mobanmarketEurope did not want Trump and the United States to walk out of the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
JCPOA was the deal negotiated with great effort by Iran and the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK, and the U.S.) and signed in 2015. At the time, Europe had substantially lost access to three of its main sources of energy—Russia, Libya, and Iran. Desperation for Iranian oil drove the European pressure on the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama to come on board the JCPOA. The U.S. was forced, kicking and screaming, into the agreement.
Iran signed the deal even though Iran’s government disagreed with its premise. The deal implied that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, which it did not have, and that the agreement would constrain it from building a nuclear weapons arsenal, which it has pledged never to have. Threats of war by the United States and its regional partners (namely, Saudi Arabia and Israel) and terrible sanctions had raised the threat level in West Asia. It was to prevent war and to undo the sanctions that Iran came to the table.
As the ink on the deal dried, Europe began to make purchases of Iranian oil. Before the European Union joined the U.S. in its sanctions regime in 2012, the EU countries bought a third of Iran’s oil output. After the deal, Iran’s oil ministry hastened to increase shipments to Europe—although lack of storage facilities and problems with payments hindered the swift increase in oil sales. During 2017, Iran shipped 720,000 barrels per day to Europe. European oil firms (France’s Total, Greece’s Hellenic Petroleum, the Netherlands’ Royal Dutch Shell, Italy’s Eni and Saras, as well as Spain’s Repsol) rushed to re-enter the Iranian oil and natural gas market.
Trump Blames Obama
When Donald Trump campaigned for the U.S. presidency in 2016, he would frequently attack the JCPOA as Obama’s folly. It was the “dumbest” deal, he said in Virginia in September 2016, pointing his finger at Obama and at Hillary Clinton for having signed it. The deal, he said, represents the “highest level of incompetence.”
Trump thought that it was the Obama administration that had initiated the deal, and that U.S. withdrawal from it would once more isolate Iran. But this was a misreading of the 2015 JCPOA, which was pushed not only by Europe but also by Russia and China. U.S. withdrawal from the deal would not be welcomed in Europe or in Asia. This is what Trump did not understand.
Even the closest U.S. ally in Europe—the United Kingdom—had grave reservations about Trump’s policy. UK Ambassador to the U.S. Sir Kim Darroch wrote to the UK Foreign Minister Boris Johnson in 2018 about Trump’s policy regarding Iran. Trump wanted to leave the deal, Darroch wrote in a secret memorandum that has now been leaked, to “spite Obama.” The killing of the Iran deal, Darroch wrote in a secret memorandum, was an act of “diplomatic vandalism.”
France and Germany, key signatories of the deal, openly said that the JCPOA was fundamental for regional stability. What they meant was that their oil companies and their oil-dependent civilization required Iranian oil. It was, for them, a practical matter. French President Emmanuel Macron spent three days in Washington, D.C., in April 2018 trying to hammer out the architecture for a new deal—but this failed. The U.S. behavior regarding such international agreements, Macron said, was “insane.”
The Way Ahead