Iran nuclear talks: Lady Ashton's Geneva triumph takes centre stage
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.
The partial but significant defusing of the Iranian nuclear question is no doubt fundamentally due to the change of regime in Tehran this summer and the Obama administration's decision to get serious about talking to Iran for the first time in a generation.
But Ashton's dogged nurturing of years of on-off negotiations, what is described in Brussels as her "emotional intelligence" in steering and mediating the highly complex talks, paid off handsomely. On Sunday, she found herself in the unaccustomed position of being deluged with compliments.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/24/iran-nuclear-talks-lady-ashton-geneva-triumph