RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the global nuclear deal with Iran marks its one-year anniversary this week, Tehran is maintaining its fierce anti-Americanism, receiving $100 billion-plus in sanctions relief with which it can better confront the United States in its region and beyond, and apparently trying to cheat its way to nuclear weaponry.

Notwithstanding President Barack Obama’s boast in announcing the deal last July 14 that it “makes our country, and the world, safer and more secure,” evidence continues to mount that it’s doing just the opposite.

With the deal coming together in the spring of 2015, Obama expressed hope that it would empower moderate Iranian forces who would convince the regime to invest the billions in sanctions relief in its economy rather than its “war machine.” But Tehran offers no signs of moderation, and if anything is doubling down on the anti-Americanism that has fueled the regime since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

In recent days, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei blamed “recent bombings in Muslim countries” on the “security services of America, the Zionist regime and England” and said Tehran will “never cooperate” with Washington on Syria and other regional problems. And with tens of thousands of Iranians chanting “death to America” at Quds Day rallies on July 1, President Hassan Rouhani declared that “the global arrogance” (a euphemism for America and its allies) “wants to create discord among Muslims.”

Tehran’s latest anti-American vitriol coincides with revelations about Iranian nuclear-related activities that conflict with the nuclear deal as well as with related United Nations Security Council resolutions.

For starters, Iran has mounted a “clandestine” effort to acquire illicit nuclear technology and equipment from German companies “at what is, even by international standards, a quantitatively high level,” including at least nine attempts to acquire technology that could be used for nuclear weapons, according to Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. Iran, the agency predicted, “will continue its intensive procurement activities in Germany using clandestine methods to achieve its objectives.”

In a related matter, the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington, D.C. nonproliferation think tank, reported that Iran recently tried to buy “tons of controlled carbon fiber,” which is used to build advanced centrifuges that can enrich uranium to atomic weapons-grade levels, from another nation. Since Iran already has enough carbon fiber to replace its existing advanced centrifuges, the Institute’s David Albright and Andrea Stricker wrote, it may be preparing to bypass the nuclear deal and build far more advanced centrifuges than the deal allows.

Meanwhile, Iran’s tests of its increasingly sophisticated ballistic missiles, on which it could later mount nuclear warheads, remain a central concern of global leaders. Reuters reported last week that in a confidential report to the Security Council, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that Iran’s missile tests “are not consistent with the constructive spirit” of the nuclear deal. That’s something of an understatement; in its resolution that approved the nuclear deal, the Security Council “called upon” Iran not to work on ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear warheads for up to eight years.

In respect of the Palestinian problem, the European political elites have only the means to destabilize the status quo without installing an alternative. But Israel’s leaders can take heart. Any declarations made at French President François Hollande’s conference will be unenforceable, because the EU on its own lacks the means and because its energies must now focus on stopping its own disintegration.

The underlying reasons for Brexit and for EU disintegration in general have still not been widely understood. Brexit was not merely a vote of no confidence in the EU but also in the UK establishment. Similar gaps between establishment and electorate now exist in several other major European states. In some cases, however, governments are united with their electorates in detesting the EU dictatorship in Brussels.

The June 23 vote by the United Kingdom electorate to leave the European Union should be seen in the context of two other recent European events. Three days earlier, on June 20, the EU’s Foreign Ministers Council decided to solve the Palestinian problem by Christmas with its endorsement of French President François Hollande’s “peace initiative.” Three days after the vote, on June 26, the second election in Spain within a few months failed once again to produce a viable majority for any government. Worse still, the steadily rising popularity of nationalist parties in France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands suggests that political paralysis in other EU countries is on the way.

In short, the ambitions of the ruling political cliques of Europe to solve the problems of the world are being undermined by their own neglected electorates, which are increasingly furious at the failure of those cliques to solve the problems of Europe itself. Four years ago, we wrote about Europe’s Imminent Revolution. Two years ago, about the attempt and failure of those cliques to turn the EU into a make-believe copy of the United States. Today, that revolution is creeping ahead month by month.

Before threatening Israel’s security and local supremacy, the EU foreign ministers could have recalled the results of their previous nonchalant meddling in the area. We were all rightly horrified by the threat of Muammar Gaddafi to hunt down his enemies “street by street, house by house,” as he began by shooting hundreds in his capital, in February 2011. Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, rallied European leaders — first and foremost the UK’s David Cameron — to do something about it. President Obama turned up to give a speech, something that he is good at. More importantly, Obama supplied warplanes from the NATO base in Naples. The idea was to enable victory for the Libyan rebel forces by paralyzing Gaddafi’s own air force and bombing his land forces.

Victory was achieved. But the rebels were united only in their hatred of Gaddafi. So Libya has descended into a chaos that could have been prevented only by a massive long-term presence of European land forces, which Europe — after repeated cuts in army strength — does not have. Now it is the local franchise of the Islamic State, among others, that is hunting down enemies house by house.

Europe was incapable of achieving anything in Libya without the United States, and incapable of replacing a detestable regime with a superior alternative. The lesson could have been learned from Iraq. Here, a massive American military presence accompanied a constitutional revolution and the beginnings of parliamentary rule. But the whole costly achievement collapsed when Obama decided to remove even the residual military presence needed to perpetuate it.