EU must realize it cannot be everyone’s friend

As a result of some disobliging remarks I recently published on the subject, I have had several lively conversations over the last couple of weeks with friends and former diplomatic colleagues about the question of European Foreign Policy. I capitalize the phrase deliberately. It has a portentous ring to it. Those who claim to be in charge of such a policy, particularly the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (a bit of a mouthful — HR for short) and his or her immediate Cabinet, make great claims for its efficacy. Federica Mogherini, who has just been replaced as HR by the former Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Borrell, was very vocal in claiming credit for all sorts of things, not least an exceptionally warm relationship with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif. Her predecessor, Cathy Ashton, has regularly said that the EU and she personally were central to the conclusion of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. She also claimed an exemplary relationship with Zarif. I expect Borrell to do the same in due course.

But I remain highly skeptical about all of this. It is true that the EU has a very large external assistance budget, devoted to humanitarian relief and development programs across the world. And I am sure that some, perhaps most, of this budget serves a useful function. After all, if you throw enough money at something, some will stick. It is true that Javier Solana, who was HR before the powers of the post were extended by the Lisbon Treaty and combined with the position of External Relations Commissioner, was a widely respected diplomat. And it is also true that the European External Action Service — the EU’s diplomatic service — has some truly excellent and committed staff.

But it remains unclear to me how much any of this adds up to a foreign policy, which implies not just a unified view of the world but a capacity to act effectively on that view in an uncertain and often hostile global environment, and to be tough as well as everyone’s friend.

There seems to me to be a fundamental intellectual problem underlying all this, which arises from the self-conception of the EU as a new and wholly benign sort of international body, neither an organization like the UN nor a state, but claiming some of the attributes of both and acting as a model and emergent portal into a new, peaceful and cooperative world. As my former colleague, Robert Cooper, pointed out nearly two decades ago, this reflects a highly idealistic view of the world, based on the idea that you can derive the basis for a perfectly moral foreign policy if you reflect long enough on the failings of nation states. This view is reinforced regularly by those who love the EU claiming that it is responsible for peace and prosperity in Europe since 1945 and that this reflects some sort of essential quality inherent in the transnational Brussels institutions. But the truth is that Brussels is as imperfect as all the nation states that make up the EU. It may have successfully claimed the right to represent those states in certain — though not all — matters of interest. But post-war conflict was in practice prevented not by the EU but by the presence of a powerful and credible US security guarantee, embodied by the existence of NATO and large numbers of US and other troops under US supreme command. This difference is encapsulated in the opposing world views of two great political philosophers, the Englishman Thomas Hobbes and the Prussian Immanuel Kant.

It was Hobbes, born in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, and living in precarious exile through the Civil War of the 1640s and 50s, who famously said that “fear and I were born twins together.” Hobbes believed in the overriding importance of the right to self-preservation. Kant, who rarely left the Baltic city of Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad) and famously took a walk at exactly the same time every afternoon, lived a reflective life of the mind. He thought universal peace was possible as well as desirable.

We would all like to believe this, I’m sure. But it’s not going to happen in our time. The international order constructed in the 1940s increasingly looks like an anomaly. The weakening of the US security commitment to Europe and indeed the Middle East, which began under George W. Bush, continued under Barack Obama and is a signature tune of the Trump administration, is causing serious worry in European capitals and within NATO. And where national interests are concerned, there has only ever been a pretense of a common approach. You can see this quite clearly over Libya. But you could have seen the same over large parts of policy toward the Mediterranean, Africa and the Balkans any time in the 1980s or 90s.

Now we also see it over Russia, which is making every effort to drive wedges between those countries dependent on it for gas supplies (most notably but not exclusively Germany, where Russophilia has a long history) and those who fear such a dependency.

And — in spite of all the claims made by Europhiles about the JCPOA — we have always seen such divisions over Iran too. The emergence of the EU3 (the UK, France and Germany) as the key European negotiating actors was not uncontested, with Italy in particular feeling aggrieved. The three countries had different political and economic interests. And their efforts only began to gain traction when the US joined in earnest, and particularly when it became clear that the US was prepared to apply sanctions that would affect Iran’s ability not just to export oil but to gain access to the revenues, denominated in US dollars, that they generated. The real pressure, then, was brought to bear because the US controlled its own currency — one of the key distinguishing features of a state — and was prepared to use it as an instrument of sovereign power. Even then there were tensions between the various Western actors, with the French, interestingly, being the most robust during the final negotiations — as the then-French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius made clear in a fascinating inside account he subsequently published in The Washington Quarterly. These negotiations eventually became essentially a US-Iran singles match, reflecting where the Iranians — rightly — perceived that the real power lay. In one sense, the entire process had always been about getting Tehran and Washington to bilaterally agree on something important.

