Lady Ashton’s Geneva triumph

When Catherine Ashton started on the daunting task of building the European Union's first diplomatic machine in late 2009, the Labour peer was met by guffaws of derision.

"Lady Qui?" they sniffed in Paris. In Berlin, they complained that Germany was getting short shrift. Besides, none of her people spoke German. In London, the attitude was "Britain does not want a European foreign policy and she'll never deliver one. So fine."

Amid this general climate of contempt, disappointment, and surprise, a senior EU official who went on to play a central role in her diplomacy offered a dissenting voice: "In four years' time Ashton will be a major figure."

As dawn broke over Geneva on Sunday, that remark from November 2009, almost four years to the day, looked rather prescient. The former Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament activist had brokered what looks like the biggest nuclear de-escalation of an era, the diplomatic breakthrough of the decade, a problem and a dispute so intractable it could have led to a devastating war engulfing the entire Middle East and beyond...

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“A credit to a common European diplomacy”

In the early hours of November 24, following five days of discussions (and ten years of talks), the "5 + 1" international negotiators – the United States, China, Russia, Great Britain, France and Germany – reached a deal on Iran's nuclear programme intended to ensure that Tehran’s capacity can only be used for non-military purposes.

“The success in Geneva is also a credit to a common European diplomacy,” writes Slate.fr: "In the absence of relations between the United States and Tehran and American scepticism about the usefulness of the exercise, Europe found itself in the front line" as ”leading negotiator on behalf of the 5 + 1". Its leadership was embodied by the patron saint of EU diplomacy, Catherine Ashton, to whom Foreign Policy magazine paid tribute: "But the bigger winner may be a low-profile British diplomat who shuns the press and had long been derided as a lightweight" —

She has spent the past few days locked in round-the-clock negotiations with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif.. […] The foreign ministers of the so-called P5+1 countries held brief meetings with Zarif this weekend, but Ashton led the talks and was Zarif's primary counterpart.”

"The historic agreement with the new Iranian government is a major success in the trajectory of Ashton, who heads up the European Union’s foreign policy," remarks El País for its part —

… six months away from the European elections, the peace deal with Iran gives the European High Representative the success she needed to wrap up her mandate.[...] The Geneva episode will, without doubt, will change the low opinion she has been held in until now.