A thousand vs. twenty-five
A couple of news items to follow this week…
The E3 get mad at Iran, sort of
Well, it used to be called the EU3 — Germany, France, and the UK — but with Brexit looming maybe we’re supposed to call it the E3 now. Anyway, these are the powers that negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran during the years the U.S. was keeping itself aloof (meaning even more aloof than now, I suppose). On Tuesday, the E3 foreign ministers met and announced that (a) they still want to save the nuclear deal but that (b) they have to trigger a dispute resolution mechanism, which activates a committee to investigate Iran’s breaches of the deal. This is part of the deal’s enforcement process and could lead, eventually, to a re-imposition of international sanctions on Iran. Iran started taking steps to breach the deal after the U.S. reneged on it in 2018 and has taken further steps since the assassination of General Soleimani.
The U.S. position is that a new and better deal must be negotiated. Britain’s Boris Johnson seemed to think that, too — on the very same day his foreign minister was announcing together with his counterparts from France and Germany that the original deal must be saved, which is of course the opposite of the U.S. position. Johnson said what was needed was “a Trump deal.” This probably annoyed the French and Germans by seeming to weaken what was supposed to be the common line. But everyone already knew that the EU3 or E3 (or whatever they are) can’t force the U.S. to return to the deal now simply by insisting that the thing must be saved.
All of these actors, perhaps with the exception of Johnson, undoubtedly hope to see, after next January, a U.S. president who is not Donald Trump. At that point, the nuclear deal could possibly be put back together; hence the importance of the Franco-German insistence that it be preserved. And hence the importance of things like “dispute resolution mechanisms,” which sometimes are less useful for resolving disputes than for dragging them out until such time as new players who will resolve them can arrive on the scene.
Shots fired at SPD politician’s office
SPD politician Karamba Diabey, who was born in Senegal, is a member of the German Parliament for a district in the city of Halle, near Leipzig. Several bullet holes were discovered Wednesday morning in the windows of his district office. Halle was also the scene of a shooting attack on a synagogue this past fall, on Yom Kippur.
This latest incident is still being investigated. It comes amid a climate of fear among local and lower-level politicians in Germany, several of whom have been the victims of threats or attacks (and not always by the far right). A few days ago, nearly a thousand people in a small city in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia demonstrated in support of their mayor, who had felt so threatened by far-right threats that he had applied for a permit to carry a gun. Read more here (in German).
A right-wing counter-demonstration was held at the same time, but only about twenty-five people attended. This admirable pattern has been repeated over and over again, all over Germany: radical right groups are dwarfed by the number of citizens willing to go into the street against them.
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