While Trump buys himself time on Iran, other countries are swooping in to avert disaster

Berlin: As US President Donald Trump decides whether to go to war in Iran, key European countries are pursuing a diplomatic path, hoping to find a negotiated solution and de-escalate the conflict between Israel and Iran before it engulfs the region.

After several days of back-channel discussions, foreign ministers from Britain, France and Germany, together with Kaja Kallas, the European Union foreign policy chief, are scheduled to hold talks Friday with their Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.

If the meeting, scheduled for Geneva, takes place, it would be the most significant European involvement since Israel launched its surprise attacks against Iran last week. And it would be the first in-person discussions between Iran and the West since Israel began attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities and other sites.

Washington is aware of the talks and will pay attention to their outcome.

But it remains far from certain whether any talks can succeed at a moment when both sides seem intent on trading blows, whether the US will pursue a competing diplomatic track, whether Iran is prepared to concede on ending its enrichment of uranium, or what Trump’s intentions actually are.

The president has at times suggested that he might send Vice President JD Vance and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to renewed negotiations of their own. At other times, he has seemed to favour an all-out Israeli victory aided by US “bunker-buster” bomb strikes on the deeply embedded Iranian facility called Fordow.

Trump has made it clear in the past that he wants a deal and would prefer not to engage the US in another war in the Middle East. At the same time, he has vowed, as presidents have before him, that Iran should never be able to build a nuclear weapon.

He has used the threat of US military force to try to drive the Iranians to the negotiating table, where they would now arrive in an even weaker position than before.

Araghchi has repeatedly said that Iran is open to negotiating tough limits on its nuclear program, but not to giving up uranium enrichment for civilian purposes. For now, Israel seems intent on pursuing its military campaign to deny Iran any nuclear program, and perhaps even to topple the Iranian government.

Until now, the Europeans, who were instrumental in the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that Trump abandoned in 2018, have been effectively sidelined – first by the bilateral US-Iran talks and then by the war.

But they, too, are committed to ensuring that Iran does not have nuclear weapons, and they are trying now to exert the limited leverage they have to end the war and to ensure a non-nuclear Iran.

Kallas and the Europeans had a phone conversation with Araghchi on Monday, she said, to “see what more can we do to really sit down and de-escalate”.

On Wednesday, they issued a joint statement calling for restraint and de-escalation between Iran and Israel. On Friday, they are set to urge the Iranians to return to negotiations, even as Trump holds the possibility of US military involvement over their heads.

Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot of France said Thursday at a Paris news conference that Iran’s message was “relatively clear: there is a willingness to resume talks, including with the United States, provided that a ceasefire can be reached”.

“On our side, there is a willingness to resume negotiations, provided that these negotiations can lead to lasting, substantial steps backward by Iran regarding its nuclear program, its ballistic program and its activities to destabilise the region.”

European views are unlikely to be an important factor in Trump’s decision on whether to attack Iran. He already tried to bypass Europe and negotiate a nuclear deal on his own, though unsuccessfully.

Still, if US troops are hit by Iran, Washington will expect European support. If a negotiated deal is ever completed, the Europeans will be important, both at the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the watchdog for the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, in helping to enforce it.

Europe’s position is hampered by its division over Israel. German, French and European Union officials have ramped up criticism of Israeli military conduct in the Gaza Strip.

But they have been much more guarded and divided when it comes to the strikes on Iran. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has welcomed them; Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has warned against a widening war.

Europe once played a larger role in the Iranian nuclear challenge.

When he was the bloc’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana first approached Iran in 2007 about its troubling nuclear program. Solana opened talks with the Iranians that later expanded to include the permanent member countries of the U.N. Security Council – Britain, France, China, Russia and the US — plus Germany, under the chairmanship of the European Union.

That produced the 2015 agreement, which gave Iran relief from punishing economic and military penalties in return for limits on its enrichment of uranium and the removal of any uranium enriched to a higher level.

Because the deal had time limits and did not ban all Iranian enrichment, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Trump excoriated the pact, which Trump called “the worst deal in history”.

Trump withdrew the US from the agreement in 2018, to European anger. The Europeans stayed, but a year later, Iran resumed enrichment activities to higher levels not required for civilian use.

Now European leaders are torn. They do not want Iran to produce a nuclear weapon. But they are fearful of a regional war that damages energy infrastructure, drives up the price of oil and gas even further, closes the Strait of Hormuz and brings another wave of panicked asylum-seekers to Europe.

Kallas is scheduled to present what is expected to be a critical review of Israel’s actions in Gaza to foreign ministers on Monday. António Costa, president of the European Council, has suggested that Israel could be found in breach of its human rights obligations and might face penalties from Brussels. But whether EU member states actually have the consensus needed to reprimand Israel is not yet clear.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, left, and French President Emmanuel Macron.Credit: Getty Images

Macron warned this week against the Israel-Iran conflict spiralling into a “regime change” effort like the war in Iraq. He has asked his foreign minister to work with Brussels and the other Europeans to come up with “a stringent negotiated settlement” to end the war.

France has in the past been the toughest of any Western country in demanding that Iran’s nuclear program be contained and strictly supervised, to maintain the credibility of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. At the same time, in a sign of displeasure with the Israeli government, Macron is toying with a symbolic recognition of a Palestinian state.

Merz said this week that Israel was doing the world’s “dirty work” in trying to stop Iran from reaching its nuclear ambitions. He defended the comment to reporters on Wednesday and said the sentiment was widely shared.

But Germany, long a vocal supporter of Israel, is increasingly queasy about Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Israel’s air defence system fires to intercept Iranian missiles over Tel Aviv on Thursday.Credit: AP

Speaking at a news conference Wednesday about the Iran attacks, a spokesperson for the German Foreign Ministry, Christian Wagner, began with a long critique of what he called the “catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza”.

For all of that, European leaders appear to have relatively little sway with Iran or Israel, or even Trump. Their best leverage in the nuclear conflict might be a remnant of the 2015 deal with Iran, known as “snapback sanctions”.

It effectively allows Europe to call for a reinstatement of the financial and military sanctions on Iran that were lifted as part of the agreement.

That threat is set to expire in October, along with the rest of the 2015 agreement, adding another element of urgency to any negotiations.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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