The German foreign minister, Mr Joschka Fischer, correctly described the announcement yesterday that Iran is to suspend all enrichment of uranium and co-operate with snap United Nations inspections as an "important day" for its relations with the international community.
This is true at several different levels. Mr Fischer, along with his French and British counterparts, Mr Dominique de Villepin and Mr Jack Straw, have been negotiating intensively with the Iranian authorities for several months in an effort to convince them to co-operate with the International Atomic Energy Agency. They decided to travel together to Tehran knowing they had been successful and that they brought with them a wider consensus within the European Union. It symbolises a more co-ordinated EU foreign policy approach to a crucial problem in a neighbouring region, in which Germany, France and Britain have a material as well as a political interest, having helped supply Iran with nuclear technology in the past and expecting to do so in the future.
They have also taken a different approach towards Iran (along with Russia) than the United States. President Bush and his administration include Iran in their "axis of evil", states which should not be engaged but opposed, isolated and forced to comply if necessary. It follows that whoever is successful in convincing Iran to co-operate has won a larger argument about the superiority of engagement and diplomatic pressure.
Iran's announcement yesterday that it will sign an additional IAEA protocol, co-operate fully with the agency inspections and suspend all enrichment is a clear gesture towards the EU's approach. It represents a tactical victory by the secular reformers within the regime grouped around President Mohammad Khatami. That it is not a strategic breakthrough is made clear in the qualifications voiced by those who oppose the president and say they have no intention to abandon nuclear enrichment, which could allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons. This conflict must be resolved in coming weeks as the IAEA conducts inspections and reports on whether Iran is complying with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
There is increasingly convincing evidence that Iran has been accumulating technologies and material which could allow it to make nuclear weapons, but not that it has as yet reached this point. Whether it should do so is a major matter of contention between reformist and clerical fundamentalists. The unanimous IAEA decision last month to set a deadline for compliance was based on such evidence. Iran would be wiser to comply than face isolation.