Palais Coburg, Vienna, site of the Iran Deal negotiations in 2015
Iran Deal’s Billion Dollar Questions
Just days after the global sigh of relief regarding the upcoming United States/North Korea Summit, world opinion swung back into bitter criticism over the Trump Administration’s announcement that it was scrapping America’s participation in the Iran Nuclear Deal, the penultimate diplomatic legacy of the Obama Administration.
Indeed the biggest political pushback to Trump’s widely anticipated policy turnaround was from Western Europe, not the Middle East nor China. The U.S. decision is supported by a curious group of friends including Israel, Saudi Arabia, and most Arab countries.
The Iran Deal as it is known, was framed by the five Permanent members of the UN Security Council; China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States as well as Germany to presumably contain what was a dangerously expanding nuclear weapons research and development program by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons was the goal of the agreement. Officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the deal would theoretically keep Teheran’s nuclear weapons ambitions “in the box.”
Crafted in Vienna’s stunningly stately but small Palais Coburg, the “Deal” reached in 2015 was actually an Obama Executive Agreement and not a Treaty and thus circumvented U.S. Senate approval, which it would never have gained.
Once the ink had dried, economic sanctions on Islamic Iran were lifted by the United States
and the Europeans. Before long, European businessmen were flooding the Iranian capital Tehran in search of their own commercial Deals. The Americans soon followed.
Prior to the tougher economic sanctions on Tehran in 2012, the European Union states were
Iran’s biggest trade partner. U.S. relations remain rooted in the poisoned ties between Washington and Tehran since 1979 and the seizure of the American Embassy as well as the nuclear crisis.
Yet by 2017 European Union exports to Iran reached $13 billion with imports from the Islamic Republic worth $12 billion. Predictably most EU imports are energy related.
China, the European Union and India remain Iran’s primary trading partners.
France’s Total Oil has signed accords of $5 billion to help develop the world’s largest gas field.
Equally Renault auto will expand current co-production in Iran to boost output to 350,000 vehicles annually. The Franco/German consortium Airbus planned to sell 100 civilian airliners to Iran.
Late in the Obama Administration, Boeing had inked plans to sell over 100 jets to Iran’s civilian
Airlines in a highly controversial move which has since been stopped.
Yet the lure of Europe’s $25 billion two way trade with Islamic Iran starkly contrasts with the EU’s $755 billion trade with the USA. Stated another way, the annual EU/Iran trade equals about two weeks worth of U.S. trade with China!
Many major Western European companies viewed Islamic Iran as a potential commercial bonanza, as it was in the period prior to the so-called Islamic Revolution in 1979, have been deeply disappointed. Still the European powers remain politically vested in the agreement.
Transatlantic Ties are being strained yet again, this time not over NATO budget shortfalls, but the fact that Washington will revive economic sanctions on Iran which not only forbids American companies, but may bar foreign firms from investing and trading with the Islamic Republic.
So-called “secondary sanctions” could affect European companies in six months.
