Why Do European Leaders Keep Making the Same Mistake About Iran?

European diplomacy on Iran has followed the same unsuccessful pattern for 20 years. Here is what keeps going wrong and whether this time is genuinely different.

The history of European diplomacy on Iran's nuclear programme is, to put it generously, a history of sincere effort producing limited results. The E3 format — France, Germany, and the UK negotiating with Iran — pioneered in 2003 and maintained through various reformulations, produced agreements that Iran subsequently violated, negotiations that collapsed at the moment of implementation, and a persistent gap between what European diplomats believed they had achieved and what Iranian decision-makers were actually prepared to deliver.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the JCPOA, reached in 2015 after years of diplomacy — was the high-water mark of this effort: a genuine agreement with genuine verification mechanisms that genuinely constrained Iranian nuclear activities for the period it was in effect. It was also an agreement that the US withdrew from in 2018 under Trump's first term, that Iran progressively violated in response to that withdrawal, and that all parties tried to revive in the 2021-2022 period without ever quite succeeding.

What went wrong, repeatedly, is the same thing: European diplomacy assumed that Iranian decision-makers were operating in a framework where a verifiable, balanced agreement was the objective. Iranian decision-makers were often operating in a framework where the preservation of optionality — the continued ability to develop nuclear capability if strategic circumstances required — was the objective, and where diplomatic engagement was a way of managing external pressure while that optionality was preserved.

This is not a characterization of Iranian bad faith in the simplistic sense. It is a characterization of rational strategic behaviour by a country that has concluded, correctly, that its regional adversaries face constraints that Iran does not face, and that maintaining nuclear ambiguity provides strategic value that a verifiable agreement would eliminate.

Whether the current crisis — the first actual military attack on Iranian nuclear infrastructure — has changed this calculation is the question that the April 6 deadline window will partly answer.