The mealy-mouthed bureaucrats at the EU have a long history of bending over backwards to please small countries with dictatorial rulers and poor human rights records.
So the latest news from Brussels shouldn’t surprise anybody. The EU’s top energy official, Miguel Arias Canete, sent a message to the Iranians on Saturday night.
Canete told the Iranians that “as long as they are sticking to the agreement, the Europeans will… fulfill their commitment.” In other words, the EU is staying in the Iran Deal even though the US is now pulling out and looking to rework the arrangement.
Canete also indicated that the EU hopes to increase trade with Iran. “We will try to intensify our flows of trade that have been very positive for the Iranian economy,” he said.
But it’s not just the Iranian economy that’s benefited from the Iran Deal. The Europeans have gotten a lot out of it too, to the tune of billions.
But given the typical European desire to trade long-term security for short-term financial gain, that’s unsurprising.
Because Europe has been getting a free ride from the US for more than seven decades now. Our military budget, and the lives of our troops, have covered their largely worthless asses since the end of the second world war.
Whether we were defending them from the threat of Nazi hegemony, the threat of global Communist revolution, or the threat of international terrorism, the cost was reckoned in American dollars and American lives. While they spent extravagantly on their welfare states, our sons stood on guard so their sons wouldn’t have to.
Now these ungrateful slugs in the EU, whose creaking joke of a united government has all but run their continent into the ground, are again forgetting who paid the bill for their seventy years of freedom and peace.
Who was it that raced across the face of Europe to finish putting the boot in Hitler’s ass? And who hunkered down in Berlin to hold off the Soviets for forty years, afterwards? Who spent vast amounts of time and treasure to bankrupt the Great Red Bear and render the world safe from the threat of a power-hungry USSR?
And who went to war in the steaming jungles of Vietnam, where Communist peasants smeared their own shit on sharpened stakes and left them in pits to trap unwary Iowa farmboys? Who spent millions of dollars cleaning up the mess the French and British made in that place? Who lost thousands of lives defending a European colony against Communist aggression?
Who declared it their responsibility to protect the world from the destabilizing influence of radical Islamic terrorism? Who made themselves a target for the bearded maniacs spilling forth the blight of jihad into the world?
Who strove to keep Iran from building a successful axis of Shiite nations to seize control over the entire Muslim world? Who instituted a set of effective sanctions to prevent maniacal Ayatollahs from obtaining nuclear weapons?
And since that system of sanctions has been too-quickly broken by a naive and foolish president, who has gone about the work of picking up the pieces? Who is now doing their best to find a realistic way to keep nuclear fire out of the hands of the Iranians?
I’m sure you know the answers to all those questions.
But it seems the Europeans have forgotten.