◢ In an op-ed published in the German newspaper Handelsblatt, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas declared that the “the US and Europe have been drifting apart for years.” In order to defend the JCPOA and protect European companies active in Iran from U.S. sanctions, Maas has outlined three initiatives: “establishing payment channels independent of the US, a European monetary fund, and an independent SWIFT [payments] system.” This has given many in Iran hope that Europe might still be able to create an “economic package” to save the JCPOA. But Maas’s vision is not an economic package. It is an economic process, which may prove transformative, but only in the long term.