And, when one looks at the performance of President Donald Trump, that same description springs to mind.
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As Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on Foreign Relations recently commented in The New York Times, Europe must now decide “not if they stick with the deal but will they stand up to the American effort to unravel it”.
Now, the three European signatories must figure out how to save that deal and continue working with a US president who has mostly shown them contempt.
The 4 countries, along with Russian Federation and China, are set to hold working-level talks in Vienna next week to discuss ways to keep the nuclear deal alive without the US.
The lifting of worldwide sanctions gave Iran access to the world’s markets for the first time in almost four decades. Staying within the deal gives Iran more leverage to convince the Europeans to continue to trade and to protect their companies from American sanctions.
In railing against Iranian links to the Houthi rebels in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon through the lens of “state-sponsored terrorism”, it is easy to both negate the levels of autonomy that these organizations have and conflate them with groups like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, organizations that our ally Saudi Arabia has been accused of funding. But the moderate Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, persuaded the Iranians to accept it and signed up to the deal.
Alternatively, the European Union could seek exemptions from the Trump administration. The wars the USA has waged, fomented, and aided and abetted in the greater Middle East over the course of the past quarter-century have blown up complex societies, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya, Syria and Yemen. Iran has also used their surge in income to support Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad, with whom the U.S.is now engaged in armed conflict.
His critics have mocked his misplaced trust in the Americans.
Russel also said that Kim Jong-Un is unlikely to put any trust in USA promises in a negotiation in the first place, even before Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran deal.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, Iran has so far complied with all of the conditions established under the nuclear deal.
That was made stunningly clear by a tweet from the new ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, shortly after he presented his credentials last Tuesday, declaring that German companies doing business in Iran “should wind down operations immediately”.
A more likely, lower risk scenario with some plausible deniability would be returning to terrorism outside the Middle East, targeting Israelis and Jews, as Iran did in Argentina and Bulgaria in the past.
Trump’s decision achieves nothing tangible for America, or the world. They were trying to take over the Middle East by whatever means necessary.
Netanyahu’s government is a coalition of hawkish nationalist parties, who have adopted a hardline stance on most issues.
But the reach of the USA financial system, the dominance of the U.S. dollar, Trump’s efforts to weaken the WTO and the presence of European companies’ operations in the United States all weaken any potential EU measures.
Israel and Iran engaged in an extensive military exchange on the heels of Trump’s decision to leave the deal. I’m not the national security decision-maker.
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Oil prices had increased about $20 per barrel since Trump was inaugurated, following a campaign in which he promised “a totally different deal” with Iran over sanctions.
