Nournews, an outlet with close ties to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, captured this sentiment in a scathing editorial. The commentary reflects a hardening consensus within Iranian policy circles that European powers, particularly France, have abandoned any pretense of neutrality, instead functioning as “crisis-makers” whose interventions exacerbate regional instability.
The analysis highlights what Tehran describes as Paris’s “duplicitous nature,” alleging that while French diplomats posture as stabilizing forces in West Asia, their concrete actions reveal complicity with terrorism and economic coercion. Iranian officials point to France’s longstanding hospitality toward the exiled Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) organization—designated as a terrorist group by Tehran for its history of violence against Iranian civilians—as evidence of state sponsorship of terrorism. Furthermore, Tehran argues that the punitive sanctions regime championed by European powers constitutes a form of “state terrorism” that inflicts direct suffering on civilian populations, contradicting the EU’s professed commitment to human rights and humanitarian law.
Central to Tehran’s grievances is the perception of European complicity in Israeli military actions. The Nournews article accuses France of granting “impunity to the Zionist regime” and actively supporting occupation and what Iranian media term “genocide in Gaza.” By insisting on “nuclear concessions” from Iran while maintaining silence on alleged Israeli war crimes—and by seeking to disarm Palestinian resistance groups while arming the occupier—Paris is effectively “rewarding the aggressor and punishing the victim.” Iranian diplomats contend that this approach exposes the EU not as an independent arbiter, but as a subordinate actor executing an American doctrine of “false power balance” designed to preserve Western security hegemony.
This overt hostility marks a departure from earlier diplomatic protocols, when Tehran maintained a veneer of cordiality toward European negotiators. Now, Iranian leaders explicitly characterize recent French initiatives in Lebanon and Syria as desperate bids by a marginalized Europe to reclaim lost global influence. State media argue that these “humiliating efforts” to pressure Tehran are accelerating Europe’s “moral collapse” and gradual exclusion from the emerging multipolar order, in which, as one commentator noted, “there is no longer room for domination by worn-out Western actors.”
With Iranian officials now routinely dismissing European diplomatic missions as covers for subversion, the prospects for renewed trust—or a negotiated settlement—appear increasingly remote. Tehran’s message to Brussels and Paris is unambiguous: in the current calculus, they are viewed not as mediators, but as belligerent parties aligned with the Islamic Republic’s adversaries.