By Matthias Küntzel · Monday, February 8, 2021 Matthias Küntzel is a German political scientist with a focus on the Middle East. His books with Telos Press include Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 and Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold, both of which are available in our store for 20% off the list price. His English-language website is matthiaskuentzel.net.
The days are over when Europeans only had to point to Donald Trump to legitimate their appeasement politics toward Tehran. But what will the new American administration and its European allies do to prevent Iran from getting the bomb?
Of course there is the nuclear deal with Iran. For months its proponents have been hoping for Joe Biden’s electoral victory. He would revoke Trump’s leaving the deal and loosen the sanctions on Iran; in return Iran would revise its violations of the agreements, and everything would be good again.
And now? Biden is still holding onto his controversial promise to return to the deal. He has filled the most important positions in the State Department with people who played leading roles in the negotiation of the deal under Barack Obama, including some who—like the new Iran envoy Robert Malley—proved to be particularly accommodating toward Iranian demands. And Biden has not at all insisted that the regime change its missiles program or aggression policies in response to a lifting of the American sanctions. He has only asked for one concession: that Iran return to the terms of the deal before lifting the sanctions that Trump imposed.
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By Matthias Küntzel · Friday, May 24, 2019 Matthias Küntzel’s Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold, published by Telos Press Publishing, presents an extensive and detailed historical account of German–Iranian relations from the early twentieth century to the present. Save 20% on your purchase of Küntzel’s Germany and Iran in our online store by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during checkout. The following essay has been translated from the German by Matthew J. Cooper.
As late as May 7, 2019, France sent a message to Iran’s rulers: “We do not want Tehran to announce tomorrow actions that would violate the nuclear agreement, because in this case we Europeans would be obliged to reimpose sanctions as per the terms of the agreement.”
 The admonition was futile. On the following day, exactly one year since the United States withdrew from the nuclear agreement, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani made two things public: He announced that effective immediately the regime no longer felt bound by the central provisions of the nuclear agreement. For example, by section 7, which requires the regime to limit its inventory of low-enriched uranium to 300 kg. Also affected is section 10, according to which Iran may not manufacture or store more than 130 tons of heavy water for fifteen years. Iran will not adhere to this provision either, according to Rouhani. Heavy water is used for reactors that are specially adapted for the production of weapons-grade plutonium. These quantitative restrictions on materials needed for nuclear weapons belong to the core of the agreement that Tehran is now avowedly violating.
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By Matthias Küntzel · Wednesday, May 16, 2018 Matthias Küntzel’s book Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold is available for purchase in our online store. Save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during checkout. Also available in Kindle format from Amazon.com.
On May 8, 2018, when U.S. President Donald Trump spoke to the press to make the case for the U.S. decision to leave the nuclear deal with Iran, he stated: “America will not be held hostage to nuclear blackmail.” With this sentence, Trump initiated a new phase to diplomacy with Iran. Up to this point, nuclear blackmail, the threat that Iran would otherwise build a bomb, had defined and shaped the dynamic of negotiations. This worst case hung like a sword of Damocles over the actors. In order to avert it and in order to secure the nuclear deal, Obama refused to support the Iranian protest movement in 2009, just as in 2013 he refused to make good on the red line he had drawn in the Syrian war.
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By Matthias Küntzel · Monday, November 25, 2013 HAMBURG, November 24, 2013—During the night of November 24, 2013, it came to this: The five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany signed an interim agreement that accepts the plutonium facility at Arak and approves Iran’s continued uranium enrichment. “This deal appears to provide the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism with billions of dollars in exchange for cosmetic concessions,” criticized Senator Mark Kirk (R-Illinois).
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By Matthias Küntzel · Friday, June 26, 2009 The Iranians who are resisting the electoral putsch are not only being humiliated and beaten by the batons and bullets of the Pasdaran but also by the inaction of the so-called freedom-loving world: no call for a special session of the UN, no threats of sanctions, no boycott declaration, no economic embargo, not even the smallest warning—let’s just not take sides or make any commitments as long as the result of the struggle in Iran remains open. The West, so the argument goes, has to be careful to avoid providing any pretext to vilify the Iranian opposition. So Obama doesn’t need days but weeks to slowly pull back his outstretched hand, while the German Foreign Ministry argues all the more emphatically for a dialogue with the putsch-regime. Undauntedly, the German-Iranian Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Tehran advertises the building of a German-Iranian Business Center in Berlin, while the German-Iranian Chamber of Commerce in Hamburg reported today that its upcoming seminar on “Export Certification in Iran Trade” (July 13) is already overcrowded. And haven’t we gotten along somehow or other with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the past four years?
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By Matthias Küntzel · Sunday, June 15, 2008 Matthias Küntzel, author of Jihad and Jew-Hatred, received an invitation to write on Germany and Iran for Neues Deutschland : the former “Pravda” of Communist East Germany, it is now a daily, close to the “Linkspartei,” the Party of the Left, itself undergoing various organizational restructurings. It is the home of various “post-communist” currents. It is represented in the Bundestag and several state legislatures; it also exercises some influence on discussions within the much larger Social Democratic Party. Within the Left, the evaluations of Iran—as reactionary or an “anti-imperialist” ally—and of Israel are both hotly contested.
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