it's not about europe standing up to trump on iran.

what it's about is europe moving in lockstep with china on iran. this is the cost-benefit analysis for europe: do they want to move with china (and russia...) on this, or with america?

i'm not privy to careful accounting numbers. but, it is intuitively obvious that europe is better off following china.

and, what trump is really doing with this is foolishly handing over power to beijing.

that's a couple of times, now, isn't it?

we might even be able to pull out a pattern: trump's decisions often have beijing as the primary benefactor.