The U.S. is Being Proven Right about Iran
The U.S. is Being Proven Right about Iran
Since the very beginning, the Trump administration has been warning of the global threat posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Crucially, the administration’s Iran policy has been informed by a larger set of factors than the status of the Iranian nuclear program.
When President Trump pulled out of 2015’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action last May, he cited its failure to constrain Iran’s overall behavior or contribute to the broader, declared goal of the multilateral agreement: to facilitate peace and stability in the Middle East.
Nevertheless, traditional American allies across Europe have continually opposed assertive Iran policies, expressing commitment to the defense of the JCPOA at virtually any cost. However, in recent months the limits of that commitment have been tested and the Trump administration’s warnings about Iranian threats have been repeatedly vindicated. Although the European Union is ostensibly still following through with plans to evade US sanctions on Iran through a “special purpose vehicle” for such transactions, that same multinational body also recently imposed its own new sanctions in response to past terror plots on Western soil.
The Trump administration, of course, has hardly ever declined an opportunity to clarify that the Islamic Republic is the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism. This is well-established by the regime’s 40-year history, but whenever the US president and his foreign policy advisors raised the topic, they were clearly underlining the potential for more activities along the lines of the bombings and assassinations carried out in the 1980s by Hezbollah, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, and the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
European policymakers evidently didn’t take these warnings very seriously when they committed to defending Iran’s position in the face of rising levels of pressure from the US Government. But then, on June 30 of last year, multiple European authorities simultaneously came face-to-face with Tehran’s escalating belligerence, when they jointly thwarted a plot to set off explosives at an event near Paris. It was later revealed that the plan had originated at the highest levels of the Iranian regime and been channeled through a high-ranking Iranian diplomat in Austria, who was arrested along with two would-be bombers.
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Read More: International Policy Digest
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