To understand the foreign policy goals of European engagement with Iran during its nascent phase, it is worth recalling a joke of the time.

In 1984, Germany’s then-foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher pursued the concept of “critical dialogue” to revive diplomacy with Iran’s first Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. This was supposed to be a kind of carrot-and-stick policy to improve the Islamic Republic’s incorrigibly reactionary human rights record with tough-love criticism; the incentive part of German engagement meant economic and diplomatic benefits to the mullah regime.