Europe would rather be blackmailed by Iran than support Trump

 Europe did not begin the war against the Iranian regime but it now has an opportunity to help bring it to an end. Donald Trump’s overnight address to the American people confirmed the conflict would conclude within a matter of weeks, with the US military instructed to “hit them extremely hard” and “bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong”.

The speech reflected Mr Trump’s need to reassure his countrymen amid rising petrol prices, but its underlying message was to Europe: here was an opportunity to smash once and for all Iran’s stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz, an artery of global shipping that carries the lifeblood of international trade.

Should the present hostilities conclude with Tehran still capable of blocking that artery, it will not only damage America’s standing in the world but embolden the Islamic Republic.

The lesson Tehran would take from a US retreat is that, even shorn of its Supreme Leader, the country is capable of humbling the Great Satan. Further disruptions would be all but guaranteed.

The consequences of such an outcome would stretch far beyond American domestic considerations. It would leave Europe at the mercy of a destabilised regime yawning with power vacuums across its key political, security and commercial sectors. A great many aspirants looking to fill those vacuums would regard holding Europe’s trading interests hostage as a dramatic way to bolster their position.

In European capitals, they have allowed their distaste for Mr Trump and a not entirely unhealthy post-Iraq intervention fatigue to rigidify their position. This is not Europe’s war, they suggest, and not Europe’s mess to clean up.

Except that this very much is Europe’s war, because European interests are tied intimately with the free flow of shipping through the Strait and the surrounding seas. Europe cannot buy and sell with Middle Eastern partners, partnerships it has already invested in heavily, if Iran continues to enjoy an effective monopoly over the body of water.

The Continent’s economic and geostrategic priorities run directly through the Strait, and the only way European leaders can ensure those priorities are protected is by taking up a seat at the decision-making table. That will require an 11th-hour entry into the conflict, one that demonstrates to both the White House and what remains of the regime in Tehran that Europe is serious enough about its own security and its various economies to set aside misgivings about Operation Epic Fury and help Washington bring the mission to a close.

Not merely the combined firepower of the United States, Israel and Europe, but the projection of a unified objective, could deliver an overwhelming blow that either topples the regime wholesale or forces it to back down and allow unfettered passage through the Strait of Hormuz.

A rapid and decisive end to this war would go some way to soothing domestic jitters, calming nervous markets, and averting the sort of full-scale energy crisis that European leaders fear. It would also guarantee a future in which such a crisis is nowhere on the horizon again, and the Continent’s import and export markets can return to business as usual.

But these things can only happen if European leaders accept that a few weeks spent in the skies alongside Mr Trump’s fighter jets is preferable to months and years of continued threat and instability from a regime with every incentive to do them harm.