The two-day Middle East Security Meeting, co-hosted by the US and Poland, opened in Warsaw on February 13, which, despite being played down, was still apparently targeted at Iran, causing it to be dubbed the “anti-Iran meeting.” Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif responded that the meeting is “doomed to fail,” reported China's official Xinhua News Agency.
Writing for The Beijing News, Diao Daming, associate professor at the School of International Relations, Renmin University of China, noted that the meeting would exert more political pressure on Iran by its large scale, and can be taken as part of the Trump administration’s moves to soften global opinion for a new round of sanctions on Iran in May 2019.
Despite upholding the Iran nuclear deal, Britain, France and Germany are concerned about the threat from Iran developing ballistic missiles and its growing influence in the Middle East. From the US’s standpoint, support from Poland will likely spread and aggravate that concern, thereby softening the three’s hard stance.
And the meeting resonates with the Trump administration's new thinking on its Middle East strategy - playing down the Israel-Palestine and Arab-Israel conflicts and unifying them around the cause to oppose Iran, he noted.
Poland, for its part, has more straightforward aspirations. The country seeks to rely on a third party, the US, for strategic security rather than Europe or Russia. And the Warsaw meeting helps to improve its international status and regional influence, he said.
The meeting also proves that the Trump administration will not easily intervene in Iran militarily, he noted. Yet neither will it change the situation substantially. The UK, France, Germany and the EU will continue to uphold the Iran nuclear deal, even more so given the ongoing Brexit drama, the US’s withdrawal from the Intermediate Missile Pact and its planned military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Russia will not soften its stance, but will instead be angered by the warming US-Poland ties, he predicted. The Warsaw meeting would only add to the conflicts and differences among different parties in the Middle East.
Old Version
