We aren’t ‘worthless’: Europe faces up to its irrelevance in the Middle East 

BRUSSELS — When it comes to diplomacy, it was as humiliating for Europe as it was brutal in military terms for Iran. 

Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities exposed his total disinterest in America’s traditional allies across the Atlantic, all of whom had been calling for restraint. Now European officials are trying to put a brave face on their own obvious irrelevance to the United States, and to the spiraling, intractable crisis in the Middle East. 

Perhaps most damningly of all, though, is the lingering suspicion that Trump didn’t just ignore his counterparts in Europe, but use them as giant geopolitical decoys to deceive Iran into thinking an attack was not imminent. 

For Europe, the price of this impotence is heavy. Not only does the EU collectively send billions of euros to fund aid programs for Palestinians, but the conflict has driven a sharp wedge through politics in many European countries since the Hamas attacks of October 2023. 

The U.S. strikes on Iran show the “declining if not peripheral influence” of the European powers in the region, said Sanam Vakil, a Middle East expert at the Chatham House think tank in London.  

As Trump ratcheted up his rhetoric on airstrikes last week, it appeared inevitable that America would enter Israel’s war with Iran within days. Then on Thursday June 19 the White House issued a surprise statement from the president suggesting he was getting cold feet about military action. Trump’s MAGA movement was divided, with some big names deeply opposed to another American war in the Middle East. 

Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said he would decide in the next two weeks whether military action should go ahead, as he wanted to give a real chance to diplomacy. 

That was seen as a welcome boost for diplomacy among officials in France, Germany and the U.K., who had a history of partnership with America on containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. These so-called E3 powers along with the EU scheduled crisis talks with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Geneva the following day. Those talks suddenly seemed to have far more weight.

There are signs that the Americans were taking the Geneva meeting seriously, too, and were disappointed that Iran seemed stubborn in its position. The talks broke up without making progress, but the E3 said they wanted negotiations to continue. 

Completely in the dark  

Within hours, however, the U.S. bombing raid was underway. 

In the days after the attack by B-2 bombers on three Iranian nuclear facilities, European ministers confessed that they were completely in the dark about the plan. 

Johann Wadephul, Germany’s foreign minister, said in a TV interview with ZDF on Sunday evening that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had been “unequivocal” that America would not join the war. He said he thought he had been told of the bombing “just like my British colleague David Lammy, in the aftermath [of the attack], not before.”

As Trump ratcheted up his rhetoric on airstrikes last week, it appeared inevitable that America would enter Israel’s war with Iran within days. | POOL photo by Yuri Gripas/EPA-EFE

In London, British officials insisted that they had been given “notice” of the military action. But it was still a humiliation for U.K. leader Keir Starmer, who had spent the preceding days and weeks calling for deescalation, and even went as far as to predict publicly that the U.S. was not about to launch military action against Iran. 

Starmer has made much of his special relationship with Trump, aiming to act as a bridge between Washington and the rest of Europe. But you don’t need a bridge if your vehicle is a B-2 warplane.

Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a MAGA favorite, yet she was also completely blindsided by the U.S. bombing. 

It’s embarrassing that European and British pleas for deescalation were ignored and worse that America’s supposed allies were kept out of the military loop. But the most egregious suggestion is that Trump was actively using the diplomatic efforts of his supposed “friends” across the Atlantic to mislead Iran into thinking any attack was potentially weeks away. 

According to a lengthy report by the New York Times, Trump’s statement that he would take as long as two weeks to decide on whether to strike Iran — because of a “substantial” chance for diplomacy — was always merely a calculated misdirection. At around 5 p.m. on Friday June 20, just a few hours after the E3 talks in Geneva concluded, Trump ordered the bombers into the air, the newspaper reported. 

“In the lead-up to the strikes, the E3 were largely sidelined in nuclear talks, as negotiations became increasingly dominated by direct U.S.-Iran interactions, with Europe unable to offer meaningful incentives or guarantees,” said Vakil from Chatham House. The Geneva meeting “further exposed this impotence, with European calls for restraint overshadowed by decisive U.S. military action taken without their consultation.”

A German government official tried to downplay the significance of being excluded. “Every conflict has a military side and a diplomatic side,” the official said. “We know that the Americans themselves are continuing to take precautions to get into such a diplomatic off-ramp. That is why I believe that the agreements, the understandings that were reached between the USA, the E3 and others to work on such an off-ramp were not worthless at the time and they will remain not worthless.”

When asked about the two-week deadline set by Trump, the official said: “There’s something a bit biblical about that. Two weeks can mean many things. We have learned in other contexts that it can describe a very long period of time. We have now also discovered that it can describe a very short period of time.”

On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron tried to argue that Europe was winning. “I am well aware that when weapons strike, when we do not participate in these strikes, we can feel marginalized,” he said. “That is what I sometimes hear in comments from some people. I think that when we decided not to strike but we remain consistent in our position, strategically and in the long term, we win.”

Irreparably undermined

In truth, Europe isn’t even in the game. 

When it comes to the conflict in the Middle East, the European Union, the U.K. and other countries such as Canada, have all tried to exert influence especially over Israel but none of their efforts have cut through. 

For Europe in particular, relations with Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightwing government are in a parlous state. 

The EU, the U.K. and other countries such as Canada, have all tried to exert influence especially over Israel but none of their efforts have cut through. | POOL photo by Jack Guez/EPA-EFE

Israel’s weeks-long blockade of Gaza and the resulting humanitarian crisis, in which thousands of Palestinians face starvation without enough food aid, have appalled EU leaders, eliciting increasingly strong criticism. A review by the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas this month found Israel had breached the human rights clauses in its association agreement. 

The EU is now weighing up whether and how to penalize Israel for these shortcomings, while the Israeli government furiously condemns Europe for its “outrageous and indecent” decision to review the relationship at a time of war. 

For the EU, it is clear that Israel has essentially decided to stop listening. Any credibility that Kallas had built up with Israel has now been irreparably undermined, and Europe’s complaints are likely to be ignored. 

When the EU is the biggest source of aid funding for Gaza, and the conflict resonates throughout European politics, this is a bad position for Brussels to be in.

But Netanyahu has shown that he really only listens to Trump, and then not always. 

“On many topics in the Middle East it’s easy to see that, for example, the U.S. has a strong role to play in what is happening, but I think that from the EU side we can be clear in our positions as well,” Jessica Rosencrantz, Sweden’s EU affairs minister, told POLITICO. 

But is anyone in the region listening to Europe? “Well I think it makes a difference when 27 countries agree on something and we speak with one voice,” she said. “But you also have to be of course realistic that there are also many other actors in this region who play an important role.”

Esther Webber in London, Jacopo Barigazzi and Nicholas Vinocur in Brussels and Josh Berlinger in Paris contributed reporting.