The difficulties of maintaining a common transatlantic front against Iran were on display last week when European officials suddenly voiced concern about Barack Obama’s public pledge to open talks with Tehran. A U.S. initiative of this sort, the officials said, could undercut the work they have done to make the Iranians suspend nuclear enrichment as a precondition for a full dialogue.

In the past, the so-called “EU-3″ - Britain, France and Germany - had chafed at the Bush administration’s refusal to envision direct talks with Tehran, complaining that Washington needed to be more directly involved in supporting the EU trio in trying to negotiate with Tehran. Last year, a common front emerged behind a Western demand that Tehran suspend nuclear enrichment as a precondition for the EU to move forward with its “carrots” and for Washington to lay down its “stick” to the degree of exploring direct high-level contacts with Tehran.

Now European governments worry that the position taken by Obama in the presidential primary campaign - in which he advocated sitting down with adversaries without preconditions - goes far past the negotiating position that Europe has been taking in tandem with Washington.

The transatlantic split came to light in an article by Glenn Kessler that appeared in the Washington Post on June 22 reporting the unease felt by Europeans in regard to Obama’s promise to open diplomatic talks with Iran without any preconditions. François Heisbourg, a Paris-based strategic analyst, was quoted saying: “Dropping a unanimous Security Council condition would simply be interpreted by Iran and America’s allies as unconditional surrender, and America’s friends would view this as confirmation of America’s basic unreliability.”

The EU has adopted a dual approach - a carrot-and-stick policy, if you will - for dealing with Iran. On the “carrot” side, they recently joined Russia, China, and the US in offering Iran an incentive package that included the promise of diplomatic talks, trade agreements and aid in developing a civilian nuclear program in exchange for the suspension of its uranium enrichment. However, after Tehran failed to give an answer on the incentive offer, the European states came together and issued a set of new sanctions on Monday, June 23.

Based on measures previously agreed upon by the U.N. Security Council, the sanctions target businesses and individuals believed to be connected to Iran’s nuclear programs. Iranian senior experts and officials such as Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar and Gholamreza Aghazadeh, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, will be denied visas to the EU and the assets of Iran’s largest bank - Bank Melli, which has branches in Paris, Hamburg and London - will be frozen. The US imposed similar sanctions on Bank Melli’s activity in America last year.

Despite the EU’s hard line, officials maintain that the incentive package is still on the table if Iran agrees to halt its enrichment.

Iran has repeatedly refused to suspend its uranium enrichment, arguing that it is intended for civilian uses such as electricity generation. Western capitals suspect that Iran’s nuclear-energy program is merely a cover for making nuclear weapons.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini condemned the new EU sanctions as “illegal” and warned that they could hurt future diplomatic efforts. It remains to be seen whether these latest sanctions will affect Iran enough to push them to halt the enrichment. Past sanctions by the U.N. Security Council and the United States have failed to do so thus far, and skyrocketing oil prices may cushion the economic impact of the latest sanctions in Iran, the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter. Some also predict that the sanctions will merely continue to push Iran’s focus away from the West and closer to China and other areas of Asia. After the EU announced the new economic sanctions, Iran’s new parliamentary speaker - Ali Larijani, the former Iranian nuclear negotiator, who seems to be a political moderate — warned that the sanctions could push Iran away from diplomacy.

Updates:

“US considers sending envoys to Iran,” Financial Times, 25 June 2008

“The Europeans Step Up,” New York Times, 28 June 2008

“New US Nuclear Sanctions on Iran,” BBC News, 8 July 2008

The Irish “no” to the European Union’s modernization blueprint has fueled a new round of skeptical American commentary about Europeans’ real ambitions. “In Europe, a Slide Toward Irrelevance” was the title of an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Robert Kagan, a foreign-policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate John McCain. “The danger of this latest blow to European confidence is that our allies, including Britain, could gradually sink into global irrelevance,” Kagan wrote.

This view dwells on an alleged pattern in which European voters seem to shun opportunities to gain unity for EU action. Further, it appears as if Europe’s governments have been unable to put together the political clout necessary to match the EU’s economic weight. This new negative view among some analysts about the EU’s lack of ambition is the opposite of the prevailing concern in recent years in Washington about the risks of seeing the EU seek to become a counter-balancing power to the United States in international affairs.

Nowadays, according to Kagan, Europeans seem hesitant to gird themselves to face a growing array of challenges. The outcome of the Irish ballot has left the EU less equipped to deal with Western economic slowdown, the increasingly competitive Asian sector, mounting European dependence on imports of monopolized Russian energy, and immigration and assimilation issues. The Treaty of Lisbon – now in limbo – was intended to address a number of these problems, notably by restructuring the EU’s leadership institutions to provide a stronger voice on the international level.

