THE European Union’s insistence on standing by President Barack Obama’s utterly flawed 2015 nuclear accord is both purblind and cynical. The dim-wittedness arises from the agreement’s fundamental failure to impose genuine restraints, not simply on the ayatollahs’ nuclear armament ambitions but also on their sponsorship of terrorism and malign interference in the affairs of their Arab neighbors.
US-led international sanctions had brought the Iranian economy to its knees and driven it to negotiate. There was a real opportunity to persuade Tehran to change its aggressive ways and rejoin the company of moderate nations.
Unfortunately the Iranian negotiators over some 20 months played a blinder in terms of negotiating, advancing and then retreating from points of agreement and finding last-minute excuses to delay a final signing. In the end they won a deal entirely lacking in real substance simply because they had exhausted US negotiators, led by John Kerry, Obama’s lackluster secretary of state. Russia and China were always eager to sign a deal that was so clearly against the interests of Washington and its allies in the region. The EU, which might have been expected to support Obama, was actually seeking an opportunity, probably any opportunity, to resume profitable commercial relations with Iran.
Hence the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” inked in April 2015 in Lausanne was neither ‘joint’ nor ‘comprehensive’. It was not ‘joint’ because the regime in Tehran had no intention of sticking to its terms, which in any event allowed the end of restrictions on its nuclear program after15 years. It was not the ‘comprehensive’ because it failed to trammel Iran’s international terrorist campaign designed to undermine and bring down other governments in the region.
The EU’s refusal to join the Trump administration in abrogating the 2015 deal is clearly self-serving. The calculation in Brussels was that there was more profit to be made by continuing to deal with Iran when US commercial rivals were once again banned from this potentially lucrative market. Indeed European companies might even expect official sweeteners to continue doing business with the ayatollahs in defiance of President Trump. However, the reality is turning out to be rather different. In the globalized world that the EU supposedly embraces, the influence of Washington on European multinational corporations reaches far. Despite a Brussels promise to protect EU firms, many large local enterprises have already quietly withdrawn from publicly-announced investments in Iran. No doubt some are now looking for more discreet ways to continue trading with Tehran.
But even while Brussels holds out an opportunistic hand of friendship to the ayatollahs, Tehran has been mounting terrorist operations on European soil. French police uncovered a plot by Iranian operatives to bomb the June Paris rally of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, attended by US politicians Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, who is President Trump’s lawyer. Two Belgian nationals of Iranian origin were arrested with half a kilogram of explosives to be used in the attack. This week French police arrested the pro-Iranian Algerian-born imam of a mosque in the port city of Dunkirk. France has frozen the assets of two top Iranians it has implicated in the bombing plan. As a result of this naked Iranian aggression, Brussels ought now to be wondering if it has not blundered badly by trying to frustrate Trump’s tough new sanctions against the ayatollahs.
