Guardian:

Key European powers will offer only limited participation in a high-profile Trump administration summit on the Middle East starting on Wednesday, reflecting their growing anger over unilateral US policymaking on Iran and Syria.

The UK foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, will leave the Warsaw summit early, pleading Brexit Commons business, while France is sending a civil servant and Germany its junior foreign minister.

Federica Mogherini, the EU external affairs chief, will boycott the event, originally conceived by the US as a way to press EU countries to adopt a more aggressive stance towards Iran.

The original summit agenda was scrapped after Europe told Washington it was “not a very smart idea” to hold a summit that would highlight Europe’s differences with the US over Iran. The EU was not consulted before Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, announced the summit, jointly hosted with Poland.

Despite retitling the agenda to focus on peace and security in the Middle East, European diplomats remain sceptical that figures such as Pompeo and the US vice-president, Mike Pence, will dial down their anti-Iran rhetoric at the summit.

The EU remains strongly supportive of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that was abandoned by the US, even if it criticises Iran’s ballistic missile programme. It has finally devised a preliminary trading vehicle to resist US secondary sanctions on firms that continue to trade with Iran.

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