And we’ve seen this reality illustrated once more in the last year or so with the agonized attempts by the EU — again essentially the EU3 — to come up with some sort of financial instrument to allow the Iranians to “legitimately” trade with European companies without being subject to US dollar sanctions. INSTEX, as the scheme is called, was dead in the water from the beginning. It doesn’t matter whether you can get paid in euros, yuan, rubles or yen, the US dollar still rules as far as most companies are concerned. We now hear increasing complaints from Tehran that Europe isn’t serious, especially as the EU3 have proposed using the JCPOA’s dispute resolution mechanism (but without driving it so hard that it frightens the horses) to try to resolve the increasingly difficult political impasse since President Donald Trump announced the US withdrawal from the JCPOA. This is rich considering that Iran has already boasted of being in material breach of the JCPOA’s provisions on uranium enrichment. But this sort of wedge-driving is a game at which Iran, and not just Russia, is skilled.

You could say more or less the same thing over EU policy toward the Middle East peace process (MEPP). The EU — or EEC as it then was — took great pride in the Venice Declaration of 1980 as the first serious product of a common foreign and security policy. The problem was that a common policy then failed to emerge. The UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece and Spain (for example) all took more or less different lines from the beginning. The Israelis would periodically threaten to “exclude the EU from any role in the MEPP” altogether. The EU tended to be alarmed at the prospect. But, as I recall once telling some senior Israelis, the threat was laughable: The only real role the EU ever had was to fund the essential operating costs of the Palestinian Authority and, if the Israeli government really wanted the EU to stop doing what the Israeli government was probably legally obliged to do instead, then “ahlan wa sahlan.”

It is unlikely we shall see any change in this well-meaning but ultimately harmful delusion — that being nice to everyone pays dividends. That might be true in one’s personal life, but it is not true of politics or global affairs. There, a healthy Hobbesian suspicion is necessary. As is a willingness to play rough. Ultimately, you have to make choices about who is your friend and who is not. And this tends to be something that member states reserve for themselves. Externally, the EU is, in truth, only as effective as its member states will allow. They are generally happy enough to allow the HR to take the lead where an issue is trivial or pursuing a clearly national course of action might be inconvenient or damaging — such as allowing the EU to take responsibility for imposing tariffs on products exported from Israeli settlements in the West Bank. But where important national interests are involved — for example, the export trade in advanced industrial machinery, the interests of national energy companies or the mercantilist pursuit of political advantage — then individual countries muscle in.

On Iran, the rational course of action would be to present a unified Western front, alongside the US, whatever the misgivings some Europeans have about the Trump administration. It is by leveraging US power that the EU will achieve most, not by pursuing the chimera of a fundamental change in the Iranian position, which has been consistent for years. And Washington, not Tehran, is where European influence can best be brought to bear. Unity brings strength. Division simply gladdens the hearts of our enemies. The fact that so many European elites think that rejecting the US — partly because they dislike Trump but also because of a longer-standing dislike of America on the European left — is the wiser course of action, at the same time as they refuse to do anything to bolster the hard power instruments at their disposal, is a reflection of their essential lack of seriousness. And that will continue to undermine any attempt to build and apply a genuinely multinational and effective EU foreign policy.

In the meantime, we can expect the UK — in its new Brexit phase — to seek to triangulate between Brussels and Washington (as Boris Johnson is already doing), Germany to focus on its relationship with Russia (and its export trade) and France to look for national advantage where it can. For me, the best outcome would be for the UK and France, still the two most capable global actors in Europe, to take the lead in building a new nationally-based, European (but not necessarily EU) and neo-Atlanticist understanding with Washington on Iran, Russia, the Gulf and other key issues. That would require an outbreak of Hobbesian realism. But that’s really the only way to have an impact. Everything else is virtue signaling.

• Sir John Jenkins is a senior fellow at Policy Exchange. Until December 2017, he was Corresponding Director (Middle East) at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), based in Manama, Bahrain, and was a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. He was the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia until January 2015.