Can France make 30 days last all year?
On Thursday I wrote that the Europeans were going to try to drag out the dispute over Iran’s breaches of the nuclear deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), until the U.S. presidential election. POLITICO Europe put an article out Friday evening detailing exactly how that would work.
Key points:
the dispute process is supposed to take 30 days, then go to the UN Security Council;
but the 30 days is actually divided into two periods of 15 days each, and either or both of these periods can be extended indefinitely “as long as the E3, Iran, Russia and China all agree;”
if the dispute ends up at the UNSC, then there would need to be a new resolution to keep the deal alive, which the Trump administration could veto; but there is also a provision to allows sanctions to “snap back” into place if the UNSC failed to act within another 30 days;
consequently, the “Europeans say they will do everything in their power to prevent” the dispute from getting back to the UNSC;
there are “consultations” going on about whether the 30 days foreseen for the dispute resolution mechanism have even begun.
The European, or at least French, goal here is indeed to drag everything out “long enough for U.S. voters to oust Trump from office in November or, seemingly even less likely, for street protests or other unforeseen events to drive Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, from power.”
Keep in mind, this report seems to rely mainly on French sources, so I would read it as a summary of what France is currently thinking; it doesn’t give us anything on the other players.
The POLITICO piece repeats the long-standing French fear, which has become a feature of pretty much everything Macron says about foreign policy, that Europe will be left out of the various geopolitical competitions that appear to be shaping up around the world:
“In any event, there is serious motivation for all the hocus-pocus to save the deal: Only by preserving the JCPOA can the Europeans also preserve for themselves a direct role in the most dangerous conflict in the Middle East. Should the JCPOA collapse, Washington and Tehran would be in a head-to-head confrontation, with the Europeans left as bystanders.”
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