Now the proposed treaty is threatened with unraveling. Ireland was the only country where it was put to a popular vote, and European leaders say privately that it would have been rejected in some other EU nations that chose to avoid putting it to vote by sticking to the formula of parliamentary ratification.

Such questions about Europeans’ deepest – and perhaps unconscious – attitudes are not confined to Washington. Gideon Rachman, a leading commentator of the Financial Times in London, seems to concur in Kagan’s skepticism about Europeans’ political will, writing recently that Europeans may actually prefer a kind of “nirvana” based on weakness rather than having to shoulder the burdensome responsibilities of a global political and economic power. Europeans, Rachman said, may ultimately want nothing more than to become a kind of super-safe Switzerland, with no real voice in world power politics.

Hubert Vedrine, the former French foreign minister, expressed similar questions about Europeans’ collective political will in an interview with European Affairs to be published next week.

“Of all the foreseeable poles in the multi-polar world, it is the European pole whose future is the most uncertain; I question whether Europe truly has the will and motivation to become a full player. Maybe Europeans will prefer becoming a huge Switzerland – a well-protected zone with a very high standard of living and great liberty, but without the responsibility of power. European public opinion seems to suggest a desire for this condition of being detached from responsibility.”

Kagan famously created the figurative comparison that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus” in his book Of Paradise and Power, which argued that Americans are more inclined than Europeans nowadays to see force as a solution to international crises. His subsequent book, Dangerous Nation, described America’s historical readiness since independence in the 18the century to undertake international intervention. (It was reviewed in European Affairs by James Steinberg, who has been named to Obama’s panel of foreign-policy advisers. Kagan has spent the last four years in Europe, and his return to Washington was marked by the publication of his new treatise, The Return of History and the End of Dreams. This book warns about possible new threats to global stability from autocratic powers, notably Russia and China: it will be noted in the forthcoming issue of European Affairs.

The European Parliament approved new EU-wide regulations with tougher measures against illegal immigrants – a population thought to number eight million (compared to an estimated 12 million in the US). The EU law, a “return directive,’ is intended to harmonize laws and policies on the politically explosive issue in all 27 member states by providing a common framework for each country’s national laws. A central point in the directive is a provision in which illegals that refuse to go home can be detained for up to 18 months and then deported – with a ban on them from reentering the EU for five years.

Parliamentary assent marked the final step in instituting the new set of regulations.

The rules in the return directive exempt asylum-seekers. But they apply to foreigners who have overstayed their visas.

Critics of the new measure brand it as an abuse of migrants’ human rights, arguing that the length of detention is disproportionate and unwarranted. But proponents retort that the directive will actually improve immigrants’ protection in EU countries where the laws currently allow indefinite detention of illegal immigrants. In a statement issued, the European Parliament said that “member states will be banned from applying harsher rules to illegal immigrants, but allowed to keep or adopt more generous rules.” It adopted the legislation as a step forward in EU integration that will help governments cope with the threat of a rising tide of illegal immigrants, notably from Africa. Human-rights activists warned that the new law will be exploited by some EU countries alarmed by inter-ethnic tensions as Europe’s demographic make-up shifts as Muslims arrive from the Middle East and Africa, and Eastern Europeans move west.

Flak has also come from Latin America about the new directive. Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, threatened to disrupt oil exports to Europe over the issue. Some Latin American countries apparently are afraid they might lose remittances from their emigrants to Europe. The EU Observer notes, “last year immigrants in Europe, the US and Japan sent money back to their families in Latin America and the Caribbean amounting to just under €43 billion, more than the region receives from foreign direct investment or development assistance combined.”

The US is wrestling with similar problems of immigration without yet finding a national consensus. Many American business sectors depend heavily on immigrants, some of them illegal.

Analysts predict that immigrant labor will be increasingly important to Europe given the pejorative economic effect of its aging indigenous populations. Additionally, it has become increasingly evident that the EU lacks the skilled migrant labor it needs in order to stay competitive in the global economy. Europe needs help filling the void left by the highly educated workforce that has emigrated – primarily to the US. Using Census data on education and income, French economist Gilles Saint-Paul of Toulouse University explained to The Wall Street Journal that “a disproportionate number of European immigrants in the US were among the brightest prospects in their fields…the people who are most important for innovation and entrepreneurship.”

