On the US Violation of the Iran Deal as an Insult to Europe
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The Iran decision has resonated among European leaders as none of Trump’s previous follies has. First, Europeans regard the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the pact is called, as the foremost proof of their capacity to act coherently and effectively. The Iran diplomacy came hard on the heels of the debacle over the Iraq War, when a divided Europe watched a U.S. president stumble into disaster. “Iran was the opposite of that,” says Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Instead of standing blinded in the headlights of American policy, Europe figured out what its own interests were.” European diplomats negotiated with the Iranians when the Bush administration refused to do so, designing a package of sanctions and incentives ultimately adopted and pushed through the U.N. Security Council by Obama.
Europe hoped to reduce tensions in the Middle East by drawing Iran out of its revolutionary shell. And it succeeded. The deal, Leonard says, was a “massive source of pride.”
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Hours after Trump’s announcement, Macron, Merkel, and British Prime Minister Theresa May issued a joint statement reminding the world that the deal had been “unanimously endorsed by the U.N. Security Council” and thus remained “the binding international legal framework” on Iran’s nuclear program. European Council President Donald Tusk announced that Trump’s Iran and trade policies “will meet a united European approach.”
The fur will fly if the United States goes ahead with secondary sanctions targeting European companies that continue to do business with Iran. Given the current bellicose mood in Washington, there is good reason to think that it will do so. Hours after assuming his post as U.S. ambassador in Berlin, Richard Grenell tweeted, “German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.” That would be Europe’s put-up-or-shut-up moment. “We’re going to have to treat the U.S. as a hostile power,” Leonard says. “We might have to introduce countermeasures against U.S. companies.” The mind reels. No, the heart breaks.
EDIT: And a mordbidy-funny closing to another Foreign Policy article on the US withdrawal:
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In short, Trump’s latest blunder shows that he’s not giving the American people the more restrained foreign policy he promised back in 2016, or correcting the various mistakes made by his predecessors (of which there were many). Instead, Trump is taking us back to the naive, unsophisticated, unilateralist, and overly militarized foreign policy of George W. Bush’s first term. The appointment of Bolton at the National Security Council, Pompeo at State, and the nomination of former torture supervisor Gina Haspel to run the CIA — it is a return not to realism but to Cheneyism. Remember how well that worked?
Otto von Bismarck once quipped that it was good to learn from one’s mistakes but better to learn from someone else’s. This latest episode shows that the United States is not really capable of learning from either. And it suggests that Winston Churchill’s apocryphal comment about the United States always doing the right thing should now be revised. Under Trump, it appears, the United States will always do the wrong thing but only after first considering — and rejecting — all the obviously superior alternatives.
