How European powers could ignite a new war with Iran

Almost everyone is familiar with Murphy’s Law, coined after an engineering mishap in the 1940s, and today widely used as a humorous explanation for bad luck: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”

It is sad to note how a variant of this law applies to decisions of the so-called E3 - the three main European powers of France, the UK and Germany - in the context of the Middle East, and especially the troublesome western relationship with Iran.

The E3 variant of Murphy’s Law might read: “If the E3 can deliberately do something detached from reality, stupid, untimely, unmeditated, dangerous, and likely to worsen an already highly tense international crisis, they will.”

A case in point is the E3’s recent decision to trigger the 2015 nuclear deal’s “snapback” mechanism, which allows for the reimposition of UN sanctions in response to Iran’s alleged defiance of its nuclear commitments. The nuclear deal was jointly signed by Iran, the EU, and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (although the US unilaterally withdrew in 2018).

While the E3 variant of Murphy’s Law has been mainly at play with regards to the Russia-Ukraine war, as some sources even inside the Trump administration have hinted, the snapback decision is extremely dangerous, threatening to set the Middle East ablaze again - as if Israel’s behaviour was not already sufficient for this purpose.

The E3’s decision appears to be based on highly mistaken reasoning, if not a deliberate distortion: that violations of the nuclear deal are exclusively ascribable to Iran. 

Unprovoked aggression

In 2018, the first Trump administration withdrew from the nuclear deal, just three years after it was signed under the Obama administration. At the time, the E3 failed to issue any serious criticism of this disgraceful move, while de facto aligning with the new US sanctions regime - which included secondary sanctions against countries that continued to trade with Iran. 

In other words, the US first violated its commitments under the deal, and the E3 did nothing to stand in its way.

From that moment on, Iran’s response aligned with article 36 of the deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which notes that any party can ultimately treat a violation by another party “as grounds to cease performing its commitments under this JCPOA in whole or in part and/or notify the UN Security Council that it believes the issue constitutes significant non-performance”.

Is Iran's nuclear showdown near a breaking point?

Read More »

Russia has supported Iran’s position, noting that the E3 itself contravened the deal by enabling the US “maximum pressure” policy.

It is also worth noting that the E3’s invocation of the snapback mechanism comes after the recent Israeli-US attacks against Iran, during which these European powers issued statements to justify and support such unprovoked aggression, putting all the blame on Tehran.

The E3 powers never seriously asked themselves what Iran’s incentive could be to negotiate with the West, after the US unilaterally abandoned the original deal, and its European allies silently accepted this provocation - then justified the June attacks, even though Iranian facilities were still, at the time, being monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to ensure there was no military dimension to the state’s nuclear programme. 

Both the IAEA and the US intelligence community had previously said there was no evidence to suggest that Iran was building a nuclear bomb.

After all of this, how can Iran still be blamed for reducing its commitments to the nuclear deal?

As Israel openly wages a genocide against the Palestinian people, while claiming a license to kill and bomb almost every country in the region - with the EU apparently incapable of adopting even the minimum measures needed to put a stop to this - the only significant action that the E3 appears ready to take is a further provocation towards Iran, which could set the region on fire.

Either the E3 powers are deliberately acting to trigger a renewed conflict with Iran, or they have no idea what they are risking. In both cases, we have landed again in a very precarious situation.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.