The message from Ursula von der Leyen was blunt. “Europe can no longer be a custodian for the old-world order” and needs a “more realistic and interest-driven foreign policy”. In a major foreign policy speech this week, the European Commission president said the EU would always “defend and uphold the rules-based system” but in a precarious and chaotic world, that could no longer be relied upon. On the day she spoke, missiles were raining down on Tehran and southern Iran as the war entered its 10th day, proving her point.
Reverberating around Europe, the Middle East conflict has triggered a range of responses. France is sending a dozen naval vessels to the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. EU officials convened an ad-hoc summit with Middle Eastern leaders in a show of solidarity with the region. EU humanitarian aid for Lebanon is being dispatched to help 130,000 people, after at least half a million were displaced by Israeli bombs and evacuation orders.
Despite the frenetic activity, Europe’s voice has carried no weight. As Donald Trump zigzags between different war aims – in one 24-hour period declaring the conflict “very complete, pretty much” but “we haven’t won enough” – Europe’s muted calls for restraint have gone unheeded.
In part, the problem is disunity over how to respond. Standing alone, Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has refused “to be complicit in something that is bad for the world and that is also contrary to our values”. At the other pole, German chancellor Friedrich Merz said it was “not the time to lecture partners and allies” on international law.
Amid this division, EU officials issue impersonal calls for diplomacy, an approach that has earned withering reviews, including from former insiders. Brussels has “slipped into a starkly paralysed role as mere commentator on the geopolitical upheaval on its Southern flank” wrote a former head of the EU’s diplomatic service. Nor did a second former EU official hold back. “Europe’s response to the American and Israeli strikes on Iran has been shameful: stunned, sidelined, and disunited,” wrote the EU’s former representative to the Palestinian territories.
European officials, it has been noted, have called out Iran for its counter-retaliation, without reference to the US and Israel’s decision to launch a war when facing no immediate threat. “Europe’s collective response has been, at best, a fiasco – and at worst, strategic lunacy,” concluded analysts at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“We’re stuck in this bizarre situation at the moment where Europeans are treading around Trump with such timidity, out of fear of antagonising him, that they refuse to come out with a meaningful position on the war,” Julien Barnes-Dacey, director of ECFR’s Middle East and North Africa programme, told the Guardian. “Can Europeans decisively shift dynamics on their own? Probably not. But could they feed into a wider effort to pressure Trump to hold back by more assertively standing up and saying this war is a disaster and Europeans cannot support it because it runs so against their interests? I think that is something they could do more on.”
An obituary for international law?
The Middle East conflict has also revealed an old fault line about who speaks for Europe in the world. In a rebuke to von der Leyen’s diplomatic outreach, France accused the commission of usurping the role of the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, who operates on a mandate agreed by the 27 member states. Without criticising specific policies or naming von der Leyen directly, French foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot called on the commission to “adhere strictly to the letter and spirit of the EU treaties”. His comments came after a senior French MEP from the ruling party, Nathalie Loiseau, criticised von der Leyen’s telephone diplomacy to Gulf leaders as “NOT your business”.
This critique is far from universal. Some EU sources contend it is important for a commission president to assume leadership during a global crisis; others said they had no problem with it. “The criticism of the commission overstepping its mandate is just a fig leaf for saying, ‘We don’t like this, that or the other decision that you took,’” one EU diplomat said.
But von der Leyen has created unease with her quickness to embrace regime change in Iran, interpreted as an attempt to stay close to Trump. Kallas did not go so far; she has said a democratic Iran is “the dream scenario” but far from certain.
There is an even greater nuance. Von der Leyen appeared to deliver an obituary for the international rules-based order calling for “new ways of cooperating with partners”. Kallas, by contrast, called for a restoration of international law, saying that otherwise “we are doomed to see repeated violations of the law, disruption and chaos”. European Commission vice-president, Teresa Ribera, a Spanish Socialist, issued a more public reprimand to von der Leyen, saying “maybe it was not the most adequate manner to express herself”. Ribera added: “To me, it is key to defend, to stress, to underline that international law is a key element of building the European project and the European security.” Socialist MEP leader Iratxe García Pérez went further, accusing von der Leyen of failing in her responsibility to defend international law: “If we accept that major powers can bomb whenever they want, then international law ceases to exist and we end up with the law of the jungle.”
Amid the criticism, von der Leyen offered a more full-throated defence of the rules-based order – and her approach – to MEPs on Wednesday: “Seeing the world as it is, in no way diminishes our determination to fight for the world as we want it.”
For Barnes-Dacey, von der Leyen’s call for realism is an attempt to keep Trump on side over Ukraine. It was, he said, “a tacit acknowledgment of the illegality of this war [on Iran] and Europe’s failure and unwillingness to call it out based on a perception that we need to keep Trump happy”. As Trump mused about waiving oil sanctions “on some countries” to guarantee supply – reported by Reuters to possibly include Russia – that strategy appears doomed.
EU leaders are deeply concerned about what the Middle East conflict means for Ukraine, more than four years after the full-scale invasion. Russia stands to gain from higher energy prices, diversion of air-defence systems and ammunition to the Middle East and reduced attention to the war it launched on its neighbour. “So far, there is only one winner in this war – Russia,” said the European Council president António Costa.
Europe is making “a disastrous strategic miscalculation” in its approach to the Iran war, Barnes-Dacey said: “For the sake of managing the Ukraine conflict and preventing more trade and economic shocks, they are effectively unwilling to confront Trump on a conflict that is so deeply going to impact their wider interests.”
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