The EU sees a world that isn’t there

Twenty-five years ago, Europe stood poised to administer a world where all nations sought peace and prosperity. Despite the recent unpleasantness in the former Yugoslavia, the new European Union could count on a shared rationality that would exclude war as an instrument of national policy. Conflict killed your people and destroyed their property; Rational states would avoid it in favour of commerce and its attendant prosperity. That this worldview was last in vogue just before the carnage of the Great War did not trouble the Eurocrats eager to place Brussels at the centre of a peaceful, rules-based world order. Nor were they concerned that their grand vision might be a highly contingent artefact nursed in a walled garden patrolled by brutish Americans.  Unlike their predecessors who’d bumbled their way into war in 1914, they would get it right this time, and Europe would reclaim its rightful place as the regulatory arbiter of global prosperity.

Unfortunately for the EU, other nations placed the material enrichment of their citizens far below more primal concerns. A few years after the Maastricht Treaty birthed the European Union, Vladimir Putin was consolidating his hold on power in Russia, determined to avenge the loss of the Cold War and the destruction of the Soviet Union. Peace and prosperity were useful tools as he rebuilt his army and infused his people with a neo-imperial vision of a Great Russia entitled to treat Ukraine as lost territory and its people destined to be elevated to true Russians.  The stubbornness of Europe’s belief in a world at odds with reality became acute in early 2022 as American intelligence officials toured capitals with hard evidence of Putin’s coming invasion, yet were dismissed as such plans made no rational sense. Which they didn’t, to European leaders clinging to their belief in peace and material prosperity as the ne plus ultra of national policy.

The sorry history of Europe’s serial attempts to forge a durable agreement with Iran’s mullahs over its nuclear enrichment programme marks another grotesque misapprehension of strategic peril.  After the exposure of the programme in 2003, the EU-3 took the lead in negotiating an end to enrichment in exchange for substantial aid and the withdrawal of economic sanctions. European diplomats repeatedly explained the fundamental illogic of Tehran’s nuclear programme to their Iranian counterparts: A nation sitting on a vast reservoir of oil and gas had no need for nuclear energy. An agreement with the West would preclude the military threats that a nuclear weapon might deter. The EU-3 offered what some termed a “coming out party,” an invitation for Iran to join polite society and reap the rewards of peace. But again, Europe failed to grasp that the Islamic Republic placed the material prosperity of its people well below its true objectives: The defeat of the West, the destruction of Israel, and the subordination of Sunni Arabs to a nuclear-armed Shiite state.  

Europe’s precious rationalism not only blinded it to grave dangers, it made the EU an easy mark for the cruel realists in Moscow and Tehran. Both regimes used temporary agreements to buy time while they poured fossil fuel revenues into their military programmes. Russia milked the EU for cash but withdrew from meticulously detailed arms control protocols once Putin wished to reclaim lost Soviet territory. No web of treaty deals and commercial ties would thwart Putin’s strategic ambitions. Successive deals between Tehran and the EU-3 unlocked cash and sanctions relief, but never hindered the regime’s progress toward a nuclear weapon. 

Trump’s attack on Iran derives from his recognition that 23 years of diplomatic effort since the disclosure of its nuclear programme failed to curtail it.  Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal offered Iran literal cash and sanctions relief in exchange for a mere ten year pause in enrichment. His “Joint Consultative Plan of Action” – not a treaty, not even a signed document – did not ensure challenge inspections or access to Iranian military facilities and sensitive sites.  It failed any standard of effective arms control verification. Any question that the mullahs out negotiated Obama is belied by the $400 million (€345 million) in used Euros and Swiss francs delivered in US cargo planes straight to Tehran.

There was no good reason to give the Islamic Republic pallets of untraceable cash, but there were plenty of bad ones: Hezbollah missiles and Hamas terror tunnels being two.  Rather than accept the obvious shortcomings of this deeply flawed non-agreement, Europe defended it as evidence of Iran’s good intentions even as the Islamic Republic promoted terror and assassination in and around Europe. Hamas’ October 7 massacre prompted less reconsideration of Iran’s terror proxies than condemnation of Israel’s fight to defeat them.

Ukraine and the United States now protect Europe from the consequences of its delusions.  Kyiv remains locked in a death struggle with Putin’s legions, backed by an EU willing to scratch cheques but not fight against the Kremlin’s imperial conquest. The US leads a coalition of Arab states determined to end the Islamic Republic’s half century of aggression and its quest for a nuclear arsenal designed to grant it regional hegemony. Iranian domination of the Gulf and thereby Europe’s oil and gas supplies would put the EU at the mercy of murderous theocrats, yet Brussels dithers over the campaign intended to save Europe from this sorry fate.  The EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen issue statements showing no grasp of the true stakes for Europe in this conflict, unsurprising given the feckless disunity of the EU on foreign and security policy, even when actual EU territory in Cyprus comes under attack.  

Europe’s persistent faith in a rational self-interest to create a global rule-based order of peaceful prosperity reflects a determination to see a world that is simply not there. Liberal democracies and free peoples require more than the attractions of material wealth to protect them in a world prowling with predatory states. Ukraine, the United States and Israel are fighting in their defence while the EU remains at best a bystander and at worst, prey.