G.As the European Union debates sanctions and pulls its member’s ambassador out of Iran, Ermany is considering designating the entire Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. , is a surprising turn of the government that called for investment in Tehran.
The Iran issue was the first foreign policy issue beyond Europe’s borders that the European Union sought to take the lead on. Klaus Kinkel was appointed German Foreign Minister in 1992. Like many Germans and European intellectuals, Kinkel was uneasy about the supposed unilateralism of the United States and wanted to prove the superiority of the European approach to engagement and multilateral action. rice field. He believed Iran was the perfect test case to show Washington how counterproductive US unilateral sanctions and military pressure can be.
Ukrainian military shoots down over 300 Iranian drones launched by Russians
Kinkel launched an “important dialogue” in which the European Union will link increased trade with Tehran to discussions on human rights. But once money was on the table, both the Kinkel and the various Eurocrats quickly forgot about human rights.Germany’s share of trade with Iran soared, and France was not far behind.
Between 1998 and 2005, trade between the EU and Iran nearly tripled and oil prices quintupled. Believing that President Mohammad Khatami’s call for a “dialogue of civilizations” meant that Tehran was sincere in its diplomacy, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, the so-called EU-3, took the lead in the nuclear negotiations. European officials understand that their willingness to pump hard currency into the Iranian economy has funded the very programs they seek to control, prompting the Ayatollah to resist reforms. Finally, after years of catching Iran’s lies, the International Atomic Energy Agency referred Iran’s nuclear files to the UN Security Council in 2005.
The European Union has tried to take the lead again, despite having the US, China and Russia as consulting partners. The rest is history. Iranian diplomats camouflaged history in diplomacy, but when their wrongdoing became too obvious, European officials intervened.European leaders as Barack Obama entered the White House showed signs of relief. President George W. Bush walked away with the threat of unilateral action. No wonder European leaders viewed Obama as a student of the European diplomatic school and willing to accept multilateral measures. As a political agreement rather than a treaty, the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Action Plan had little legal significance in Washington, but its inclusion in UN Security Council Resolution 2231 has encouraged European leaders to , tried to prove that the United Nations and multilateralism work.
However, spin is not the same as real. The nuclear deal overturned decades of non-proliferation precedents by leaving an industrial-scale program for violators and imposing an expiration date on regulations. Israel might face an existential crisis and the United States might face a strategic challenge, but European diplomats didn’t care. They saw US “cowboy unilateralism” as a greater threat to world peace than the Iranian bomb.
Such prejudices have blinded them to the fallacies of nuclear diplomacy and the reality that reformers are not honest, they are simply good cops of the IRGC and the Supreme Leader’s bad cops.
Today, European officials are increasingly aware of the evil reality that underpins the Islamic Republic. But Europe’s new consciousness should not stop there. European leaders wanted to show that their approach to diplomacy could be more successful than America’s tendency to coercive measures. In order to prevent other rogue regimes from getting a free pass to his 30 years and billions of dollars, Europeans must understand how unrealistic their assumptions are and how impractical their philosophies are. Being productive is essential.
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Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) are contributors to Washington Examiners Beltway confidential. Senior Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
