The European Union has minimal influence in Middle East events even as war rages there, despite the bloc’s significant financial input into the region.
That is the assessment of Marwan Abdallah, a Lebanese geopolitical analyst and the foreign affairs minister with the Lebanese Kataeb Party.
“The European Union invests significant resources in Lebanon and across the Middle East. But the roots of the region’s problems are primarily military and security-related sectors in which the EU is largely unprepared,” he said.
“As a result, it struggles to translate its investments into geopolitical influence.
“Today, Europe’s influence in the Middle East is minimal,” Abdallah said.
Kataeb is one of Lebanon’s oldest political movements. Once a youth movement that then became a militia during the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War, the organisation later abandoned armed struggle and evolved into an institutional political party.
It produced two Lebanese presidents: Bachir Gemayel, elected in 1982 but assassinated before taking office and his brother Amine Gemayel, who served as president from 1982 to 1988.
Today the party is part of the governing coalition in Beirut.
Within Lebanon’s political system — where political parties broadly represent different religious communities — Kataeb is traditionally associated with the country’s Christian constituency and positions itself as a centre-right conservative force.
At the European level, the party maintains links with the European Parliament’s European People’s Party, where it holds observer status.
“We try to explain the complexity of the Lebanese situation and the wider regional dynamics so Europeans can better understand the realities on the ground,” Abdallah said.
In his view, though, the EU currently plays only a marginal role in the unfolding crises across the Middle East.
Beyond Europe’s limited military leverage, he points to the dominant strategic role played by Washington and Israel.
“They don’t provide the EU space,” Abdallah said.
At the same time, Europe’s political attention has shifted elsewhere.
“Europeans are now more concentrated on Ukraine,” he noted, adding that EU member states often lack full political alignment when it comes to Middle East policy.
According to Abdallah, migration has become the only Middle Eastern issue consistently rising to the top of the European agenda in recent years.
“The issue of refugees,” he argued, has often been approached by European institutions and governments in a rushed and short-term manner, with the overriding objective of reducing migration flows.
In doing so, he said, European policymakers have sometimes engaged — formally or informally — with regimes that were themselves among the drivers of migration and capable of exploiting refugee flows for political leverage.
He cited Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad as examples of governments that have used migration pressure to extract concessions from Europe.
“Europe’s approach has too often been about containing emergencies rather than addressing the root causes,” Abdallah said.
Despite its limited political leverage, the EU remains one of Lebanon’s largest financial backers.
Since 2011, Brussels has provided more than €3.5 billion in assistance to the country through a mix of development aid, humanitarian support and programmes linked to the Syrian refugee crisis.
The funding includes about €865 million in humanitarian aid, more than €1 billion through regional resilience and refugee-support funds and hundreds of millions more in bilateral development programmes.
In 2024, the EU also announced an additional €1 billion financial package aimed at supporting Lebanon’s economic stability, social services and border management.
For Abdallah, this highlights a broader contradiction in Europe’s Middle East policy.
While the EU invests heavily in the region, he argues, its geopolitical influence remains limited — a gap between financial engagement and strategic power.
Looking ahead, Abdallah argues that Lebanon’s long-term stability will depend on addressing one of the country’s most contentious issues: The role of the Lebanon-based Hezbollah terrorist group and its ties to Iran.
In recent years, the Kataeb Party has emerged as one of the political forces most openly critical of Hezbollah and what it describes as Tehran’s geopolitical agenda in Lebanon.
For this reason, Abdallah says the Lebanese Government should now implement a decision it has already taken: Declaring Hezbollah’s military wing illegal and moving to disarm it.
According to him, such a step would represent a crucial turning point for the country.
“The Lebanese Government has already taken the political decision,” Abdallah said. “Now it must implement it.”
In his view, disarming Hezbollah could also open the door — eventually — to a broader geopolitical shift in the region.
“It is still a long way off,” he said, referring to the possibility of normalised relations between Lebanon and Israel.
“But there are steps that could be taken, particularly in the context of a wider regional implementation of the Abraham Accords.”
According to Abdallah, once Hezbollah’s military structure is dismantled, there could be room for diplomatic negotiations between the two countries aimed at resolving several long-standing disputes.
Among them is the formal fixing of the border, which has never been definitively agreed upon, as well as several small contested areas in southern Lebanon currently under Israeli control.
“These would be two important steps,” Abdallah said, “if Lebanon and Israel ever want to move toward normalisation and mutual recognition.”
Meanwhile, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah continues to reshape Lebanon’s fragile political landscape.
Israeli air strikes and Hezbollah rocket attacks have kept the southern border in a state of constant conflict, raising fears that the confrontation could expand into a wider regional war.
For many Lebanese political actors, the outcome of this conflict will determine not only the balance of power inside Lebanon but also whether the country remains trapped in a cycle of proxy wars or eventually moves toward a new regional order in the Middle East.
