Martin Jay
The EU has had plenty of opportunity to work with Donald Trump and Iran to ensure that the Iran deal does not collapse. Instead, they’ve been dragging their feet and Trump might just walk away.
On May 12, President Trump seems poised to plunge the Middle East into darkness as he is likely to pull out of the so-called Iran deal – an agreement struck mainly between the West and Iran aimed at curtailing Tehran’s abilities to produce weapons-grade uranium.
Iran has stated that it will not stay in the deal if the US walks away.
If Trump goes ahead, the consequences could be cataclysmic in a region which is overflowing with rival power blocs at one another’s throats.
A war between Hezbollah and Israel is reported to be “inevitable” by western media buffs who in fact only replicate the line fed to them by the Israeli media; in recent days a number of experts have elaborated though on the tension building up between Iran and Israel, with the latter threatening to obliterate the former’s military installations in Syria.
This second scenario is more real, and just as, if not more, threatening.
One hates to think of a military landscape where both wars – plus the proxy East-West war going on in Syria – would all merge into one, with Assad, Hezbollah, Iran and Russia on one side and the US, Israel and Gulf Arab states on the other.
In a period where we have seen endless leaked stories about Trump’s new idea in Syria of pooling soldiers from Gulf Arab countries and a hue and cry about fake journalists espousing Assad’s propaganda (or Russia’s), perhaps it’s time to draw breath and seek sobriety on what is about to happen if Trump really goes ahead with his withdrawal of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). And perhaps also try and understand the logic of such a decision.
Break out the super hawks
The world war scenario is not far-fetched if Iran is forced to pull out of the JCPOA, and there is no expanded or improved deal, which is what the Saudis and Israelis want.
Picture this: without a deal on the table Iran can go back into isolation and build a bomb, and Saudi Arabia and Israel would be vexed enough to take matters into their own hands.
Whether this means Israel striking Iranian nuclear sites, or the Saudis building their own bomb – it’s a more flammable stand-off than we have under the current deal.
Ironically, it would be Washington which would be the least vexed.
Even though the Iranians boast of being able to produce higher concentrations of uranium suitable for making nuclear weapons within weeks, their “breakout” period which they are sticking to, so far, restricts them from making a nuclear bomb to around six months. If the deal is scuppered, this time it could be just around two months.
Many might argue that this is not a great difference. But the Trump administration, with uber-hawk John Bolton seething for war with Iran, is not interested in rational debate.
The most abstemious argument is that by allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon, the West will be putting Iran and Saudi Arabia (plus Israel) on a collision course with Tehran; by restricting them to only having ballistic missiles, a sort of peace can prevail.
Which is why Trump’s misaligned logic of seizing on the issue of Iran’s ballistic missiles is a triumph of arrested thinking. It’s nuts.
The Europeans, or rather the EU, played a big role in hammering out a deal with Iran and they specifically avoided any clauses in it relating to ballistics as they knew it would be unrealistic for Tehran to agree to any caveats.
But there’s another reason.
Allowing Tehran to have ballistics and to test them actually compounds peace in the Middle East as even the Saudis know that Iran would never use them unless they were attacked.
Even the Saudis didn’t kick up much of a fuss about Tehran testing its ballistic missiles.
Going ballistic
Only Trump. After only a few weeks in office he decides ballistics should be a factor and hence the crisis which is boiling.
On 20 April 500 parliamentarians in Europe wrote to Trump pleading with him not to abandon the Iran deal.
Apart from the instability in the region, they argue, it would render any other deals, that the countries who signed the Iran agreement, as more or less useless and “there would be little appetite for further sanctions if the deal was cancelled by the White House”.
The EU would pay a very high price for Trump’s feral ideas about foreign policy and banal need to make a splash in the Middle East
Now, you might think this is only the European Parliament, an institution so ineffective that its members don’t even have the right to propose draft legislation and whose travelling circus road trip from Brussels (in Belgium) to Strasbourg in France each month, costs EU taxpayers anywhere from $170 to $250 million a year, while 20,000 tonnes of CO2 emission are burnt in the folly.
But still, they’ve got a point. Yet, ironically, it’s the EU which has to accept a big part of the blame.
For months Trump has been hinting that he wants the Iran deal re-drafted and ballistics should be in it.
The EU’s foreign policy diva, Federica Mogherini though hasn’t been playing ball and has actually been supporting the stoic Iranians.
The Western media has not made much of the fact that Trump’s greatest friend in Old Europe – France’s Emmanuel Macron – has even asked the Iranians to include ballistics in a redrawn deal, as did Angela Merkel.
The only way that could happen is if the EU were to offer Iran some cash incentives.
This may sound absurd but the EU gives money to some pretty strange regimes around the world for entirely preposterous reasons in many cases.
The EU loses over 11 billion euros of aid money in Africa each year just due to incompetence and graft.
If the EU has that sort of cash to lose, why can’t it help Iran build commerce and provide jobs and give Trump what he wants?
Instability in the Middle East will bear heavily on Europe which is already struggling with immigration flows and homegrown terrorism.
For the EU to miss this opportunity not only shows how weak it is to Trump but also how ineffective it is as a project which often has delusional ideas about itself on the world stage – which a lost Iran deal will only further proves.
