Sen. Tim Kaine warns about war with Iran.

The squatter in the White House was in Europe this week trashing U.S. allies, making gauzy remarks about leaving NATO unless the other members pay a bigger share of the alliance’s costs, politically damaging the British prime minister, lying about what he clearly said in a taped interview, insulting the Queen, lining himself up unequivocally with white nationalists, and intoning “fake news” like a shield that he hopes will magically erase Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s latest indictments and the indictments yet to come. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s top minions were telling Britain, France, and Germany that Washington will not grant exemptions on economic sanctions for companies doing business with Iran.

The rejection of the exemption request is part of the Trump regime’s hard-nosed approach that includes public and behind-the-scenes U.S. advocacy of regime change in Iran. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced last month that he will deliver a major address near Los Angeles on July 22 titled “Supporting Iranian Voices.”

In August and again in November, the U.S. plans to reimpose two waves of sanctions against Tehran. Sanctions were lifted by the Obama administration after the Iran nuclear accord was signed in 2015. A key element of the reimposition is cutting off Iran from access to Western banks. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the accord on May 8.

On Saturday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said: “Today, we are in conditions in which the United States is more isolated than ever over the sanctions issue. America’s illegal actions ... have even isolated it among its own allies as we just saw.”

Certainly the Trump regime has generated a wave of eye-rolling and head-shaking among European leaders. And it’s true that the other signatories to the nuclear accord—China, Russia, and especially Britain, Germany, and France—have sought to keep the multilateral accord alive. But reimposed sanctions without exemptions could make their effort to stick to the accord politically difficult at home.

Dan De Luce, Abigail Williams, and Andrea Mitchell at NBC News report that in a written reply to a request for broad exemptions from sanctions by those three European nations, Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said the U.S. would only grant limited sanctions exemptions on humanitarian and national security grounds.

Their letter noted that the 2015 deal, which lifted sanctions in exchange for limitations on Iran’s nuclear development program, had “failed to guarantee the safety of the American people” and, therefore, the U.S. will place “unprecedented financial pressure on the Iranian regime” through reimposed sanctions until there is a “tangible, demonstrable and sustained shift in the policies we have enumerated.”