Part Right

At The American Interest Matthias Küntzel says that the Germans are being naïve about Iran:

As early as 1995, when President Bill Clinton prohibited American firms from trading with Iran because of the regime’s nuclear ambitions, it was Germany that systematically counteracted the American efforts to impose international sanctions. Hossain Mousavian, then the Iranian Ambassador in Germany, wrote that Tehran was “aware in the 1990s of Germany’s significant role in breaking the economic chains, with which the USA had wrapped Iran . . . Iran viewed its dialogue and relations with Germany as an important means toward the circumvention of the anti-Iranian policies of the United States.”

Washington, however, persisted in its efforts. As former Secretary of State Warren Christopher detailed in his memoirs, “We constantly prodded them [the Germans] to distance themselves from Iran and to suspend trade, as we had done . . . Unfortunately, the struggle to stop our allies from doing business with Iran has not yet succeeded.”

When I was working in Germany in the 1970s I was surprised by the array of Iranian goods in German stores. They were something not seen in the United States. The relationship between Germany and Iran goes back even farther:

In the mid-1920s, Germany was the founder of Persian industry, providing Iran with the backbone of its industrial infrastructure and the trained personnel needed to run it. Between 1933 and 1941, according to the scholar Yair P. Hirschfeld, the Nazi share of Iranian imports rose from 11 to 43 percent while the German share of Iranian exports rose from 19 to 47 percent. (Another aspect of the Nazi period, which continues to be important in Iran, was pointed out in 1996 by Iranian President Rafsanjani: “Our relations have always been good. Both [peoples] are of the Aryan race.”)

In 1952 West Germany again became Iran’s leading trading partner, a position it held almost continuously until 1979. After the Islamic revolution, West Germany’s trade with Khomeini’s Iran rebounded from 2.8 billion Deutsche Marks in 1980 to 7.7 billion in 1983. “It is striking to see how Persia’s new rulers are specially favoring German firms with orders, given that German business leaders and politicians had kowtowed to the Shah with special fervor,” wrote Der Spiegel at the time.

In the following years, Germany remained not only Iran’s most important high-tech partner but also its most trusted one.

I don’t think the Germans are naïve at all. I think they’re cynical, amoral. Without the Germans the Iranians would never have gotten their nuclear enrichment program off the ground, the Pakistanis would never have developed a nuclear weapon, and German technology formed the basis of Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons program. The Germans are convinced with a confidence born of experience that the United States will do nothing about their misbehavior and, indeed, will come to their aid if they get in trouble.

All of that having been said I think the recent saber-rattling against the Iranians is misplaced. We should make our notional allies aware that, if they’re threatened by the Iranians, they’re on their own. They need to come to their own modus vivendi with the Iranians. IMO prudence would dictate that they impose and enforce economic sanctions of their own against the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guard and certainly not enable the Iranians.