Iran applied a rather unusual tactic for wooing the European Union on Wednesday: It threatened to kill European soldiers.
Responding to the EU’s overdue triggering on Tuesday of an aggrievement mechanism in the 2015 nuclear deal, President Hassan Rouhani warned that, “Today the American soldier is not safe, tomorrow it could be the turn of the European soldier.”
Don’t misunderstand Rouhani. These fighting words aren’t a sign of courage and resolve, but rather a flailing facet of Iran’s desperate strategy to maintain appeasement from the EU.
This fits with Iran’s escalating steps to abandon its commitments to the nuclear accord. Its hope is that escalated threats will persuade the EU to provide increased sanctions relief. As proved by Iran’s economic crisis, U.S. sanctions reintroduced following President Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the nuclear deal have wreaked havoc.
Iran has few solutions.
That’s largely because the relative size and opportunity of the U.S. economy has meant that many multinational companies have avoided investing in Iran in fear of losing their American market access. While the EU has sought to provide protections for these companies to invest in Iran, many of them have viewed those efforts as totally inadequate.
Thus, Iran is stuck with collapsing foreign investment and rising popular discord. And because Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is presently unwilling to accept Trump’s three key conditions for sanctions relief — a new open-ended agreement with stronger inspections protocols and limits on ballistic missiles — Iran has no obvious way of escaping its abyss.
Indeed, Iran is left simply with killing and intimidating its own people into accepting Khamenei’s geriatric idiocy.
Why does Rouhani think that threatening kill Europeans will bring the Europeans back to a malleable state of mind?
Presumably, because he thinks the Europeans will be highly uncomfortable with an escalatory showdown. Rouhani is presuming that his threats will mean that EU politicians now face domestic anger blaming them, not Iran, for the threats. In short, the translation of this message is intended as something along the lines of, “Please don’t stop giving us sanctions relief. If you do, we’ll have to blow you up, and you’ll be to blame.”
Ultimately, however, as with Iran’s lying over its recent downing of a civilian airliner, these threats speak to the nature of this regime. For all Ben Rhodes’s hopes of detente, Iran remains committed to the language and politics of terror.
