Bombing a Middle Eastern country. ‘With us or against us?’
The West’s response to Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran is striking in its unity and vacuousness and seems to boil down to this: “We’re bombing a Middle Eastern country. You’re either with us or against us”.
The June 21 attack, hatched in Jerusalem and carried out by Washington, D.C., came after two decades of US debate about it, and seven years after Mr Trump pulled his country out of a nuclear pact with Iran agreed by President Barack Obama.
It has set back the world’s nuclear non-proliferation agenda with many non-nuclear nations probably now watching footage of American bombers over Iran and thinking North Korea’s Kim Jong Un had the right idea – get the nukes so they leave you alone.
And yet the UK, France, Germany, Italy and the European Union have expressed little concern about the US bombing a sovereign country without provocation (nor even the “dodgy dossier” it flourished during the 2003 Iraq invasion). Instead, they’ve all urged Iran to return to the negotiating table as if it had not been in diplomatic talks with the US, a process that Mr Trump’s bombs have blown up.
As Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said on X, it wasn’t his country that had ended talks. “How can Iran return to something it never left?” he asked.
Even though it was Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu who torpedoed Mr Trump’s so-called diplomatic negotiations with Iran with a series of devastating missile strikes, it is Iran that is being blamed for Mr Trump dropping bombs on it.
Characteristically, it is only Switzerland that has noted the dispiriting implications for international order in the United States joining Israel’s war on Tehran by striking Iranian nuclear sites.
“Switzerland emphasises the importance of full respect for international law, including the UN Charter and international humanitarian law,” the foreign ministry said on its website.
