There was a time when Europe broadly was in favour not just of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, colloquially ‘the nuclear deal’) but also of continuing with it even after the U.S.’s unilateral withdrawal from the arrangement on 8 May 2018. This was based partly on long-running historical ties between France (one of the three key economic and political powerhouses of the continent, along with Germany and Great Britain) and the pre- and post-1979 Islamic Revolution regimes, and Germany’s considerable commercial…