When Assadollah Assadi, the Iranian ‘diplomat’ jailed for 20 years in Belgium for a terrorist bomb plot, was released in a farcical deal with the Iranian regime and returned to a hero’s welcome in Tehran, many thought the EU’s appeasement policy had reached rock bottom. Warnings were sounded that the release of Assadi would embolden the mullahs to attempt a further bomb attack or assassination attempt on European soil. The warnings were ignored and sure enough, in November 2023, a hitman financed by the Iranian regime attempted to assassinate Alejo Vidal Qudras, a former senior vice president of the European Parliament. Mr Vidal Qudras was shot in the face, in broad daylight, outside his home in Madrid. He miraculously survived.

Following Assadi’s arrest for attempting to bomb an Iranian opposition rally in Paris in 2018, Spanish socialist Josep Borrell, the EU’s high Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security said nothing. When Assadi was sentenced to a maximum 20-year term for terrorism, Borrell said nothing. When the terrorist diplomat was released and sent back to Tehran, Borrell said nothing. When Alejo Vidal Quadras was shot in the face, Borrell made little more than a muted complaint. No attempt was made to condemn the Iranian regime for its criminal behavior.

We shouldn’t be surprised. The first country that Borrell visited within days of taking office in December 2019 was Iran, where he met the then president - Hassan Rouhani and foreign minister Javad Zarif. Borrell pledged to “preserve” the defunct nuclear deal from which President Trump had unilaterally withdrawn America in 2018, promising that Iran would “benefit economically from sanctions lifting.” Borrell’s insipid inaction was simply the continuation of decades of appeasement by the EU and its European External Action Service (EEAS).

The post of EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security was created following the adoption of the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997. Javier Solana, a Spanish socialist, became the first High Representative. He served in that role as the EU’s top diplomat from 1999 to 2010. At a press conference in Washington in 2002, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the main democratic opposition movement to the mullahs, led by the charismatic Maryam Rajavi, had revealed the existence of the Iranian regime’s top-secret nuclear........

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