What is it about a campaign to remove the Islamic Republic’s chokehold on Europe’s energy supplies that appals Europe? It can’t be rational self-interest: The free flow of oil and gas through the Straits of Hormuz is critical to European industry, which has yet to recover from the loss of Russian fossil fuels. Iran has repeatedly demonstrated that no negotiation or agreement will halt its millennial ambitions and its determination to use a nuclear arsenal to establish hegemony over a region critical to European energy needs. Does Europe really wish a future spent kowtowing to the mullahs and their proxies for the sake of cheap oil and gas? Iran seeks to subordinate the West to its dream of Shia supremacy, no matter how convenient it has been for Europe to ignore this ambition.
The upside of a successful war on the Islamic Republic is immense: The dismantling of Iran’s terror proxies in the region, the potential for stable coexistence between the Gulf states and a peaceful Iran, and abundant gas and oil for energy-starved Europe. Even should the military campaign against Iran fail to dislodge the hardliners, it has fatally wounded the legitimacy of the regime. Reconstructing their ruined military infrastructure will come at the expense of a populace suffering dire hardships as well as desperate shortages of electricity and clean water. The Islamic Republic presides over a failed state held together only at gunpoint. In the absence of another infusion of Western cash, it cannot restore its military capacity or its proxy armies in Gaza or Lebanon.
The example of Venezuela shows that Trump is less interested in full regime change than in altering the policy orientation of a regime. The post-Maduro government may not have yet embraced democracy, but it has abandoned both its reflexive hostility to the US and the decrepit Stalinists still ruling Cuba. Venezuelan oil now flows to its natural market in North America rather than around the world to China, showing Beijing that the West too can wage resource wars. Closing the Straits of Hormuz only complicates matters for China, which must now compete with America, rich in hydrocarbons. An Iran brought in from the cold is one able to sell oil and gas at full market prices to the West rather at a large discount to China.
There are clearly elements in the Iranian military and the IRGC who would oust the fanatics and relinquish their missiles and uranium in exchange for avoiding a Khaddafi-like fate at the hands of their own people. These men may be the only means of ousting the true-believers, given the regime’s monopoly on the tools of violence and its willingness to use them. Trump is inviting them to reorient Iranian policy away from aggression and toward peace and prosperity. Europe made a similar offers over the negotiating table, but these polite entreaties failed because they were never coupled with a credible threat. As any scholar of international relations could have explained, a state will never relinquish a key objective unless the alternative is worse, and a military defeat is always worse.
Loathing of the American President doesn’t constitute a rational policy, yet it seems to be forging the closest thing the European Union has to a common foreign and security policy. The use of raw military power to solve a problem threatening the West for nearly half a century is met with a self-regarding disdain in Europe, rather than relief that a theocratic regime determined to back its militant ambitions with nuclear weapons might be overthrown. Moves by Spain, France and Italy to deny bases where the US has invested billions put to rest any doubt as to why Donald Trump wanted sovereign control of US bases in Greenland. Europe never paid for its own defence, but offered access to its ports and airfields in return for American largesse. Now that access to European bases and airspace is conditional on European hissy fits, America is publicly considering a diminished commitment to NATO. Should Germany make noises about US access to the critical Rhein-Main airbase, a US withdrawal from Europe is assured.
Vacuous declarations that “this is not Europe’s war” may play well among Euro-elites, but raise clear implications for a different conflict now entering its fifth year. A final White House decision that Ukraine “is not America’s war” is the probable near term consequence of European fecklessness over Iran. A longer-term pullback from NATO coupled with the implication that deterring Russia is now Europe’s problem will land a trillion euro problem on stressed balance sheets across the EU. Should the current US campaign fail, Europe will also find itself committed to securing the Persian Gulf after the departure of a US that has little need for the oil and gas there.
A deeper rationale may underlie Europe’s decision to torment and undermine its American protector: A quaking fear of the Islamist militants poised to take action across Europe. Starmer, Macron and Sanchez are all haunted by the prospect of an open conflict between their home-grown jihadis and the populist movements appalled by the Islamification of their native lands. Adopting Muslim communities as useful voting blocs has emasculated governments and persuaded them to throw their vulnerable Jewish citizens to the wolves. Opposing Trump is a highly rational electoral strategy when Islamists have forged working coalitions with bog-stupid elements of the European Left. All of which tends to vindicate JD Vance’s warning a year ago, that Europe is endangered by its importation and appeasement of militant Islam. As in the 1930’s, Europe may suffer a dire brain drain as highly-educated, successful Jews depart for Israel and the US. Antisemitism may once again prove Europe’s greatest gift to the cultural, scientific and business prospects of the United States. Look at the ancestry of American Nobel Prize winners and consider their lost contribution to Europe.
Between gratuitous offenses against its primary security provider, and a cowardly deference to communities happy to replace liberal norms with Sharia law, European leaders today embody Orwell’s criticism of the Left nearly a century ago: They are people playing with fire who don’t even know that fire is hot.
When the war is interested in you