The other sandal dropped in Tehran yesterday when, despite years of the finest in European-led diplomacy, the Iranians did what everyone knew they would do, and indeed what most nations do: They shrugged off a United Nations Security Council resolution. The U.N. demand: either stop your nuclear development program or face the threat of more meetings with Europeans. Sanctions? Not on your little blue helmet. In fact, just this morning, Reuters is reporting the likely outcome of relying on the U.N. for a meaningful response to the Iranians: Sanctions, said Russia’s foreign minister, are “a dead end.” Those playful, punning Russians and their macabre sense of the macabre.

Europe’s most cogent response to this so far has been to recover “The Scream,” the Edvard Munch painting stolen a while ago. Good thing, too, because if their resolve is anything like it has been for, say, the last half-century or so, the scream will be Europe’s first line of defense. In fact, if the U.S. decides to make Iran the EU’s problem by simply throwing up a protective umbrella over Israel and wishing Brussels well, it will be their only defense.

Domestic political preoccupations are fascinating the Europeans — especially the French ones. This week saw Jacques Chirac doing what he does best: provide relief that if not exactly comic is certainly bemusing. As Le Figaro reported, on Monday, only days after he completely confused the peacekeeping provision of the U.N.’s ceasefire in Lebanon, he criticized the EU for having dropped the ball in that crisis — a comment that came as a surprise to the rest of Europe, no doubt, where it was not assumed the EU had any such things to drop.

Chirac’s antics were intended solely for consumption in France, of course, where the maneuvers in advance of the 2007 elections are driving the headlines. The looming showdown between the beauty-on-duty of French politics, Socialist Ségolène Royal, and the Gaullist’s little pit-poodle, Nicholas Sarkozy, has turned to direct confrontation on issues that divide the right and the left , especially the 35-hour week, as this item in Le Nouvel Observateur shows. As the paper also reports, Sarkozy’s putative rival, the fabulously coiffed, Bonapartistic, self-published poet and prime minister, Dominque de Villepin, has been relegated to waffling responsibilities on the pressing matter of smoking in public places. In the midst of all this, Iranian nukes are small potatoes or petits pois, depending on your choice of side dish. Chirac is foremost among those menacing the Iranians with more “dialogue,” which is a French word meaning appeasement.

In Britain, the tired and tiresome Left is thoroughly enjoying the Iranian response because it adds spice to their view of America as a rogue state. The BBC’s World Service, for example, wondered aloud whether “there would be another war before George W. Bush’s term ended.” In fact, the almost instant repositioning of the Iranians as the valiant advance-guard of anti-Americanism, as the responses to this Guardian leader demonstrate, is impressive in its own run-for-cover way. (The Times’s Gerald Baker comments on the special victim status accorded Muslims, British and otherwise, here.)

The hatred of the British Left for the U.S. far exceeds the anti-Americanism floating darkly over the continent. It’s conflated with the complex anger the Left feels toward Tony Blair, a man who simultaneously stripped the socialist fringe of power in the Labour party while aligning British foreign policy with that of America. Iran isn’t important in that discussion, except as a symbol of resistance to American hegemony. It hasn’t yet occurred to those calling for global multipolarity that the pole opposite the American one will not be European, let along British. It will be a joint project of Iran and its trading partners, Russia and China, and the British Left will dance happily around that pole until it lands on them. The main concern of the Left in Britain is not Iran at all; it’s when they can finally be rid of Blair. They accuse Blair of being Bush’s lapdog, but in fact, they’ve made Bush Blair’s effigy. Showing a wishful film about the assassination of the man they hate most is going a bit far, even for the radicals in charge of Channel Four. So their docudrama, as the Telegraph reports, is about the assassination of Bush. Kill George if you can’t kill Tony.

Bush can “demand action,” as the Guardian headline puts it, all he wants. But him and whose army? It won’t be a European one, as this report in Le Monde shows. It’s the U.N., stupid. Even the Sudanese, where the Russians and Chinese have heavy economic interests, can laugh off a U.N. Security Council resolution, as the BBC reports they have done in response to the genocide taking place in their nether provinces — and as the Syrians are doing with 1701 as they busily rearm Hezbollah. Only the U.S. insists on taking the U.N. seriously; Europe won’t defend that most corrupt of global institutions, that’s for sure. As we know by now, they won’t even defend themselves unless we make them. (The Germans, according to Deutsche Welle, are fighting the war against terror in the trench of the ‘net.) If Bush is expecting Europe to resurrect the grand old alliance against fascism and tyranny, he’s doomed to sorrow — an inarticulate sorrow, but sorrow nonetheless.

There’s a great scene in Eudora Welty’s short story “Why I Live at the P.O.” in which the doughty narrator is told that her odd Uncle Rondo has taken to wearing her sister’s kimono. “What do you expect me to do about it?” she says. Since the only alternative is to tell Uncle Rondo to knock it off, she decides to defend his right to wear a kimono if he wants to: “I think you look all right. Just try to take care of yourself and not talk and eat at the same time.” But the quarrel continues, so finally she gives up, leaves home and moves into the post office, putting her fingers in both her ears and refusing to listen.

In the end, even after all the posturing is over and the missiles are finally armed and ready, that ear-plugging strategy will be the only meaningful European response to Uncle Mahmoud and those guys around him in their Persian kimonos. Let’s hope the post offices stay open.

ITEMS

Corrections. Last week, I claimed Jiminy Cricket sang “A dream is a wish your heart makes when you’re fast asleep.” No, said many of you. It was Cinderella. I also confused Elmer Fudd with Porky Pig, and that was the topic of several letters, too. I would have fired my research staff for this kind of sloppiness, but they are my three young daughters. So instead, I sent them to bed without their customary episode of “Cops.” Tough love works.

Attack of the Cat Woman. The Wall Street Journal has had a reporter named Elena Cherney covering the Conrad Black story, a somewhat glitzier turf than her normal tundra beat provides (“Giving Day-Care Cash to Stay-at-Home Parents Sounds Like Politics to Some Canadians,” etc.), but that couldn’t possibly explain this lead to a piece in yesterday’s paper: “A Canadian court has frozen all the assets of former media tycoon Conrad Black and his socialite wife, Barbara Amiel Black.…” Okay, she’s kind of cute and way rich, at least for now, but “socialite”? Even the AP dropped that adjective from its pick-up of the piece. Barbara Amiel is one of the better writers to appear in the Telegraph, and if the paper were smart, they’d hire her back. (Here’s a recent sample of what Telegraph readers are missing.) If Cherney’s reporting is even halfway accurate, it looks like she could use the dough.

Need an extra European, Arianna? Ray D. at Medienkritik, provides the dossier for a guy who could really give the HuffPo what’s it’s always needed: A little, subtle anti-Bush bile. “Pitzke’s articles…are written to please a readership that desperately wants to believe that because it rejects European-style big government and socialist-democracy, the USA is a nation drowning in poverty and social injustice.” Buoy, oh buoy, Ray.

— Denis Boyles is author of Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese.