Global Geopolitical Series: EU scrambles to appease Trump with fresh Iran sanctions to save nuclear agreement

The European Union led by the United Kingdom, Germany, France are working to impose new sanctions on Iran in order to appease the U.S. President Donald Trump and to persuade the President to sign sanctions waiver on Iran, the deadline for which comes due on May 12th.

In 2015, Iran signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as Iran nuclear agreement with the United States and other five world powers; Russia, China, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. The deal required the U.S. President to certify Iran’s compliance with the agreement, however, Trump, who has been very critical of the agreement and often called it as the worst deal ever made, refused to recertify Iran’s compliance with the agreement in October. The U.S. President needs to sign sanctions waiver on Iran in every 120 days, failing which the sanctions would get automatically re-imposed. When President Trump signed the sanctions waiver in January, he said that he is doing it for the last time unless the terrible flaws made in the nuclear agreement are corrected.

Despite some efforts, the EU offer has fallen far short of Trump’s standards for success, laid out in January. At that time, the president called for US-EU sanctions that would demand swifter and broader access for UN nuclear inspectors to Tehran’s military sites and an extension of limits on its uranium-enrichment program, in addition to the ballistic-missile actions. The first two demands would touch on the nuclear deal itself, and EU governments are still opposed to that. Trump has given London, Paris and Berlin until May 12 to offer concrete fixes to the accord, otherwise he would allow US sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program to snap back into place, effectively withdrawing Washington from the accord.

Iran on the other hand has threatened to cancel the nuclear agreement is the U.S. sanctions are imposed again.