What are Britain, France, and Germany thinking? I ask that question because those three nations on Friday abstained in a U.N. Security Council vote on whether to extend an international arms embargo on Iran.
The abstention and associated defeat of a U.S. call to extend the embargo means that Iran will soon be able to buy foreign military equipment on the open market. In turn, Iran will soon be able to make significant advances to its ballistic missile and air defense network forces. This will enable its posing of a steadily escalating threat to the region and the world. While the Trump administration now says it will trigger a “snapback” sanctions mechanism under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement, it’s far from clear whether that tactic will achieve anything. After all, if China, Russia, Britain, and the European Union refuse to recognize the snapback, its impact will be muted. At that point, the only alternative will be for the United States to introduce secondary sanctions on foreign entities that sell arms to Iran.
So, what’s going on here? Why are the major Security Council powers happy to allow this destabilizing regime to buy advanced weapons?
The answer is simple on the Chinese and Russian count. Beijing wants to use Iran as a pressure point in its escalating geopolitical struggle with the U.S. It also sees this as an opportunity to consolidate its Iranian oil relationship. Russia sees Iran as a valuable destination for new arms exports and, more importantly, as a key leverage pivot on which to advance its underlying Middle Eastern objective: the construction of a patronage relationship with Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni Arab monarchies.
I suspect two other motives for the European impetus against a continued arms embargo. First, London, Brussels, Berlin, and Paris appear to have judged that Joe Biden is very likely to win the November presidential election. Considering that Biden is in favor of overturning President Trump’s 2018 decision and seeing the U.S. return to the Iran nuclear deal, the Europeans want to avoid further antagonizing Iran in the run-up to January 2021. While we now have abundant evidence that Iran has breached both the spirit and terms of the 2015 accord, Britain and the big two European Union powers believe that sustaining a semblance of the old deal is preferable to the present situation. This assessment ignores the imminent nature of Iran’s threat.
Iran has already put itself in a position in which it could rapidly begin high-purity enrichment and thus quickly assemble a nuclear weapon. Considering that Ali Khamenei’s regime is at once politically unstable, deeply paranoid, and driven by a functionally nihilistic theological agenda, allowing Iran access to more weapons is not a very good idea. The specific concerns in relation to lifting the arms embargo are Iran’s improved ability to access ballistic missile materials and to bolster its air defenses.
On the ballistic missile count, note that Iran is already heavily engaged in a satellite program. Tehran claims this satellite program is peaceful, but that excuse serves as a thinly veiled cover for the development of medium- to long-range nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. Put simply, Iran is launching satellites in order to learn how to get ballistic missiles onto suborbital trajectories. This alone should demand a continued arms embargo. But Iran will also use the lifting of any embargo to purchase more advanced air defense from Russia or China. Tehran knows its nuclear and ballistic missile activity is coming very close to Israeli and U.S. red lines. It wants new means of deterring and/or defeating any Israeli or U.S. airstrikes against its nuclear program. The Russian S-400 system, for example, would help enable that objective.
As I say, Europe is making a dangerous gamble, here. The Iranian regime has rarely, if ever, been weaker than it is now. The appropriate objective, as stated by Trump, is to use this weakness to pressure Iran into a more credible nuclear accord. Not, as with this U.N. vote, to throw Iran a lifeline.
