Sound complicated? It is. And while it works on paper, it’s proved extremely hard to realize in the real world. Policymakers in Berlin admit freely today under the condition of anonymity that they had underestimated the technical difficulties.

Instex was first announced by the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs in September 2018. It was first intended to be set up as an E.U.-institution; then, as a result of legal and political concerns, it transformed into a private company created by only three member states — France, Britain and Germany — to be hosted in Paris and headed by a German. But finding the right personnel to staff Instex proved difficult. The staff had to be composed of people with expertise in both diplomacy and banking, and people willing to take a personal risk, since the United States had threatened to bar both the company and anyone associated with it from the American financial system — which could even extend to having private bank accounts shut down.

After a lengthy slog, in January 2019, the three countries announced that Instex had come into existence. At a meeting of the E.U.’s foreign ministers in Bucharest, Romania, that month, the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, even tried, boldly, to flex some muscle: “We’re making clear that we didn’t just talk about keeping the nuclear deal with Iran alive, but now we’re creating a possibility to conduct business transactions,” he said. A year later, with Instex poised to process its first transaction, Europe’s great moment of defying the United States approach to Iran seems to have finally arrived.

But has it really?

When compared to Mr. Maas’s strong rhetoric in Bucharest, the sound emanating from German foreign policy circles today is rather mealy-mouthed. The first transaction is said to be a “test case.” German officials have declined to name the exact amount, but say it is “less than a million” euros. They like to stress that everything about it is entirely legal and in accordance with the American sanctions regime: The first trade deal operated through Instex is a shipment of medical goods produced by a German company.

Still, the exporting company’s name has been treated like a state secret — as are the names of the banks involved, for fear they might become the targets of American wrath. Also, there have been no Iranian imports to the E.U. in return, as laid out in the original concept of the barter system. The amount due for the shipment has been provided by Instex itself.

Get through all that? Here’s the tl;dr version: Under constant American diplomatic pressure and threats, Instex has gone from being promoted as the linchpin of an independent European foreign policy to a company sending less than a million euros’ worth of humanitarian aid to Iran in half-secrecy. The once-defiant posture — Europe proudly standing up to a bully — is long gone.

This was roughly the situation when Mr. Trump ordered a death sentence for Mr. Suleimani in January, causing the world, and not least Europeans, to hold their breath for several weeks in fear of a hot war in the Middle East. On the surface, the crisis did not influence Europe’s strategy of management and control. France, Britain and Germany have triggered the nuclear deal’s dispute resolution mechanism; Germany hopes to intensify regional dialogue, leveraging mounting concerns with Donald Trump’s maximum-pressure strategy.