At the June Group of Seven meeting in Canada, Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, answered a reporter’s question about Israel’s attacks on Iran that were then taking place: “This is the dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us.” He added to the German journalist, “We are also affected by this regime. This mullah regime has brought death and destruction to the world.”
The chancellor’s candor was notable, and he wasn’t finished. A few days later, back in Germany, after the United States had joined Israel in striking Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, Merz said: “There is no reason for us and also for me personally to criticize what Israel started a week ago and also no reason to criticize what America did last weekend. It is not without risk, but leaving it as it was wasn’t an option either.”
Such insights are important coming from any European leader, but especially from Germany’s. Rather than condemning military action, Merz acknowledged the reality that, in effect, Iran is the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism and one of its most dangerous nuclear proliferators. He said out loud what many of his fellow European leaders knew but couldn’t bring themselves to admit, and in doing so, reversed two decades of European Union policy in support of failed diplomacy with Iran. Merz now recognized that the logic of force, whether in self-defense in Israel’s case or preemptively in America’s, had become overwhelming. The rationale for military action had become only more compelling when Tehran unleashed its “ring of fire” assaults against Israel after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack.
If the Trump administration had any strategic sense, it would immediately seize the opportunity Merz has provided. Regardless of whether European leaders might ever have initiated the strikes against Iran, they have now occurred—and they define a new reality about Iran’s nuclear-proliferation threat. President Donald Trump has been offered a great chance to lead a united Western alliance that can reconsolidate tactics against Iran’s nuclear efforts.
The EU’s efforts to cajole the mullahs into giving up their nuclear ambitions date back to 2003. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom (the EU-3, as they called themselves then) wanted to prove that they could thwart Iran’s quest for weapons of mass destruction through diplomacy, in pointed contrast to George W. Bush’s military action against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. The EU aspired to a higher purpose, as two commentators noted in Foreign Affairs in 2007: “The European doctrine of managed globalization envisions a world of multilateral rules that will supersede U.S. power.” Over a dozen years and through many permutations, these negotiations with Tehran led to the deeply flawed 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
The EU-3 efforts did have one virtue. From the start, they pressured Iran to forswear uranium-enrichment activity before being permitted access to Western nuclear-reactor technology. The Europeans also insisted that Iran refrain from reprocessing spent reactor fuel to extract plutonium, the alternative source of fissile material for a bomb. These crucial prohibitions, the EU-3 believed, would block Iranian nuclear-weapons ambitions while affording Tehran the benefit of civil uses of atomic energy for electrical power, medical research, and the like.
When President Bush agreed in 2006 to join the European diplomatic initiative, he did so on the express precondition that Iran suspend its enrichment activities. He wanted to oblige the mullahs to renounce both ends of the nuclear-fuel cycle in exchange for receiving civil nuclear technology. Initially, the Obama administration continued with the no-enrichment, no-reprocessing position that Bush had established—until desperation to get a deal ultimately meant caving on this central element of the EU-3’s long-standing strategy. That concession to Tehran was the 2015 deal’s original sin. President Trump was right to withdraw from the Obama administration’s misbegotten project in 2018—even though the EU signatories remain pledged to the zombie agreement to this day.
Iran, of course, never had the slightest interest in renouncing domestic mastery of the entire nuclear-fuel cycle. As a practical matter, this was perfectly logical for a regime that saw getting the bomb as central to its survival: How else could the Iranians produce nuclear weapons free from external reliance and therefore vulnerability? These self-evident truths demonstrated so palpably Iran’s intention to become a nuclear-weapons state, rather than merely a green-energy success story, that I was always baffled by how anyone could mistake Tehran’s true objective.
After last month’s Israeli and American military strikes, including Israel’s targeting of Iran’s senior nuclear scientists, that historical issue is now moot. Iran has neither shown remorse nor indicated any inclination to give up its long quest to acquire nuclear weapons. Tehran’s immediate response to the attacks was to declare Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “enemies of God,” which, coming from a theocracy, sounds serious. The regime immediately began work to excavate the deeply buried nuclear facilities at Fordo that had been struck by U.S. bunker-buster bombs. After personally threatening the International Atomic Energy Agency’s director general, Rafael Grossi, Tehran suspended all cooperation with the agency. These are not the actions of a government seeking serious diplomacy. By contrast, amid all its problems, Israel is helping Ukraine repair damage to water systems caused by Russian attacks.
The 2015 deal has become a dead letter, but its nominal expiration date of October 18 coincides with the Trump administration’s new opportunity to pull in its EU partners to create a solid Western position that would put more international pressure on Iran’s highly stressed leadership. Even more important, a resolute West would encourage internal Iranian dissidents to express their opposition to the regime more forcefully, encouraging fragmentation within its senior ranks.
A renewed Western alliance has no guarantee of success against Iran. Its restoration would not ensure solidarity on other fronts, such as Ukraine, where the Trump administration may be pulling away from the international support for Kyiv. Nor would it ensure the future of NATO, whose superficially friendly summit in The Hague last month merely carried its members past one more potential flash point. But revived Western cooperation on Iran might at least give those inside the Trump administration who still prize America’s alliances hope that all is not yet lost.
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