Western European allies could hesitate to sanction Iran for violating the 2015 nuclear deal even after lodging a formal diplomatic complaint, analysts say.
“This is an admission by the Europeans, but it’s also a tactic,” a Republican congressional aide discussing the European decision to invoke the Iran deal’s “dispute resolution mechanism” told the Washington Examiner. “They can use it as a delaying mechanism.”
European allies have refused to follow the United States out of the pact for more than a year, fuming at President Trump’s decision to exit the deal even as the diplomatic disputes with the regime turned into violent clashes in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. The Trump administration hopes the European powers will agree to reinstate U.N. sanctions against Iran, now that it has said it would not abide by the nuclear accord’s restrictions.
“And we look forward to working with them quickly and would expect that the U.N. sanctions will snap back into place,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday during a televised interview.
The reinstatement of sanctions could be a long time coming.
“Our own public opinion [is that] who is responsible for the crisis is Trump,” retired ambassador Gerard Araud, the top French diplomat in the U.S. from 2014 to 2019, told the Washington Examiner. “So you have also to understand the political difficulty for the Europeans to really now to, in a sense, punish Iran because Trump has denounced the agreement.”
The United Kingdom, France, and Germany, the E3, as the three European members of the deal are known, could agree to extend the “dispute resolution” process beyond the time frame suggested in the nuclear deal.
“Depending on who you ask, the dispute resolution mechanism either sets in motion a clock, the end of which is snapback; that is the hope the administration has — or it begins an indefinite process where the Europeans have an excuse not to snapback,” the Republican congressional aide said. “As always, it’ll be a matter of power politics.”
