The EU’s goals, announced after yesterday’s foreign ministers meeting, are ambitious and reflect the Europeans’ political resolve. But even if the EU follows through on them, European businesses are unlikely to risk access to the U.S. market for the comparatively marginal revenue available in Iran. So any economic incentive for Iran to remain compliant will likely come from China, Russia and India, among others.
As a result, after having played a key role in the painstaking negotiations that resulted in the JCPOA, Europe will watch the deal’s commercial payoffs head East.
It would be insane for European businesses to pursue trade with Iran if it harms their trade with America.
But wait, there's more!
There is no shortage of explanations for why Europe finds itself powerless to back up its bark with some bite. To begin with, as Jeremy Shapiro explains in Foreign Affairs, the trans-Atlantic relationship continues to be based on a fundamental power asymmetry: Europe simply needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs Europe. Moreover, as Shapiro astutely notes, Europe’s internal divisions at times make the U.S. a more valuable partner for individual member states than the EU itself.
So Europe needs more unity to use its aggregate power. This would be useful to block Russia? No. Stop terrorism? No. Fight chaos around their southern periphery to prevent destabilizing migration to Europe? Oh no, of course not.
Europe, the author (and likely every Eurocrat in Brussels) thinks the EU needs more unity to resist America. Yes, the America that defended them from the threats of a Kaiser, Nazis, and commissars for much of the 20th century, which allowed them to think they could build a giant EuroDisney fantasy world where power is exercised not by tanks and secret police, but by ever closer cheese regulations.
And that urge to stick it to the Americans is currently strongest even when America has taken a step to oppose a theocratic, nuclear weapons-seeking, destabilizing power in the Middle East.
Yes, they think, Europe should create and use its power to bolster charter member of the Axis of Evil, Iran. Ah, the sweet economic and cultural friendship they could have, but for meddling America!
That's what those Euro-suckups really think. And yes, the picture of Iran's reprehensible foreign minister with the EU's top foreign policy official--the reprehensible in her own way tyrant fangirl Mogherini--was used in the article, which nicely makes my point.
So don't even talk to be about how a stronger European Union that aggregates their dispersed power into a single entity is in America's interests. That political "Europe" is not our friend.
America--for the sake of the free West which Europeans are a major part of--should want the European Union to die with festering boils.
