The woeful inadequacy of the EU’s foreign policy
President Donald Trump’s decision to assassinate Qasem Soleimani may not have entirely transformed the politics of the Middle East, but it has re-defined the rules by which the US is now playing the foreign policy game.
Indeed, in its own way the assassination was a powerful illustration of the changing geopolitical landscape, a world shifting from the thin idealistic veneer of a liberal international order to a resurgent age of diplomatic realism. As traditional fault-lines are crossed and old rules torn up, the new international politics more closely resembles the Hobbesian state of nature. The spirit of 1991 (the end of history and the triumph of the West) is gone – and the spectre of Realpolitik has returned.
The ideal of a rules-based consensus that for so long shaped the political imagination of many in the West is crumbling. The game has definitively changed, and a different tide is sweeping across the globe – the new Cold War is underway as competing states grapple through proxies and sanctions to establish and maintain strategic footholds.
This new geopolitical world will not be structured around a standoff between two clearly-defined blocs – capitalism vs communism. Instead, its battles will be waged upon many terrains and through the competition of multiple actors. An authoritarian China balances market forces with geopolitical assertiveness while a revived Russia seeks to build coalitions against a European Union mired in a crisis of confidence, as well as a wider western world wearied by the legacies of ongoing military interventions in the Middle East.
The poly-centric character of this new world disorder creates dangers, but it also produces more diplomatic opportunities. It is an age in which the European Union is desperately fighting for relevance. Put simply, the EU’s architects will struggle to gain purchase if they are unable to coordinate member states and find a coherent vision and purpose.
Yet on several issues of great geopolitical significance, a coherent EU foreign policy has been markedly absent. On the most burning foreign policy question of this year so far – the US-Iran crisis – the European Commission was notably out of stride with events. President von der Leyen took a full three days to respond with an official statement on the situation – not quite the urgency required of one of the main brokers and guarantors of the Iran Nuclear Deal, the JCPOA.
The follow-up has been equally lethargic, as a commission out of sync with events struggles to adapt to new realities. The nuclear deal painstakingly facilitated by Europe’s statesmen in 2015 has unravelled; the mechanism for the dispute resignation in the deal has been triggered, but it has fallen on deaf ears in Tehran.
The inconvenient truth is that the JCPOA deal is now not only dead, but damned. The world is now dealing with a US President who has expressed no interest in returning to the compromise crafted by Barack Obama. In this context, the UK Prime Minister’s call for the negotiation of a new “Trump deal” has merely put a cheerful gloss on this fact.
By constantly being caught on the backfoot, the EU now risks becoming a diplomatic insignificance. A clear indication of this could be seen this weekend, when leaders from around the world met in Berlin to discuss the future of the civil war stricken state of Libya. Although EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met with the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the true power politics was conducted elsewhere.
The entire conference was a product of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s attempt to wrest some form of initiative back from Presidents Putin and Erdogan. These two had already brought the two conflicting sides in Libya’s civil war – an administration in Tripoli and the insurgent military force of General Khalifa Haftar – to the table in Moscow on Monday 13 January. It is they – not the EU, or even the US – who are the chief power brokers in the region.
Yet how much control could Berlin or Brussels conceivably regain over the situation when the member states are so clearly at cross-purposes on their respective countries’ interests in the Middle East? While Merkel seeks to bring the strongmen around the table, President Emmanuel Macron has vocally criticised the Turkish presence in Libya, lending his moral support to the insurgent General Haftar over the United Nations-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli; Italy and Germany, on the other hand, continue to sponsor the internationally-recognised GNA. The nation state has clearly reasserted itself in the domain of foreign policy as much as in domestic affairs. None of this bodes well for a unified European geopolitics.
Beyond this, in the EU’s approach to Russia and China, the same weaknesses and divisions are even more stark. Here the commission is caught between promoting humanitarian goals in countries that persistently undermine human rights on the one hand – and the desire to protect member states’ economic self-interests on the other.
Aspiring to speak with the voice of Europe, President Von der Leyen has vowed to lead a “geopolitical” mission from Brussels. In the acceptance speech for her new role as Commission President, delivered in the European Parliament on 27th November 2019, she declared that Europe “can be the shapers of a better global order”, and that “this is Europe’s vocation”. This, we were told in various other statements, would involve redefining relations with an assertive Beijing and confronting threatening activities perpetrated by the Kremlin, both in Europe and elsewhere.
Yet, in order to truly get tough on these two powers, Von der Leyen will have to seek closer coordination with the United States. Here, the price of geopolitical confrontation with China and Russia would certainly be greater economic policy and defence spending coordination with an isolationist-protectionist Washington.
If President Donald Trump were to be re-elected in November 2020, this rapprochement would probably require a dialling down of the EU’s rhetoric and policies targeting US big tech multinationals operating in European markets. It would also likely mean confronting the issue of Trump’s sanctions crusade against the Nordstream 2 project, which is currently connecting Russian natural gas to European markets.
When it comes to China, the commission faces the unpromising prospect of persuading all member states to cut Beijing’s state-sponsored Huawei out of its 5G digital infrastructure and minimising other ties that could compromise the integrity of their intelligence services. There is also no guarantee that a victorious Democrat challenger in November would be any softer on this issue, since scepticism towards China’s global ambitions has emerged as one of the rare points of bipartisan consensus in Washington.
Any form of confrontation with China, on anything, will be a tough task, given the studiously neutral position adopted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel on matters of cooperation – diplomatic and economic – with both Russia and China. Nor is the German Chancellor alone in this pragmatic caution – Italy, it must be remembered, signed up to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative last year.
In the new, volatile post-Cold War order there is a price for holding high principles. If they want the EU to be a key actor on the geopolitical stage, the key decision-makers in Brussels will need to pick fights wisely, or else get out of the way. They must learn to play the game of Realpolitik or wither in the storms that have been left behind by the breaking of the liberal international order.