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The chair of the European Parliament’s Iran delegation, Hannah Neumann of the German Greens, has warned that US President Donald Trump is “gambling with the lives of 90 million Iranians” as the conflict gripping the Middle East continues to escalate.
“Donald Trump promised that help was on the way to the protesters before he started this war,” Neumann said, referring to a brutal crackdown in January by the Iranian regime on protesters sparked by a currency crisis and broadening to political opposition.
On Monday, Trump said he expects the war to end “very soon” but provided no timeline on when that might be, contradicting an earlier timeline indicating the military operation would last four to five weeks. He also made conflicting statements as to whether the war is intended to topple the mullah regime entirely or pursue a Venezuela-style transition.
It is “quite unclear what his (Trump’s) goals are, what his strategy is to get there, and he’s gambling with the lives of 90 million Iranians and the whole region, ” she told Euronews. “I cannot endorse a war when I don’t know what the strategy is, and the Iranians clearly deserve better.”
Indicating a permanence of the hardliners, an assembly of clerical experts appointed Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of Iran’s long-time Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as his father’s successor. Trump has slammed the appointment as “unacceptable.”
Neumann said the appointment “signals continuity and more repression,” adding that “this is clearly not what Iranians had hoped for”, while stressing regime change can only come from the inside with “with a broad coalition of people from outside and inside Iran who represent the diversity of the country and can come up with a new vision.”
“This cannot come from bombs alone,” she said.
The European Union’s response to the conflict so far has been fragmented, with the Spanish and Slovenian government outliers in their condemnation of the initial US-Israeli strikes on Tehran last week. Madrid called the operation illegal and escalatory.
Neumann, who has for years worked closely with Iran’s pro-democracy movements, said that the bloc has a role to play in calling for a return to diplomacy.
“I think we have to indeed urge de-escalation. The first thing is to work together with the Gulf countries. This is not our war, but we have to deal with the consequences,” she said.
She urged EU efforts at de-escalation to be directed not only at the Iranian regime, but also towards the US and Israel.
“We should work together with the Gulf countries to push for de-escalation towards Trump and Israel, to clearly make them understand what they are gambling with, and so they tell us what their goals are and then have a reasonable discussion,” she said.
“The question is how many of its own people and how much of the region are they dragging into the abyss.”
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