War with Iran?

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(08-02-2019, 01:48 PM)Dill Wrote: Good questions/ponts, B, addressed in reverse order.

The UK may be preparing to Brexit now (probably against the current will of the majority), but it still prefers to join a coalition of Europeans than appear to support US Iran policy. Who knows, though. Britain's Trump is PM now. We could see this decision reversed.

And right, the EU chooses not to enforce EU rules on non-EU members acting outside the EU. MOST countries choose not to violate others' sovereignty like that. (Imagine PA state troopers stopping a vehicle with CA plates in Ohio to enforce PA speed limits.) Strictly speaking, the EU does not have an "agreement" with, say, Panama or India or South Africa or Iran, to impose sanctions on Syria. So those countries would not be breaking any agreement with the EU were they to trade with Syria. Contrast this with US sanctions on Iran, which it requires all other countries to follow, or face sanctions on themselves. That's about FORCE, not "agreement."

I suppose everyone is responsible for his own behavior. My questions were about cause and effect, posed within an analytic framework familiar to anyone in the foreign policy community, to examine how current actions of allies and adversaries unfold in the wake the broken Iran Deal. E.g., would Iran be "responsible" for seizing a British tanker if Britain were not already "responsible" for seizing an Iranian? Would Britain have seized the Iranian ship were the US not "responsible" for pressuring its allies to pressure Iran?

In contrast to this analytic approach, the goal of propaganda is to frame international conflict as a moral drama which obscures cause/effect relations in favor of inherently good or bad actors. Within this frame, Iran would be "responsible" for virtually any action deemed anti-US, even if reacting to US provocation. US "responsibility" would be framed out of consideration. Professional foreign policy analysis would be "defending Iran" wherever it strayed from the party line.

Since WWII, the US and GB have worked tightly together in the ME, supporting each other's security needs. To the extreme on Britain's side, as the Iraq war showed. Pre-Trump, were Iran threatening Gulf shipping, the first two countries to "coalesce" on security policy in the region would be the US and GB.  Since Trump trashed the Iran Deal, while GB and the rest of the world are trying to keep it, a division has appeared between the US and its allies. So GB still loudly proclaims its world partnership with the US, but declines to join Trump's proposed Operation Sentinel, along with Germany and the rest of Europe, leaving the US as an embarrassing coalition of one so far.  That is certainly a degree of separation in the Iran policy of the US and GB. And it could widen to affect each country's greater ME policies. So Britain is only "separating itself from the US" with respect to ME policy, at this point. But the separation is clearly there.

The US refused to help when the Impero was seized, but that was two weeks ago. Now it is NOT refusing in the sense that it has called for a coalition.

I appreciate your good faith answers. I think I see why Britain is telling the EU to kick rocks.