Trump and Europe: Atlantic hurricane season? by Ian Bond
The Atlantic hurricane season does not officially start until June 1st, but US President Donald Trump’s decision on May 8th to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – the Iran nuclear deal – has triggered an early transatlantic storm. In pulling out of the agreement – which froze Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, in exchange for sanctions relief – Trump ignored pleas from all his main European allies. Unless Trump changes course, sanctions will kick in later this year, hitting European firms that do business with Iran harder than they hit Iran itself. It appears unlikely that an EU plan to ban European companies from complying with US sanctions on Iran will stop firms doing the White House’s bidding, for fear of US punishment. This is the latest move by Trump that puts the US at odds with its European allies. In June 2017 he withdrew the US from the Paris climate agreement; he has threatened to impose tariffs on European steel, aluminium and vehicle producers on spurious national security grounds; and he has regularly criticised NATO (even to the point of suggesting that the US might not defend an ally under attack if it had not spent enough on its own defence). In response, European leaders are becoming more vocal in their criticism of Trump. British Prime Minister Theresa May, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued a joint statement on
May 8th expressing “regret and concern” at his withdrawal from the JCPOA. For many EU member-states, the reflex has been to look for purely European approaches to international challenges. In remarks on May 10th at a ceremony in Aachen to award this year’s Charlemagne prize for services to European unification to Macron, Merkel said that the US would no longer simply protect Europe; Europe had to take its fate into its own hands. Macron, in accepting the prize, said that Europe should not allow its trade policy to be decided by “those who blackmail us while explaining that the international rules that they contributed to drafting are no longer valid because they are no longer to their advantage”. He also warned against allowing even allies who had been “friends in the hardest times in our history” to take foreign and security policy decisions for Europe. And in a speech at the European University Institute on May 11th, Federica Mogherini, the EU High Representative for foreign and security policy, bemoaned the fact that “screaming, shouting, insulting and bullying [are] systematically destroying and dismantling everything that is already in place”. She argued that the world needed a change of attitude,