U.S. President Donald Trump may do something characteristically foolish this month and decide not to re-certify the nuclear deal with Iran he labeled “an embarrassment” at last month’s U.N. General Assembly. The move would give Congress 60 days to decided whether to impose new sanctions on Iran.
For the sake of global security, the deal must hold. And so it’s good news that — despite Trump’s brinkmanship and headline-grabbing bluster — an unlikely story is emerging: Even as Trump batters away at the agreement, Europe’s major powers are stepping in to hold it together.
The Iran nuclear deal — more properly called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — was struck in 2015. It lifted sanctions against Tehran and unfroze billions of dollars worth of assets in exchange for greater scrutiny of Iran’s nuclear facilities.
What Trump seems to fail to understand is that the deal doesn’t just involve the U.S. and Tehran, but “the P5+1” — the five Security Council powers and Germany. And — aside from a faction of hard-liners in Iran — none of the other signatories agree with the U.S. President.
To be sure, Trump may not pull out of the agreement at all.
The U.S. president is a born blowhard, and his U.N. speech was filled with absurd threats and variegated rhetoric, sublime in delivery and hilarious in content. As much as Trump mistrusts Tehran, he recognizes that Iran — with its 80 million people — is a promising economic market.
Keeping the deal, while talking tough, would allow him to strut the stage sounding like the tough guy he so desperately wants to be while maintaining a status quo that benefits both the U.S. and its allies.
Trump speaks during the opening session of the U.N. General Assembly in New York | Justin Lane/EPA
But the possibility remains that he will pull the plug anyway.
And so it’s a good thing that the EU has responded to Trump’s blustering with uncharacteristic leadership. Indeed, Trump’s disparagement of the agreement at the U.N. General Assembly last month was met with an immediate riposte from French President Emmanuel Macron, who praised the deal for preventing nuclear instability in the Middle East.
Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the body charged with monitoring the deal, echoed the sentiment — quickly restating that the deal was being implemented on both sides.
The Europeans have been clear to the point of bluntness. Trump may be dividing the U.S., sowing discord on the Korean Peninsula, and doing his best to rile up the Chinese; but his influence in Europe, at least when it comes to Iran, is to bring Europe, Russia and China close together.
As ever, money is playing an important role.
Paris has launched into a long-awaited commercial embrace with Tehran. In July, France’s Total SA (along with China’s state-run China National Petroleum Corporation) signed a $5 billion agreement with Iran to develop its South Pars offshore field. Renault, Peugeot and Airbus are also now doing business in Iran.
Russia is a long-time nuclear partner of Iran’s and has considerable financial interests in its nuclear program. And China is never one to turn down a slice of the economic pie.
But for the EU, there’s more to the deal than economic opportunity.
The nuclear deal represents a “compromise on which hard-liners like France and the U.K. eventually came together with the soft-liners like Germany, Austria and Italy,” says Sebastien Duhaut, a consultant for development policies in the Middle East and North African region and a former Quai d’Orsay (French foreign ministry) staffer.
As a result, the agreement is that rarest of things: a concrete result of European unity. And so it’s only natural that the EU wishes to keep it in place.
Europe is also united in its belief that Iran’s moderates are the best hope — though the term is always relative — for the country’s future, as well as for stability in the Middle East.
According to Duhaut, the EU puts its faith in Iran’s moderates because “they offer hope that the regime can change — even if only slightly — from within, and, moreover, that the EU can somehow influence this process.”
Trump’s words have been a gift to Iran’s hard-liners, and a withdrawal would buttress Iran’s extremists, at the expense of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s more moderately-inclined brand of politics.
Whatever happens, one thing is clear. Even if Trump were to withdraw, it would not necessarily spell the end of the deal.
But Europe’s position is already having its intended effect.
As soon as U.S. hawks and Iranian hard-liners attack the deal’s integrity, the moderates fire back. Rouhani called Trump’s speech at the U.N. “ignorant, absurd and hateful” and attacked the president as a “rogue newcomer.”
But even as he did so, he was careful to stress his regard for the deal itself.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif also left the door open for the agreement’s continuation if Trump pulled out, saying recently in New York that Tehran’s options “will depend on how the rest of the international community deal with the United States.”
Whatever happens, one thing is clear. Even if Trump were to withdraw, it would not necessarily spell the end of the deal. The EU will fight alongside Iran’s moderates to keep it alive.
David Patrikarakos is the author of “Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State,” a Poynter fellow in journalism at Yale University and an associate fellow of the School of Iranian Studies at the University of St. Andrews.