Europe’s fury over Trump’s Iran decision, explained in one word

European leaders are calling President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal a potentially catastrophic mistake. One French diplomat is so furious, he even coined a new description of Trump’s view of the world: “unisolationism.”

The phrase is the brainchild of one of the most prominent European diplomats in the US, François Delattre, France’s ambassador to the United Nations. He told Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post that the Trump administration’s foreign policy was a dangerous “mix of unilateralism and isolationism” that he combined into “unisolationism.”

The comments are worth taking a close look at, for two reasons.

First, they give a sense of the historically high levels of European anger toward Trump over his Iran decision. French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson all traveled to Washington to personally lobby Trump to stay in the Iran deal (Johnson even appeared on Fox & Friends, Trump’s favorite TV show). It didn’t work; Trump pulled out of the deal anyway.

Second, they’re an unsettling reminder that Europe’s fears about Trump extend well beyond the Iran decision. Trump has cozied up to dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin while personally insulting Merkel and British Minister Theresa May over their refugee and counterterror policies. In June 2017, he pulled out of the Paris climate accord that all European leaders continue to support, and he’s repeatedly hinted that the US is no longer committed to the mutual defense provision that is the heart of the NATO military alliance.

The Iran decision, in other words, is just the latest reason for Europeans to conclude that the US is no longer a country that keeps its word and values its allies.

To understand why Europe is so angry with Trump’s Iran decision, it’s important to understand that the initial pact — which imposed strict limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting economic sanctions on the country — opened the door to an array of European companies eager to sign lucrative business deals with Tehran.

Those deals are now in jeopardy because of the nature of Trump’s Iran move. The US isn’t simply reimposing sanctions on Iran. Instead, Washington is reimposing what are known as “secondary sanctions,” designed to punish any foreign companies that do business with Iran by not allowing them to do business with US banks or financial institutions.

That puts an array of European companies, mainly from France, squarely in US crosshairs. That fact isn’t lost on European leaders, who have responded to Trump’s move with a mixture of confusion and fury.

French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire, for example, told French radio that Trump had made “an error” that carried both security risks and economic ones.

According to a report in the French edition of the Local, a digital news outlet, Le Maire said that it was “not acceptable” for Washington to try to be the “economic policeman of the planet.”

He said that France had tripled its trade surplus with Iran over the past two years, and that European firms would now only have a “very short time of six months” to close down their operations without risking being hit by American sanctions. He said the return of the American economic measures would have unspecified but dangerous “consequences” for large French companies — like the energy giant Total and automakers Renault and Peugeot — currently doing the most business with Iran.

Publicly, European leaders are saying they’ll try to get the US to exempt their companies from the sanctions. That’s a long shot, though, given the ferocity with which Trump denounced the Iran deal and his administration’s refusal to say that it would treat European allies differently from countries like Russia and China, which also have extensive trade deals with Iran.

The new US ambassador to Germany, in fact, is specifically warning German companies that they’d risk sanctions if they continued working with Iran.

Grenell’s remarks brought a furious response from Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German ambassador to Britain and the US.

The Trump administration temporarily exempted the European Union from a recent round of steel tariffs, and it’s possible the president will do so when it comes to the Iran sanctions as well. If he doesn’t, we’re seeing Europe’s first attacks on Trump for his Iran decision, but more are yet to come.