The Iran nuclear deal has dominated the foreign policy debate in the U.S. this summer, with Congress in the midst of a 60-day period to review the agreement. But America is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to the accord reached in July between Iran and the P5+1 world powers. In Western Europe, as the following survey indicates, the agreement is not exactly a hot-button issue.
United Kingdom: Tom Wilson, a resident associate fellow at the Henry Jackson Society think tank in the UK., told JNS that “unlike in the U.S. Congress, Britain’s parliament has really neglected to debate the agreement robustly,” adding that “With the exception of a few lone voices, British parliamentarians have simply ignored this issue.”
Wilson explained that political conservatives in the UK can be divided among those who are similar in their views to American conservatives and tend to oppose the deal, and those who are politically isolationist. The isolationists, from economic and pragmatic perspectives, tend to oppose military intervention and support a diplomatic relationship with Iran.
Prime Minister David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, does not fit perfectly into either of those categories due to his vocal opposition to radical Islam and support for intervention in Syria on the one hand, and his support of the Iran deal on the other.
British liberal and leftists largely support the deal, though there are some center-left figures who oppose the agreement,
Sam Westrop, a UK-based senior fellow with the Gatestone Institute think tank, told JNS that the attitude in Britain “is, to some extent, reflected across Western Europe.”
“The willingness of European parliaments to embrace the outcome of dialogue, whatever the cost, is alarming. Undoubtedly, the threats posed by ISIS have, foolishly, led many in Europe to regard Iran as an ally in the fight against terror,” Westrop said.
When the deal was announced, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council issued a statement calling for “caution” and “extreme vigilance on those who are policing the agreement,” so that “Iran, which remains a sponsor of terror worldwide, has no opportunity to develop weapons of mass destruction.”
More recently, while Board of Deputies President Jonathan Arkush welcomed the “emphasis placed on human rights in Iran by Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond,” who recently visited Tehran for the reopening of the British embassy there, Arkush also noted that the Iranian regime’s “record on human rights can only be described as dire.”
The reopening of the embassy seems to have garnered more attention in the UK than the signing of the nuclear deal itself. The move, said Wilson, was accompanied by “disquiet about the fact that the ‘Death to England’ graffiti was still on the embassy’s walls at the time of reopening.”
While visiting Tehran, Hammond said the current government of Iran has a “more nuanced approach” to Israel. That assertion was quickly refuted by Hussein Sheikholeslam, a foreign affairs adviser to Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani , who said Iran’s “positions against the usurper Zionist regime have not changed at all; Israel should be annihilated and this is our ultimate slogan.”
Germany: A YouGov poll conducted in July showed that 62 percent of the German public supported the nuclear deal. Among the U.S., the UK, and Germany, the Germans were revealed to be the least likely to view their country’s relationship with Iran as “poor.”
Deidre Berger, the director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) office in Berlin, told JNS that in Germany “there is little opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. In fact, the agreement is not much of a topic of public discussion.”