WARSAW — It is the Iran conference where uttering the word Iran is almost taboo. It is the Middle East peace gathering with utterly no chance of forging peace in the Middle East.

And it is a meeting intended to end a sense of U.S. isolation from discussions about the region that so far have only cast a bright light on President Donald Trump’s pariah status among longtime allies.

Officials from dozens of nations are convening in Warsaw at Washington’s behest on Wednesday for an event billed as the “Ministerial to Promote a Future of Peace and Security in the Middle East.”

Some, including diplomats representing America’s closest historical allies, said they are attending grudgingly, out of a sense of obligation and mainly in hopes of containing any damage.

A number of key players are not planning to attend at all — notably Russia, which is now viewed by many as the dominant power in the Middle East after successfully protecting President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

This is not a trash-Iran conference” — Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the EU

Neither Iran nor Iranian opposition groups were invited, and on Monday Lebanon became the latest country to announce it would skip the event — a move viewed as showing solidarity with Tehran. Lebanon's Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil announced the decision in Beirut at a news conference with his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Others not attending include Qatar, Turkey and the Palestinian Authority.

Just about the only nation expressing enthusiasm is Poland, the host, which has made a show of cozying up to the U.S. president, and even asked him to establish a military base on its soil to be called Fort Trump.

Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz said the event demonstrates the strong partnership with the U.S. and, playing off the name of the Polish anti-communist movement, that Poland and the U.S. “are rallying the world to a new solidarity.”

However, the reluctance of allies to participate led the U.S. ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, to lash out, saying the Europeans “make unhelpful statements and act in unhelpful ways.”

“The level of participation in the upcoming Warsaw ministerial is one example,” Sondland said. “This is not a trash-Iran conference.”

No one, particularly not the Iranian government, really believes that. It also didn’t help that on Monday, two days before the conference, Trump tweeted — in Farsi — to trash the Iranian government on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the country’s Islamic Revolution.

“The regime in Iran has produced only 40 years of failure,” he tweeted, along with accusations of corruption, repression and terror.

A senior U.S. administration official insisted the conference is not focused on Iran, but said officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, would not shy away from discussing or criticizing the country.

“Secretary Pompeo will certainly discuss our concerns regarding Iran’s destructive policies in the region,” the official said in a briefing for reporters. “It’s difficult to talk about the region’s challenges without referencing Iran, but this is simply a function of Iran’s behavior. As we have stated, Iran is not a specific agenda item.”

The official insisted the meeting could spur positive dialogue. “It’s a good faith effort to have a real conversation about how we can promote stability in the region,” the official said, adding: “By getting ministers from around the world in the room together to discuss these issues we hope to tread new ground and define areas of consensus that can lay the foundation for future cooperation.”

Dead in the water

Critics of the Trump administration declared the event a debacle long before it started.

“Everything that I've heard,” said Andrew Miller, the deputy policy director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, a Washington think tank, “is that this is a dumpster fire. That it’s ill-conceived, ill-executed and that it’s unlikely to produce anything of value.”

Miller, who served on the National Security Council during the Obama administration and worked before that at the State Department, said the reluctance of close allies to participate is a stinging rebuke.

“In any other administration at any other time whether our European partners would show up at one of our events was never in question,” he said.

The Warsaw meeting could hardly come at a more excruciatingly difficult time, with Trump having alienated the world’s other major diplomatic powers — China, the EU, France, Germany, Russia, and the U.K. — by unilaterally withdrawing from the Iran nuclear accord, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and reimposing economic sanctions against Tehran.

The Europeans view the sanctions as unlawful, and in a bid to preserve the accord, France, Germany and the U.K. have created a so-called special purpose vehicle designed to help facilitate business transaction with Iran.

Indeed, the EU has such a dismissive view of the U.S. sanctions that a spokeswoman took issue with suggestions the special purpose vehicle was intended to thwart Trump’s punitive measures.

“They don’t apply to us,” the spokeswoman said. “We don’t recognize them.”

No seat at the table? Create a new table

The three European guarantors of the JCPOA have made clear that they viewed the goal of halting Iran’s nuclear weapons program as so singularly important that the deal should be preserved as long as Iran remained in compliance as confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency. And they said that other concerns about Iran’s behavior, including at least two state-sponsored assassination attempts on European soil and Iran’s role in regional military conflicts like the war in Yemen, should be addressed in separate discussions.

The EU then created a new format, known as the E4, which added Italy to the table, to pursue those issues.

It was the perception at the State Department that the U.S. is being excluded from such conversations that led Trump’s special representative for Iran at the State Department, Brian Hook, to propose the idea of holding a ministerial meeting. Initially, it was intended to take place on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September, but when that proved difficult, it was shifted to Europe in the run-up to the annual Munich Security Conference.

But it quickly became clear that there is little to no appetite to talk about Iran.

“The idea was to have a conference, a ministerial, and basically break our diplomatic isolation on Iran,” said a person familiar with the planning of the event. “It started out as an Iran conference in disguise but has probably actually been forced to take on more actual broader Middle East content now."

The person added: “They changed some of the focus and were forced to pony up with content on Syria and Yemen particularly."

But without Russia at the table, there is virtually nothing to discuss about Syria, where Assad has been able to hold onto power thanks to the willingness of his patrons in the Kremlin to flex their military might on his behalf.

There is similarly little hope the meeting in Warsaw will yield any progress on the quagmire in Yemen.

Even as they plan only limited participation, the European powers are intent on making sure the discussions in Warsaw do not undermine their already fragile effort to preserve the JCPOA. The British foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, is planning to attend part of the conference. Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, will not attend. She cited a scheduling conflict.

It is not clear if the U.S. organizers would be able to generate sufficient consensus to publish a final communiqué at the conclusion of the conference.

U.S. officials insisted the choice to hold the event in Poland reflects a nod to the “new Europe” — but it also underscored how the Trump administration has alienated virtually all of Western Europe, and counts Poland as one of its few dedicated friends on the Continent at the moment.

In another briefing, a senior U.S. official said countries skipping the event are making a mistake. “We think anybody who doesn’t participate is going to be missing out,” the official said. “But we’ve got a good roster.”