with the Europeans having emphasized the value of ‘critical dialogue’ with Tehran and the Americans having adopted a strategy based on containment or even ‘rollback’, Iran being one of the members of the so-called ‘axis of evil’. 

The problem was also underlined by the transatlantic disagreements that had emerged during the build-up to and the conduct of the US-led attack on Iraq in 2003. In the case of Iran, however, there was a united EU position in favor of diplomacy and a multilateral solution; the UK, which had been the most loyal and substantial of the US’s allies in the Iraq action, pursued a strongly ‘Europeanized’ line on Iran, and played a leading role through what became known as the ‘EU3’ group along with France and Germany”( 412). Since the debate of using the USA’s more traditional hard power approach with Iran by holding it accountable with inspections and promises to not work with certain substances. After many years of failed talks, debates on using European soft power versus the US hard power, in 2015 there was EU, US, China, France, Russia, Germany agreement with Iran to monitor its nuclear activity to make it peaceful. While this deal sounds great on paper, this is very much a European victory since it promotes peace, which is very soft power-esque.  While it can be argued that this is a European victory, with the deal recently killed by the Trump administration, it is clear that the US is the one with the most diplomatic power and that Europe’s soft power is ineffective without the United States. Despite this, there is still a joint statement between the UK, France and Germany that goes along the lines of the original Iran Deal. This situation symbolizes that with the Trump administration, it is obvious that EU influence and EU relations with the US are beginning to be weaker and have surface-level meaning.

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Sources:

“Chapter 17: The European Union and the USA.” International Relations and the European Union, by Michael Smith and Rebecca Steffenson, Oxford University Press, 2017.