In 2003, shortly after the Iranian opposition revealed the existence of Tehran's covert nuclear program, three global powers – Germany, France and the U.K. – enlisted their efforts, along with then-EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, to persuade Iran to abandon its atomic aspirations. The Europeans called those negotiations, which lasted for three years, "critical discourse."
What that meant, cynics quipped, was that the Europeans and Iranians were sitting down together to criticize the United States. It goes without saying that those talks ended in abject failure: The Iranians signed agreements with the Europeans, but violated them even before the ink had dried. We should have expected the Europeans to learn from their inability to cope with Iranian guile, but the Europeans excel at constantly recycling their mistakes and failures.
One day before U.S. President Donald Trump's crucial decision on the future of the Iran nuclear agreement, which would have fulfilled his promise to rip that "bad deal" to shreds, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif flew to Brussels for a meeting with the current iteration of the "three plus one forum" – in other words, with his counterparts from Europe's three prominent powers and the EU. Instead of being reprimanded for the deadly and violent suppression of popular protests against the Iranian government, for the Islamic republic's ongoing development of its ballistic missile program and for its expanding involvement in undermining stability in the Middle East, the four foreign ministers gave Iran and the nuclear deal their complete support and forced Trump into a corner. The crux of their joint statement following the meeting with Zarif: Iran is fully complying with the nuclear deal; thus there is no reason to impose new economic sanctions or to refuse to lift old ones, as the agreement stipulates.
German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel went as far as saying that Europe and Iran want to protect the nuclear deal from any decision that jeopardizes it. While Gabriel was defending the Iranian regime in Brussels, German authorities were busy smuggling prominent regime figure Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, in the midst of a complex medical procedure, out of a German hospital back to Iran.
Shahroudi headed Iran's judiciary from 1999 to 2009. During that time he allegedly carried out more than 2,000 executions, including of adolescents, while overseeing the torture of prisoners and arrests of political and human rights activists. After Iranian dissidents exposed his hospitalization in Germany, complaints were filed with local police to arrest him. The German government, which facilitated Shahroudi's arrival in the country "under the cover of darkness," also took pains to return him home safely.
Sigmar Gabriel was the first senior Western official who rushed to visit Iran, even before the nuclear deal was approved, to guarantee his Germany's economic interests in a country Berlin perceives as a historical ally. These interests are compelling Germany and the EU to support Tehran over Washington. "Universal and humanitarian" principles are apparently no longer a factor for the Europeans. Their support for Iran strips them of the right to preach morality unto others and makes them solely responsible for the development of an Iranian nuclear bomb.
