EU leaders have suddenly grown enough of a spine to refuse to take a part in the Iran war. But what are they doing to stop it?
NATO is supposed to be a defensive alliance. That means members aren’t actually obligated to go bail out a member state that goes around the world punching other countries in the face. Easy mistake to make from the optics of other recent conflicts, though, where the term “defensive” has been doing a lot of impressive rhetorical gymnastics.
US President Donald Trump hasn’t been able to talk his ‘allies’ into coming along for the white-knuckle adventure this time. Largely because he threatened to invade Europe – specifically Greenland – barely weeks before asking for their help to do the same to another country. Apparently, they took his threat so seriously that they were getting ready to beat him to the punch by blowing up their own airfields first, according to the New York Times.
Before Trump just decided to go it alone and threaten to fix the global energy problem in the Strait of Hormuz by also blowing up a bunch of power plants in the region, he got to the “who needs these losers anyway” stage with Western Europe. Let’s see… Starmer is no Churchill, Trump says. Sick burn, if it were still 1940 and not just a guy declining participation in your dodgy group project.
French participation doesn’t even really count, Trump says, because President Emmanuel Macron will be gone soon. Like a sitcom character whose hand is on the knob with one foot out the door in every scene.
But here in the real world, Macron is actually still the president of France for another year. And it’s not like anyone who could possibly replace him would be up for this political suicide mission that Trump’s proposing, either. Hardly a day goes by without French military brass appearing on TV, either telling Trump to go “f himself” or else comparing his invitation to something along the lines of buying tickets for the Titanic after it hit the iceberg.
The Irish president should just be grateful for Trump’s mere existence, he says. Who isn’t at this point, right? One day Trump’s telling all the NATO allies to just get in the van already. The van’s on fire, but minor detail. And they’re like, no thanks. Not interested in careening down regime change highway with Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu like a scene out of Mad Max.
So at first Trump tries to make it sound like it’s for their own benefit to go send their own troops to hangout in the Strait of Hormuz where missiles are flying around. Because they’re the ones who largely use the oil that normally transits through it when Iran hasn’t closed it because Trump and Bibi started bombing them. A phenomenon that does tend to complicate shipping schedules.
Probably doesn’t help either that Europe already had the experience of volunteering to do the heavy lifting for Washington just so an American president, Barack Obama, could brag to his people that America did a regime change without a single pair of boots on the ground. Right, because there were covert, European boots on the ground. In Libya. Led by the Brits and French, back in 2011. And that turned into a years-long mess for Europe and a migrant tsunami that kept rolling in long after the “mission accomplished” energy had worn off. So it’s no wonder that some of those 15 NATO countries that helped out in Libya aren’t up for a rerun. Once you’ve helped a friend move and it turns into a ten-year renovation project, the next time they call you just let it ring.
So Europe is banking on riding out the fuel disruption instead of prolonging it by getting involved with the risk of provoking an escalation. Unless of course the missiles stop flying. In which case, Macron will be there in a jiffy to film more heavily militarized thirst trap videos.
It’s one thing to not participate, but what are they actually doing to stop it, besides issuing strongly worded statements that reek of déjà vu?
The bloc’s chief diplomat says that it’s all such a good example of the failure of international law, which is one way to describe a fire while refusing to notice that you’re actually holding a fire extinguisher. Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East “are products of erosion of the international law without accountability, judicial or political, the war will engulf the world once again,” Kaja Kallas said.
Gotta love the passive verbiage doing the heavy lifting there. Really lets everyone off the hook. Yeah, international law just eroded on Iran. How did that happen? All by itself? Or because no one can bother actually trying to enforce it when it’s inconvenient because it involves the risk of eliciting the wrath of Daddy Trump?
She has no problem comparing the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran except in failing to notice that that one has involved like 20 packages of EU sanctions and the other zero. Or to notice that their favorite foster kid has been begging Trump to let him come play drone warfare in this war with the toys that they’ve been buying for him with money from the same EU taxpayers who are now being gauged on energy prices yet again as a result of this new war. The same war that the EU says violates international law.
Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky has said that he’s psyched to get over there and play in the sandbox with all his shiny new drones – which is one way to pitch the escalation that the EU says it doesn’t want. And the EU’s like, can’t you see – he’s really hurting here! “The longer the war continues in the Middle East, the more Ukraine suffers,” Kallas said. I’m really trying to lean into this whole Ukraine x Iran crossover. “I mean, Russia is already making money off the war in the Middle East with higher oil prices and the Strait of Hormuz closed, they can now again fund the war.”
Try telling that to your boy, Zelensky. Does he know that offering to help prolong the war with his drones would just be making Putin more money? But really, why should he even care when the EU keeps insisting on having their citizens pay for it all anyway.
