Eli Lake, Columnist

America Wants to Talk About Iran, But Europe Doesn’t

A U.S.-sponsored conference in Warsaw is instead about broader regional issues.

February 13, 2019 at 9:30 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Not talking about Iran.
Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images Europe

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When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo first described this week’s big international conference in Warsaw, he left little doubt about its purpose. At the meeting, he said last month, America and its allies would discuss “how it is we together can get Iran to behave like a normal nation.”

Now Pompeo is in Warsaw, and official discussion is about everything but Iran. As Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz put it on Tuesday, the focus of the conference is now “on the most problematic horizontal issues rather than individual states.”