At that stage it was understood that the EU’s efforts to find a solution seems to be useless without a coherent and common policy together with the US. Actually there was a strange situation in which the EU was trying to solve the issue by the soft policy tools on one hand and the US was one-track mind on her coercive measures such as economic sanctions and military option on the other hand. It was a scenario in which the EU was the good cop and the US was the bad cop. But it seems that our cops have forgotten the fact that this strategy can work out only when the good cop has the capability to restrain the bad cop. In our case, since the EU has not the capacity to restrain the US, its maneuverability and capability for handling the crisis was not sufficient. The lack of support from the US side blocked the ways for the EU to be able to submit strong and persuasive incentives. That’s why a series of inefficient negotiations were taken over and finally this process came to a deadlock in 2006 when Iran decided to restart its enrichment program. Later on the transatlantic policies have become closer in regard with sending a tough international message to the Iranian Government. That was the main reason that the EU finally agreed to send the case to the Security Council and decided to play with the coercive diplomacy cards just like the US. Henceafter the negotiations were being held among the permanent members of the Council beside Germany. Although it was really difficult to reach an agreement within this group, but they finally managed to find a common ground for further sanction decisions. Still, it could not be possible to adopt effective sanctions against Iran since Russia and China, the veto holder members of the Council, have important economic ties with Iran.

At the third year of the crisis the tension has gradually increased and process has reached to an impasse. There were two main reasons behind those developments. The first one was the presidency election in Iran that was resulted by the victory of the conservative President Mahmud Ahmadinejad and the second one was the inclusion of the Security Council into the process. Those two factors have triggered the crisis and today we are so far from the conciliation ground that was established previously by the 2004 Paris Agreement[1]. At that point we need to assess the fitness for purpose of this new coercive policy toward Iran. We need to ask that would it be better to handle the issue through the IAEA and EU’s conditional engagement policy or through the Security Council and coercive measures. When we compare those two rapprochements we clearly see that the positive outcomes of the first strategy were more than the second one. By the soft policy measures and engagement policy of the EU, the Iranian Government has been convinced to suspend its enrichment activities and sign the additional protocol. So we can say that while there were at least some short-term conciliation periods before the inclusion of the Security Council, all those positive grounds perished after the crisis case passed to the Council. Hereafter Iran did not care any sanction decision against her and on the contrary decided to accelerate its enrichment program. A simple example can give us some clues about the effectiveness of that western coercive strategy. At the beginning of the negotiations Iran just had 164 centrifuges[2] which remained the same until the Security Council has been included to that process, but today Iran has 3.000 centrifuges and last week President Ahmadinejad announced their new plans for 6.000 centrifuges. So again we need to ask whether the western policies are effective enough for convincing Iran to halt its program. So far we can say that the answer is ‘NO’. It can be said that neither the US’ nor the EU’s policies could not be considered effective or successful. Since the necessity of the US’ existence has proven several times during the negotiations, the general international opinion for a possible solution focus on the direct dialogue between Iran and the US. But since the Bush Administration has a precondition for negotiating on nuclear impasse that is not acceptable for Iran, there is still an important obstacle for that dialogue option. Hopefully there are conflicts among various American officials and experts about the US’ Iran policy and again hopefully while President Bush and his team still send ultimatums and give some signals about a possible military confrontation, former US officials such as Thomas Pickering are trying to provide complementary ways of communication by the back-channel negotiations. Because those efforts might be succeed at the end and might create the appropriate ground for a dialogue process especially for the new US President.

At a juncture that the dialogue option seems to be inevitable, the back-channel or direct efforts to facilitate this are also vital. Otherwise this crisis is going to be a vicious circle and at the end it might have undesirable consequences. On the other hand, a fresh policy included attractive incentives and stricter obligations should be designed to solve this problem. As the former measures and approaches proved to be insufficient and ineffective, it is better not spending more time by the same mistakes. So that, both the US and the EU are better to sort out a new common strategy in which they can support each other. Otherwise at a time when hawkish politicians are pressuring for harsher measures to be adopted against Iran and by the stricter containment policy they pursue, there are limits to what can be accomplished by the EU-Iran talks on nuclear impasse.

After the latest Security Council resolution which was also ineffective in terms of convincing Iran to halt its enrichment program the big six powers decided to restart the negotiations. In parallel with that decision on 16^th of April there was a new round of P5 + 1 negotiation in China. Although they could not take a concrete decision at the end of the meeting, but the big six powers agreed to continue their diplomatic efforts in the Iranian nuclear crisis. According to the news, during this three hours closed door meeting they reached agreement on some major parts of the issue and they also discussed a new political, economic and security incentives package to be given to the Iranian Government. But it is useful to remind that the package they are working on shall include attractive and meaningful issues that can both address Iranian security concerns and also being persuasive enough to solve the problem. Otherwise in a picture that Iran has a more advantageous position especially after the 2007 national intelligence estimate (NIE) report of the US, it doesn’t make sense to insist on a preconditioned negotiation or wasting time by same useless packages that in reality do not address any problem. It shall be kept in mind that when 2007 NIE Report stated that the nuclear weapons program of Iran was halted in 2003, it also put forward that there is not a serious and urgent threat ‘as tried to be projected’ in that case. So the remaining question is the international concerns in relation with the past activities of Iran (before 2003) which need to be address by a better understanding and common strategy.

Objective guarantees to be given by Iran to address international concerns about her nuclear program and the security guarantees to be given by the US to address Iran’s security concerns are the key steps in that stalemate. So it can be said that this is the time to get at the root of the trouble, find out the main factors paved the way for that crisis and recovering the problem by a fresh and well-established policy.