The US has means at its disposal to ensure compliance with the new reality regarding Iran…
My buddy, retired US Naval intelligence officer, Jennifer Dyer , elucidates for us the main reason why the US is acting unilaterally against Iran:
The bottom line is that American security cannot be held at risk by the choice of Europeans to live in the shadow of a nuclear threat from Iran. All else is secondary, for America. There is no justification for demanding that the president of the United States have any higher priority. Happily, that comports nicely with the security priorities of our allies in the Middle East.
I’ve said for years that if Europe really cares about its citizens, as well as for the people of Iran, they would choose meaningful policies against Iran to ensure it complies to international will. A blue smoke and mirrors agreement which allows Iran the appearance of divesting itself from its nuke program is a non sequitur as far as this current US administration is concerned, the Euros better get their heads right and soon. There’s more at stake here than a Finnish firm expanding its market to flip burgers in Tehran.
Europe Is Feeling Trumped
No U.S. president has been as loathed. But the Continent knows it still needs America.
The trans-Atlantic relationship is in trouble. No American president has ever been as widely loathed among Europe’s political class as Donald Trump. And not since the era of Freedom Fries and Axis of Weasels have so many European countries, this time including Britain, been spoiling for a fight with the U.S.
To the Europeans, Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran deal and impose sanctions on European companies that trade with Iran is a profound betrayal. As they see it, the U.S. made a solemn commitment to observe the deal after European countries entered into it in good faith. Harming European commerce with Iran to serve American interests is the act of a bully and an overlord, not of an ally and friend.
The Trump administration’s apparent indifference to European concerns boils the blood of even the most placid of Eurocrats. Europe is now actively looking for ways to inflict pain on the Trump administration in the short term, and in the long term to ensure its increasing independence from the U.S.
From the White House, things look very different. The Iran deal was not a legally binding instrument but the result of President Obama’s overreaching freelance diplomacy—as if Woodrow Wilson, counting the votes against the Treaty of Versailles, unilaterally committed the U.S. to join the League of Nations. The Europeans should have checked the relevant clauses in the American Constitution, assessed the state of congressional sentiment, and realized that Mr. Obama simply lacked the authority, political or constitutional, to commit the country permanently to such an agreement.
For the Trump administration, the Iran decision was not about deserting allies or overruling their wishes. Mr. Trump’s Middle East policies, after all, are quite popular with most of America’s Middle East allies. The Gulf Arabs and Israel felt betrayed by the Obama administration’s pivot to Iran; they are thrilled about the American change of course. The question isn’t whether the U.S. should stand by its allies but whether the Middle East policy preferences of America’s European allies should be imposed on those allies that actually live in the region.
