Germany is considering designating the entirety of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity as the European Union debates sanctions and pulling its members’ ambassadors from Iran. It is a remarkable about-face from governments that just last month counseled Washington to drop sanctions on the IRGC and sought to invest in Tehran.
The Iran file was the first foreign policy problem beyond Europe’s borders on which the European Union sought to take the lead. Klaus Kinkel became Germany’s foreign minister in 1992. Like many Germans and European intellectuals, Kinkel was uneasy with supposed U.S. unilateralism and wanted to prove that the European approach of engagement and multilateral action was superior. He believed Iran to be the perfect test case to show Washington how counterproductive U.S. unilateral sanctions and military pressure could be.
UKRAINIAN FORCES HAVE SHOT DOWN OVER 300 IRANIAN DRONES FIRED BY RUSSIANS
Kinkel launched a “critical dialogue” in which the European Union would tie increased trade with Tehran with discussions about human rights. With money on the table, however, both Kinkel and various Eurocrats soon forgot about human rights. Germany’s share of Iran trade skyrocketed, with France not far behind.
Between 1998 and 2005, European Union trade with Iran nearly tripled, and the price of oil quintupled. Believing that President Mohammad Khatami’s call for a “dialogue of civilization” meant Tehran was sincere about diplomacy, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the so-called EU-3, took the lead in nuclear talks. European officials were never self-aware enough to realize their willingness to pump hard currency into Iran’s economy financed the very program they sought to control and encouraged the ayatollahs to resist reform. Finally, after years of catching Iran in lies, in 2005, the International Atomic Energy Agency referred the Iranian nuclear file to the United Nations Security Council.
Once again, the European Union sought to take charge, albeit with the U.S., China, and Russia as consulting partners. The rest is history. Iranian diplomats feigned history in diplomacy, but when their cheating grew too obvious, European officials would run interference for them. European leaders breathed signs of relief when Barack Obama entered the White House. President George W. Bush was gone and with him the threat of unilateral action. European leaders rightly saw Obama as a student of the European school of diplomacy, a man exclusively willing to embrace multilateral measures. As a political agreement rather than a treaty, the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action had little legal weight in Washington, but by enshrining it in U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, European leaders sought to prove that the U.N. and multilateralism worked.
Spin, however, does not equal substance. The nuclear deal reversed decades of nonproliferation precedent by leaving the violator with an industrial-scale program and putting an expiration date on controls. Israel might face an existential threat and the U.S. a strategic challenge but European diplomats did not care: They saw American “cowboy unilateralism” as a greater threat to world peace than an Iranian bomb.
Such bias blinded them to the fallacy of nuclear diplomacy and the reality that reformists were not sincere, but rather simply the good cop to the IRGC and supreme leader’s bad cop.
Today, European officials increasingly recognize the evil reality underpinning the Islamic Republic. But the new European awareness should not end there. European leaders wanted to show that their approach to diplomacy could win success better than America’s penchant for coercive measures. They failed. In order to ensure that no other rogue regime ever gets a 30-year, multibillion-dollar free pass, it is essential Europeans confront how unrealistic were their assumptions and how counterproductive was their philosophy.
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Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
