Tehran commentariat split on value of talks with Europeans

Iran’s outreach to European powers has divided Tehran’s political commentators over whether engaging France, Germany and Britain serves any real purpose amid the Islamic Republic's talks with Washington.

Senior diplomats from Iran and the three European signatories to the 2015 nuclear deal met in Istanbul on Friday in what appears to be Tehran’s attempt to prevent a "snapback" of the UN sanctions that were suspended for ten years as part of that deal.

But the initiative is being questioned—somewhat surprisingly—by voices long known for advocating diplomacy, such as former lawmaker Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh.

“There is no point in holding talks with Europeans. Iran’s only solution is to continue negotiations with the United States,” he told the conservative Nameh News on Friday

“Europe’s influence will remain insignificant as long as Trump is the President of the United States.”

Missed chances

A former head of parliament’s foreign policy committee, Falahatpisheh argued that Iran’s recent diplomatic overtures to the signatories of the 2015 deal are little more than a symbolic attempt to break out of the political impasse created by Washington.

“Iran should have negotiated with (US President) Trump during his first term,” Falahatpisheh said. “Unfortunately, Iranian officials are known for their costly and untimely decisions.”

This critique of past decisions may be shared by many in Tehran’s commentariat, but the way forward is certainly not.

“Even if talks with the Americans are paused or entangled in new complexities, we should not stop our negotiations with the Europeans,” political analyst Ali Bigdeli told the moderate outlet Fararu.

“The truth is that the Europeans are holding a hostage called the ‘trigger mechanism,’ which they can use to pressure us. If they don’t agree to postpone its activation by a year, they can use it as leverage against us,” he added.

Fearing the trigger

The trigger clause in the 2015 nuclear deal allows any signatory to reimpose lifted UN sanctions on Iran. The United States effectively forfeited that prerogative when the first Trump administration withdrew from the agreement in 2018.

It remains unclear whether the so-called snapback of sanctions was discussed in the Istanbul roundtable on Friday.

European officials described the event as a broad discussion about Tehran’s relationship with the West. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi asserted that it had “nothing to do with negotiations with Washington.”

It did, as far as the media inside Iran are concerned. Whatever their view on the significance of the Istanbul meeting, most editorials linked it to the talks with the US.

“The position of the United States, which has initiated bilateral negotiations with Tehran, has somewhat sidelined Europe’s role,”Khabar Online wrote in an editorial on Friday.

“The nuclear negotiations are not merely a diplomatic engagement between Iran and Europe, but will more broadly affect the balance of power in the region,” it concluded.