WARSAW, Poland — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in a jovial mood at a U.S.-led summit after a Wednesday evening presentation by a trio of Arab diplomats on the threat Iran poses to its other neighbors. He declared in a show of mock lamentation that he had been “dethroned” as the chief Iran hawk among Middle Eastern leaders, three diplomats in the room told the Washington Examiner.
That joke — an endorsement of the alarm sounded by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain — all but vindicated the Warsaw conference on Middle East peace in the minds of U.S. organizers. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s team suffered some quiet disrespect in the days leading up to the ministerial thanks to Western European disinterest in an event devoted to flogging Iran for its aggression throughout the region.
“We are seeing near-public unity among key Arab states and Israel to confront Iran’s aggression in the region,” Brian Hook, the State Department’s special envoy for Iran, told the Washington Examiner in an interview on the sidelines of the summit. “It’s important that the world understands that the view from the region is that the most serious and pressing security challenge for both Arab states and Israel is Iran.”
Netanyahu’s remarks — and the nearly unprecedented public meetings he’s held in Warsaw with Arab leaders — offset the frigidity of diplomats from major European powers, who declined to applaud the Arab triumvirate’s broadside against Iran. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom credit the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with defusing a nuclear crisis that would have exacerbated other aspects of Iranian misbehavior. U.S., Israeli, and Saudi officials countered Thursday that they should rethink that conventional wisdom in light of the historic consensus between the Jerusalem and Arab capitals.
“We cannot neglect the very good presence of Arab countries,” the head of a European delegation, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Examiner after a private conference session Thursday. “Also, we cannot neglect that most of these Arab countries and Israel are speaking with the same voice on Iran — very strong. So we should take it seriously.”
That’s exactly the response Netanyahu and Arab leaders were seeking. The Israeli prime minister added Thursday morning that European officials should welcome Israeli-Arab unity on Iran as a diplomatic achievement that could ease the path to Arab support for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
“The message from these states to the world is to pay attention to the fact that there is this agreement,” Hook said.
The E3, as the Western European powers are known, tried to minimize the significance of the ministerial before it even started Wednesday. Germany, France, and the European Union declined to send their foreign ministers to avoid lending diplomatic heft to a forum for criticism of Iran and the 2015 nuclear deal Western powers made with it. Organizers induced British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt to huddle Wednesday with U.S. and Arab officials to discuss the Yemen crisis — a meeting the administration scheduled to assure Europe that the summit would examine the Middle East more broadly.
Hunt left early Thursday, so he missed Vice President Mike Pence’s tongue-lashing of European defenders of the “devil’s bargain” of the nuclear pact, which President Trump exited last year. Pence called for European leaders “to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal” rather than persist in “an effort to break American sanctions against Iran’s murderous revolutionary regime” — a rebuke that grated on the annoyed ears of the pact’s supporters.
“It’s an unusual thing for Pence to do, given that we were told this conference wasn’t about Iran,” one European diplomat told the Washington Examiner, on condition of anonymity.
The ministerial took place at the PGE Narodowy, or National Stadium, an arena built to hold more 58,000 fans of Poland’s national soccer team. Leaders met in conference rooms that opened off one of the stadium’s endless hallways while audio of the conversations was piped into other rooms populated by career diplomats and political advisers. The delegation heads, seated at tables arrayed in a square, would turn their name cards on their sides to alert the moderator they wanted to speak; this format ensured that Pence’s targets received a prompt chance to reply to his criticism.
“Coercion alone is not a recipe for success,” replied the French diplomat Paris sent in lieu of Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, according to two Western diplomats present.
That rebuttal provided one of the more public demonstrations that the Iran hawks weren’t persuading their opponents, even those with less of a stake in the preservation of the nuclear deal.
“You need a number of different strands to engage, and what we’re sort of hearing on Iran at the moment is pretty much a single perspective,” a second delegation leader told the Washington Examiner while walking between meetings. “Everyone’s hearing the message that the Arabs and the Israelis are agreeing, [so] people need to pay attention. But people are also saying that paying attention can play out into a number of different ways of approaching the problem.”
That complaint contains an important admission — that Iran is indeed a problem. “No one spoke up saying that the data set about the threat that Iran poses in the Middle East is any way wrong or overhyped,” Pompeo said.
One of the European diplomats couldn’t help but recall that Pompeo’s team organized the summit while other administration officials worked on plans to implement President Trump’s abrupt December order to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria. Trump surprised allies with that decision, having agreed months earlier that American special forces operators should remain on the ground to stop Iranian fighters, already deployed to Syria on behalf of dictator Bashar Assad, from connecting a terror network that would stretch from Iran across Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea.
“The leaders of Russia, Turkey, and Iran are meeting today in Sochi discussing the future of Syria,” the European diplomat said. “I’m not sure whose meeting is going to have the greater impact.”
Warsaw got more press than Sochi, however, and U.S. and Arab officials felt good as they left the meeting. One Arab diplomat approached Hook in the hallway with a congratulatory greeting after the ministerial concluded.
“I don’t know how you managed to do all of this,” he told Hook. “It’s a shift in paradigm.”
“We did it together,” Hook replied.
