European irrelevance in the Middle East
The European Union will restart a civilian mission on Wednesday to monitor the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt in support of the US-brokered ceasefire agreement. The EU-27 first launched this mission in 2005, but suspended it two years later after Hamas took control of Gaza. "We are ready to contribute to the success [of Donald Trump's plan] with all the tools at our disposal," wrote Commission President Ursula von der Leyen yesterday, including "supporting the governance and reform of the Palestinian Authority." European leaders have already begun talking with their Gulf counterparts about the cost of rebuilding Gaza.
"The EU is seeking its place at the peace table after having been absent all this time," lamented a Jordanian diplomat yesterday. The European Union is a weak player, condemned to the role of spectator in the diplomatic dance that Trump has led in the Middle East. For two years, internal divisions have paralyzed the EU in a conflict in which it has always played an essential donor. But now it is facing a growing number of pending cases. "It is unlikely that Europe will get a place in the peace council [conceived by Trump] if it does not reestablish full cooperation with the Netanyahu government," the new Israeli ambassador to the EU warned this week in an interview with the digital PoliticalAnd yet the European Commission is already determined to back down from its proposal to partially suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement.
Europe's first challenge will be to deal with its own irrelevance in the Middle East and with the crisis of moral authority that has been left to it by these two years of unconditional support for Israel, which has not prevented the contempt of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has entrusted his fate solely to Donald Trump.
The EU is a victim of its own bewilderment when it comes to interpreting the depth and speed of global changes in which it still does not know how to fit in. Last April, in an interview with the German newspaper The TimeVon der Leyen admitted that "the West as we know it no longer exists." But it is the internal reality of Europe that increasingly complicates the Union's ability to determine its place in this transformation of the international order. The Europe that recognized itself as an economic giant and a geopolitical dwarf is recalculating its self-perceptions. What role can a supranational organization, created with the aim of taming the power of nations engaged in war, play in a world of precisely choreographed displays of force?
The EU has been forced into an increasingly disruptive dependence on the United States' attacks and China's commercial penetration. Furthermore, the increasingly fragile state of European democracies increases the level of uncertainty about which worldview is gaining ground among the Twenty-Seven. Adding to the chronic instability in France in recent days has been the electoral return of Andrej Babis to the Czech Republic, with the formation of another coalition government with the far right, which will join the nine currently existing in the European Council. Last week, the British think tank Chatham House published a reflection on what would happen to the European Union and Europe as a geopolitical bloc if this rise of the far right continued. Currently, polls in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom place Marine Le Pen's National Rally, Alternative for Germany, and Nigel Farage's Reform UK at the top of the polls, respectively. In the fourth largest country in the EU, Italy, the far right is now in power.
It is difficult for the European Union to imagine and defend its own role in managing the instability raging on its borders when the pressure of internal centrifugal forces is changing the nature of a political project that is accumulating ever more internal contradictions. With each crisis, the EU has grown stronger in terms of powers and instruments, but, in turn, has lost its leadership capacity and strategic vision. The EU has the tools to help in the reconstruction of Gaza, as it promises these days, but if it wants a relevant role in the return of peace, it will also have to work to rebuild the lost trust of the countries of the region, which requires, first, rethinking the strategic mistakes it has made in the Middle East.
