President Donald Trump's decision to terminate President Barack Obama's Iran deal, said Mr. Obama – a self-described globalist "citizen of the world" – "is a serious mistake."

Two former directors of Obama's National Security Council committed an even larger ethical breach.  Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson in a New York Times op-ed called on European nations to withdraw their diplomats from Washington, expel U.S. diplomats from their capitals, and respond to any U.S. sanctions for continuing to trade with Iran by imposing sanctions of their own against the United States.

The German weekly Der Spiegel – whose politics echo the Social (i.e., Socialist) Democratic Party (SPD), much as Britain's Guardian and our New York Times act as propaganda auxiliaries of their nation's main leftist parties – declared a day later in an editorial that it is "time for Europe to join the Resistance" to President Trump's America.

"The West as we once knew it no longer exists," wrote Der Spiegel.  "Our relationship to the United States cannot currently be called a friendship and can hardly be referred to as a partnership."

The immediate reason for such high dudgeon is, of course, money.  Germany was doing $6.0 billion a year of business with Iran in the late 1970s, saw trade shrivel with the embargo, then watched business rebound to $3.5 billion in 2017 under Obama's Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).  The European Union was Iran's third largest trade partner, behind only China and the United Arab Emirates.  E.U. exports to Iran grew by 31.5%, and imports grew 83.9% during 2016-17.

Europe has been raking in money from Iran hand over fist, with a French oil company deal worth $4.8 billion, an Airbus deal for 100 airplanes to Iran worth $18 billion that otherwise might have gone to Boeing, and so forth.

Such short-term riches are much nicer to contemplate than the coming destruction of Europe by nuclear weapons from the world's leading supporter of terrorism, Iran.

Part of Europe's shortsighted, selfish mindset is America's fault, as Craig R. Smith and I analyze in our latest book, Money, Morality & The Machine.  After World War II, we put a nuclear umbrella over Western Europe, saving its nations the cost of national defense against Soviet invasion.

European nations spent this money saved from defense spending on vote-buying welfare and built quasi-socialist states, which continue to distort their politics and economies.  We infantilized these nations by making them dependent on American money and protection.

Germany was also defeated in World Wars I and II because of American intervention; has had U.S. soldiers stationed on its soil since 1945; and has always quietly resented being bested by what it regards as an inferior people (17% – roughly one in six – of whom, according to the latest U.S. Census, have some German ancestry).

Of those we defeated in WWII, 57% of Japanese and 61% of Italians view America favorably, a 2017 Pew study found, but 62% of Germans view the U.S. unfavorably.

As historian Victor Davis Hanson writes, "[i]f German haughtiness works on a dependent Europe, it certainly does not always impress a wary America."

No wonder Der Spiegel recently seized the opportunity to editorialize: "It's time to get rid of Donald Trump...a danger to the world."

Even the left-of-center magazine The Atlantic titled a May 4 article "The Iran Deal Is Strategically and Morally Absurd," noting that this non-ratified non-treaty is merely the compromised whim of "America's first 'post-Western' president" and that Obama's "paralyzing fear of war" led him to "wishful thinking" about the Middle East.

Barack Hussein Obama "speculated that his nuclear agreement with Tehran ought to allow the Iranians and the Saudis time to learn 'to share' the region."

Instead, Iranian-armed guerrillas are establishing a "Shiite Crescent" from Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq to Yemen under a corrupt, unstable theocratic dictatorship that believes in an apocalypse destined to bring the global triumph of Islam.

Obama rolled out a fatally flawed, unsecure JCPOA that was in fact a red carpet to Iranian nuclear weapons.  Now he tries to prevent Trump from being a new King Leonidas with his 300 Spartans stopping the Persians again at Thermopylae.

Lowell Ponte is a veteran think-tank futurist and author or co-author of eight books.  His latest, co-authored with Craig R. Smith, is Money, Morality & The Machine, available free and postpaid by calling 800-630-1492.  Lowell can be reached for interviews by email at radioright@aol.com.