FRENCH Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner has backed away from the comments he recently made about Iran which raised the specter of war. His retreat, however, was a bit too late. Related statements and events since Kouchner’s remarks about a possible war over Iran’s nuclear program have come thick and fast. French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared that Iran was trying to obtain an atomic bomb, a meeting of the permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany spoke of the need for more sanctions against Iran, and a Washington Post story that warned Iran that just because the US was bogged down in Iraq didn’t mean it could not get physical with Tehran. In addition, the story published of US President George W Bush saying that he “was not going to tolerate” a nuclear-armed Iran. Taken all together, they made for a week of tension which heightened all the more following Iran’s warning to the West that it would regret any attack against Tehran — and promptly rolled out a display of missiles and other military hardware as proof it meant business.
Kouchner’s remarks signaled a qualitative shift, not only in the French position but also in the European one toward Iran. As France is pressing for a range of European sanctions to be imposed against Iran outside the context of the United Nations, such a move would herald a new phase in Iranian-European relations on the one hand and American-European relations on the other. Attitudes toward Iran have long served as a litmus test of the difference in how Europe and the US pursue their interests. Germany and France in particular have, until recently, been keen to distance themselves from Washington when it comes to resolving issues associated with Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
However, Paris is becoming aggressive; the shift in the French position is part of the ongoing rapprochement with Washington that followed the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as French president. Under Sarkozy, France has indicated a willingness to cooperate, rather than clash, with Washington over foreign policy. The heavy political and economic costs of opposing Washington are clearly something that Sarkozy understands.
Iran’s negotiating strategy throughout the standoff over its nuclear program has been based on the assumption that a margin of difference exists between Europe and the US, and that this difference allows Tehran a certain amount of room for maneuvering. That assumption must now be called into question. The world had become accustomed to a France bent on pursuing an independent foreign policy even in the teeth of American opposition. That time, however, that appears to be coming to an end.
The world should, perhaps, prepare itself to bid farewell to some long-held assumptions about France. While statements by Sarkozy and Kouchner need not be read as a declaration of war against Iran, they do suggest that a military solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis is now feasible, viewed as such no longer exclusively in Washington but also in Europe’s corridors of power.
