View / The Iran war warning Europe chose to ignore

In 2019, I attended a security conference in Warsaw that presaged this moment: Europe would not be prepared for a war against the Iranian regime. Back then, Arab and Israeli leaders were warning that the regime posed the greatest threat to the Middle East, and that containing Tehran could not be achieved through diplomacy and commerce alone. Europeans did not dismiss the threat, but they were still prepared to do business with Iran.

The conference — the Ministerial to Promote a Future of Peace and Security in the Middle East — brought together US Vice President Mike Pence and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, Egypt, and others. There were roughly 60 nations in total.

The politics of the time did not yet allow Arab leaders and Netanyahu to stand together publicly. But privately they were saying the same thing: The Iranian regime was the central threat to the Middle East. Not theoretical. Not distant. Present, urgent, and shared. Netanyahu later described the scene publicly as Israeli and Arab leaders speaking with unusual force, clarity, and unity against their common threat. He was not overstating it, based on what I witnessed in the room.

After withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, the Trump administration imposed what it called a “maximum pressure” campaign on the Iranian regime. In Warsaw, speaking on behalf of the president, Pence called on European partners to follow America’s lead, stop trying to create financial workarounds that would allow European companies to continue doing business with Iran, and stand with the US and its allies in the Middle East. The message was unambiguous. After watching Arab and Israeli leaders in Warsaw, there was no ambiguity about where the Middle East stood either.

Where the equivocation began was in conversations with European diplomats and officials. Not every European country was in the same place, and there were meaningful differences among them. But what I — and other American officials — heard in Warsaw from Europeans was not a discussion about confronting the Iranian regime. It was a discussion about how to work around US sanctions; how to structure financial mechanisms that would allow European companies to keep doing business with Iran despite the pressure campaign. I was struck by how many of our European partners were focused on keeping commerce flowing.

There is a difference between principled disagreement and deliberate avoidance. What I witnessed in Warsaw was not a strategic disagreement. In many cases, it was a decision to ignore the threat, or to behave as though it did not exist, while prioritizing commercial relationships with a regime that funds terrorism, kills Americans through proxies, and chants “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” at state-sponsored events. President Donald Trump concluded in his second term that more than 45 years of accommodation had strengthened rather than moderated the Iranian regime. Many Europeans preferred not to confront a reality that arguably affects them even more than it does the US.

We call each other allies, and we are. The transatlantic relationship matters and should be preserved. But for those who now ask why Trump did not do more to bring some European governments along before the war, or why he is urging European powers to do more to secure their own energy flows, Warsaw offers a direct answer. He tried. His administration made the case clearly and publicly as early as 2019. Some European governments heard it, understood it, and chose their economic interests instead.

Jason D. Greenblatt served as White House Middle East Envoy in the first Trump administration. He is the author of In the Path of Abraham and the founder of Abraham Venture LLC.