Conversation on Transatlanticism and Europe Blog

By Victoria Bauer This blog post was written for the course "Current Issues in Global and EU Affairs", which took place from February 12-April 30, 2018. Earlier in May 2018, President Trump killed the Iran Deal which sends a strong message that the United States does believe that Iran’s nuclear programs are peaceful and nothing to worry about despite what the international community thinks and Europe’s best interests to keep the deal alive. Historically this issue has been problematic since 2003 after the US attack on Iran and how European leaders want to handle the situation. Smith and Steffenson describe the origins of the Iran Deal as such: “During 2003–4, differences surfaced between the EU member states and the US over how to handle nuclear weapons programs in Iran. These tensions reflected a longstanding divergence of approaches, with the Europeans having emphasized the value of ‘critical dialogue’ with Tehran and the Americans having adopted a strategy based o...

By Genie Melamed This blog post was written for the course "Current Issues in Global and EU Affairs", which took place from February 12-April 30, 2018. In the past few years the issue of oil has been on the rise in the United States. Only a select few countries have oil, and many of those countries happen to be in the Middle East, where there has been a lot of conflict occurring in recent years. The United States has certain allied countries in the Middle East, and adversaries as well. This has caused quite an issue in the past few years due to the fact that oil comes from some of the adversarial countries. In 2012 the Barack Obama administration imposed oil sanctions on Iran due to Iran’s nuclear program. These sanctions were done in an effort to make Iran stop its nuclear program. In addition to these oil sanctions, there are also primary sanctions, which restrict US companies from doing business with Iran (Turak). The oil sanctions led to Iran’s oil exports decreas...