Europe’s Geopolitical Challenges and the Impact of the Middle East Crisis
The European Union (EU) has faced a series of significant geopolitical challenges in recent months, from trade issues with China to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. These events have disrupted Brussels’ agenda and tested the unity and strategic focus of the bloc.
In the days following the United States and Israel’s attacks on Iran, European leaders found themselves divided. Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz expressed support for regime change in Iran shortly after the strikes began over four weeks ago. They also questioned the effectiveness of the international rules-based order. Meanwhile, Merz’s foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, went as far as stating that international law “cannot be invoked” by a “regime like Iran.”
In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez took a different stance, condemning the war as illegal. He refused U.S. requests to refuel fighter jets on joint U.S.-Spanish bases and used a televised national address to declare “no to war,” following President Donald Trump’s threat to cut off all trade with the Iberian nation. However, Sanchez’s voice was largely isolated.
As the situation escalated, rising energy prices and the potential influx of displaced migrants heading for Europe became clear indicators of the crisis’s impact. While it was not Europe’s war, the continent would surely bear the consequences.
Germany, France, Italy, and other EU nations rejected Trump’s demands to get involved, while concerns emerged that another American foray into the Middle East could divert resources from Europe’s primary foreign policy objective: supporting Ukraine.
A proposal by top diplomat Kaja Kallas to expand Operation Aspides, which monitors shipping routes in the Red Sea to prevent Houthi attacks, was rejected by the 27 EU member states. German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius stated, “This is not our war. We have not started it. What does Trump expect a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to do in the Strait of Hormuz that the powerful U.S. Navy cannot do?”
The crisis and the evolving European response have revealed much about the EU’s current state. It shows that Europe is still far from being the geopolitical player many leaders aspire for it to be. Combined with its confused response to the war in Gaza, near-silence on the presidential toppling in Venezuela, and the current fumble over funding for Ukraine, it paints a picture of Europe as an international crisis tourist—hopping from one geopolitical flashpoint to another, swept up by global events without leaving its mark on any of them.
“Just saying you are a geopolitical actor doesn’t make it so,” said Sven Biscop, director at Egmont – The Royal Institute for International Relations in Brussels.
Europe’s response also suggests a distracted bloc, easily prised away from core issues by the crisis du jour but also unable to weigh correctly its own interests before leaping to the defense of an illegal war.
If you were to design a crisis to get Europe’s incumbent leaders unseated from office in elections with populist parties at the gate, it would probably look a lot like the war waged by Israel and the U.S. against Iran. It is driving up energy prices and threatens a new influx of displaced migrants. It could cause terror attacks and supply chain bottlenecks, further imperilling EU industry—never mind that it was launched in breach of international law and is a distraction from Ukraine.
Yet while most failed to criticize the U.S.-Israeli operation, some European leaders welcomed it, perhaps in the paradoxical hope of keeping the United States engaged in Ukraine. Even seasoned analysts were stunned, with Julien Barnes-Dacey, head of the Middle East desk at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), describing this approach as “strategic lunacy.”
“There’s a risk, which is probably a reality these days, that Europe is not seen as a serious actor prepared to assert its own interests,” he told the South China Morning Post.
Europe’s crisis-driven politics leaves it perpetually off balance and unable to address the challenges that will define its future, from industrial decline to de-risking from China.
Less than two weeks ago, leaders from the 27 member states huddled in Brussels for what was supposed to be a crucial summit on competitiveness. Their aim was to put meat on the bones of an informal debate that took place in a Flemish castle in February, over how the bloc could arrest its industrial decline and steel itself in the face of what many economists now agree is a “China shock” threatening to hollow out EU manufacturing heartlands.
“We cannot and will not absorb China’s export-led growth model, and its industrial overcapacity,” von der Leyen said days later, in a speech to the Australian parliament that laid out the scale of the problem.
While the March 19 Brussels summit produced lengthy written conclusions—including a tight timeline of industrial legislation to be adopted by the end of next year—the debate was instead overshadowed by Iran. Hours were devoted to climate policy, with some capitals looking to water down the bloc’s emissions trading scheme. Much of the rest of the day was spent on the Middle East, including more than three hours at lunch with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
After lunch, Merz wondered aloud to his fellow leaders why they had not scheduled things differently to place more focus on economic issues. “Perhaps the choreography there could have been a bit smarter,” was how an EU diplomat briefed on the discussion summarised his comments.
For China watchers, it was a familiar pattern: a long-planned strategic debate squeezed to the margins by the latest emergency.
Even the EU’s own trade officials have conceded their tools were not designed for the scale of the China shock.
“On TDI [trade defence instruments] we have something like 143 measures targeting Chinese products directly or indirectly,” Marco Chirullo, the EU’s top trade official on China, told the European Parliament’s trade committee.
“It is true TDI is not a systemic tool, it goes product by product. So it does the trick for what it is designed to do but we cannot solve a systemic issue through a non-systemic tool,” Chirullo said.
The strategic slippage caused by the war in Iran has shown up in other areas of China policy too. On April 13, von der Leyen will convene a meeting of the security college—consisting of her 26 commissioners—to discuss EU-China relations. People familiar with the planning said that the date was partly set to fall after Trump’s visit to China, which was scheduled for late March but postponed because of the war in Iran.
When asked last month what to expect in EU-China affairs this year, one senior official quipped, “Let’s see what happens when Trump goes to Beijing”—suggesting again that the union, like many parts of the world, was being swept up in events that are largely out of its control.
According to Andrew Small, head of the ECFR’s Asia programme, Europe is “serially absorbed with crises.”
“If you then spend your time dealing with this just as a matter of crisis diplomacy, and all of the bandwidth is taken up with that, then you have a problem,” he said.
“Because you continue to go through another year in which you devote inadequate attention to putting the capabilities and essentials in place to be in a more resilient position to deal with all of these things in another couple of years’ time.”
To be fair to Europe, Small said, it was not the only global player caught off guard by events in Iran.
“What’s China doing about any of it—absolutely nothing, it too is completely ineffectual, having to straddle different interests between its relations with Iran and other Gulf states—unable to defend the fact that its oil supplies are being hit,” Small said.
Nonetheless, it is hard to escape the idea that it is Europe—already decoupling from Russian energy and backtracking on some elements of its green transition—that will be disproportionately hit. This applies in geopolitical terms as well.
Perhaps the biggest victim of this crisis-hopping approach is the biggest crisis of all for Europe. Ukraine—the one issue on which the EU has undeniably played a major strategic role—risks being marginalised in the global picture by Iran.
The U.S. decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil will help to replenish Moscow’s military coffers at a moment when Ukraine is seen to have been performing better on the battlefield, after the revocation of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite coverage for Russia.
Finnish President Alexander Stubb told British daily The Telegraph last week that the move was “very damaging for Ukraine, because it basically feeds the Russian war machine.”
Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s foreign minister from 2020 to 2024, said the episode—combined with the inability to unlock a Euro90 billion (US$104.3 billion) loan to Ukraine and the suggestion that EU funds would repair a Russian-damaged gas pipeline bringing energy to Hungary and Slovakia—showed that “Brussels is in disarray.”
“A continent that could very well play an important part in shaping global events will retreat to being a group of middle powers scrambling for what’s left in a great power competition,” Landsbergis wrote in his newsletter.
“The hope of a geopolitical Europe and Europe as one of those great powers would be buried.”
