There’s an interesting op-ed by Philip Stevens at Financial Times that illustrates pretty well how the Europeans think about things like President Trump’s abrogating President Obama’s executive agreement with Iran:
The exit from the Iran deal is different. It marks the biggest rupture in transatlantic relations since the end of the cold war and mocks the west’s efforts to uphold a rules-based order. It surrenders the international high ground to a deeply unpleasant regime in Tehran. And it pours petrol on a region already in flames. A region, incidentally, that sits alongside Europe.
Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu have been banging the drums for war against Iran. Mr Trump in effect has now joined them. The deal restricting Iran’s nuclear activities was imperfect. Without it, Tehran has means and incentive to build a bomb.
For European policymakers there is an additional dimension. If Iran, or any other unpleasant regime, had needed a rationale for a nuclear programme, former president George W Bush offered it with his Axis of Evil speech and the US-led invasion of Iraq. North Korea is unlikely to unlearn this lesson when its leader Kim Jong Un meets Mr Trump next month to talk about Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal.
When you subscribe to a rules-based order it imposes obligations on you. You refrain from doing some things you might wish to do; you do other things you might not care to. Once you’ve subscribed to the order (and particularly when it’s the order you devised), you can’t pick and choose the rules you like. In a Westphalian order, an important component of the rules-based order, that gives license to other countries to do the same.
It didn’t start with the Iran deal and it didn’t start with Trump. For the last couple of decades we’ve shucked the rules with reckless abandon, with somewhat good reason. The rules aren’t working for us any more and they are not applied evenly.
Something we might consider is that abandoning the rules isn’t working for us, either. Are we broken, are the rules broken, or both?
I initially read that as the biggest rupture in transatlantic relations in the post WWII period, which would have had to have been the Suez Crisis. There were two responses to that Crisis, one typified by the British was to cling closer to American leadership, and the other typified by the French, to support a European counterweight, independent of American stupidity. I wonder what happens this time.
Hmmm. Iran now has a newly minted incentive to build a bomb? Surrenders the international high ground to Tehran? That doesn’t seem plausible.
My general reaction these days is that Europe is having some gas adjusting to a more US-centric and “you pay your own way, Europe” US policy stance.
Something we might consider is that abandoning the rules isn’t working for us, either. Are we broken, are the rules broken, or both?
I’d say both, and corruption is a major cause. Given that economic sanction have been a mainstay of maintaining the rules-based-order, it was probably inevitable that it was doomed to corruption and failure.