Trump Provokes Iran

The American president should remember the very high tension in the Middle East.

One of the major recent achievements of worldwide diplomacy — in which the EU had a relevant role and contributed to not making things worse in the Middle East — is in great danger if Donald Trump’s threat to review the nuclear agreement with Iran, after difficult negotiations in July 2015, is confirmed.

The accusation of the American president against Tehran, that Iran “doesn’t respect the spirit” of the agreement sounds like a vague excuse to start imposing sanctions on the Iranian regime and recommence confrontations. The agreements are respected or violated in the points written and signed by both parts. The “spirit” to which Trump refers to is not shown anywhere in the document signed by the United States and Iran almost two years ago.

Trump and his foreign policy team should remember the very high tension that was occurring in the Middle East while Iran developed nuclear industry techniques that could easily have led them to obtaining atomic weapons. Just to give an example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu affirmed many times that his government would not allow this to happen, and we must not forget that Israel has already opted for an unilateral course of action twice before: with Iraq in 1982 and with Syria in 2007.

The signing of the agreement was a success for reasons that, moreover, go beyond the regional scope. It was a demonstration of competency of multilateral diplomacy, in which Moscow and Washington collaborated efficiently, and drove away the ghosts of a nuclearized Middle East, an unpredictable scenario that would put global stability in constant danger. Before making general declarations that are only good for stirring ghosts and fueling the most radical sectors of the ayatollahs’ regime, Trump should be more careful and conscientious of what is in question.