The European Chemicals Agency, which started operations in June in its Helsinki headquarters, marks the latest chapter in the European Union’s efforts to address consumer needs and concerns though market and business regulations. (Similar programs already in place have included antitrust regulation in the computer industry and rules imposing greater consumer privacy.) With its corresponding regulatory legislation, known as REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals), the new EU program requires companies to prove that a chemical is safe before they put it on the market.

This approach is the exact opposite of current US policy in which regulators have to prove that a chemical is harmful in order for it to be pulled from the market.

The EU initiative has aroused transatlantic controversy. But now that it has been pushed through in Europe, it is causing American companies with markets in Europe to take into account the new requirements, often across their whole production, in everything from processed food to household furnishings and beauty products.

Supporters defend the step as helping the environment and protecting the health of individuals, Daryl Ditz, senior policy adviser at the Center for International Environmental Law, believes that the new regulations will “compel companies to be more responsible for their products…they’ll have to know more about the chemicals they make, what their products are and where they go.”

For example, any chemical suspected of causing cancer or other health problems will be placed on a new list of “substances of very high concern” and all of this data will be made accessible to the public for the first time via the internet. Supporters hope that by making information - such as the “high concern list” - available to the public, consumers will shirk from certain products and the subsequent decline in demand will pressure manufacturers to halt production of dangerous chemicals.

American chemical manufacturers and the Bush administration have strongly opposed the new EU measures because they believe that they will hurt manufacturers and offer minimal benefits to the consumer. In order to continue selling to the EU market of nearly 500 million people, US manufacturers like DuPont Chemicals will have to spend “tens of millions” of dollars to register chemicals and also pull major products that contain chemicals placed on the list of “substances of very high concern.”

In the absence of similar strong federal regulations for chemicals in the US, individual states have taken it upon themselves to address consumer concerns. Last month, Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) reintroduced the Kid Safe Chemical Bill to Congress. The bill proposes that all chemicals used in baby bottles, children’s toys and other products are proven to be safe before they are put on the market - a philosophy that echoes the EU approach invoking the “precautionary principle” favored in Europe and gaining ground in some quarters in the US.

See Also:
“Chemical Law Has Global Impact,” Washington Post, 12 June 2008
“European Chemicals Agency: Turning REACH into Reality,” Speech by José Manuel Durão Barroso, President of the European Commission, 3 June 2008
“Lautenberg, Solis, Waxman Introduce Legislation To Protect Americans From Hazardous Chemicals In Consumer Products,” 20 May 2008

Seven NATO members signed a pact in late May formally establishing an alliance-wide “center of excellence” in Estonia to combat the growing threat of cyber-terrorism.  Officially called the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, the center will be operational later this year and officially open its doors in early 2009.  It will have an initial staff of 30 experts, half of whom will come from the seven founding countries.  The U.S. will participate as an observer alongside the seven: Germany, Italy, Spain, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Estonia. Other alliance states are expected to join the project as it moves forward.

The centre’s purpose is to improve preparedness and inter-operability within NATO on cyber-defense, officials said, adding that allied experts also want to draw up an alliance-wide cyber-defence doctrine, including legal mechanisms. The center will also provide training, assess threats and steer research projects.

The choice of Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, as the site for the center is significant and appropriate.  Just more than a year ago, Estonia - which has a high degree of computer infrastructure - became the first victim of an all-out cyber assault on the nation’s on-line electronic services in a string of network attacks that apparently originated in Moscow.  The Estonian government had moved a bronze statue of a Soviet soldier-a reminder of the USSR’s former dominance of the country-from a prominent spot in central Tallinn to a military cemetery. 

The current issue of European Affairs carries a comprehensive and insightful analysis of the “cyber war” on Estonia a year ago. Kertu Ruus, an Estonian journalist (who is a member of our quartely’s editorial board) tracks exactly how Estonian government and private networks were attacked by massive “botnets,” which are huge networks of so-called “zombie” computers that are hacked into and made to access targeted networks.  Ruus’s article also details the NATO allies’ response to the attacks, and the call by some to invoke Article 5’s rule that an attack on one ally is an attack on all.

The U.S., for its part, has also stepped up its efforts to defend against cyber crime.  As noted here last month, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff has compared the risks presented by cyber terror to the impact of 9/11.  Addressing a group of IT professionals in Silicon Valley last month, he implored the industry to “send some of your brightest and best to do service in the government.

Meanwhile the European Observer  says that EU has launched a public consultation on how to combat high-tech crime and warfare, but predicts that Brussels will move  cautiously on the possible legislative remedies and instead stress strengthened cooperation between EU states.