US up against EU’s Kafkaesque foreign policy

As existentialism’s greatest chronicler put it: “But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?” Franz Kafka, a writer so unique that he inspired the adjective “Kafkaesque” to describe the peculiar, nightmarish world evoked by his novels, would, I think, well understand the art of modern political risk. This is because so many of his forebodings come true in the study of the EU every day.

While it has yet to understand it, the new, sunny, optimistic Biden administration will soon find itself in a Kafkaesque nightmare of its own, as its intellectually sleepy EU-first foreign policy — built around the comforting fiction that great power Europe will surely continue to serve as a rock-steady US ally — is about to be blown to bits by reality.

The facts underlying this impending nightmare are all around the new White House if it only dares to see the new world as it is. The EU’s future is to broadly espouse a neutralist line — shocking as it will be to the new White House, convinced of the verities of yesterday — that is relatively equidistant, geostrategically, between the US and China/Russia. This will be the common position of the Franco-German motor that powers the EU when it actually moves in synchronicity. France’s anti-American Gaullism is a long-lived and well-known factor in transatlantic relations; potent, but not powerful enough on its own to dominate the direction of the continent’s common foreign policy. However, when combined with Germany’s increasing neutralist mercantilism, this core is more than enough to cause nightmares in Washington.

Despite the poisoning and then show trial of Russia’s chief opposition leader Alexei Navalny (whose convalescence took place in Berlin), Germany stubbornly — and in the face of US and Northern, Eastern and Central European pleas — refused to reconsider the completion of Nord Stream 2, a 1,200-km undersea pipeline that begins north of St. Petersburg and runs to Germany’s Baltic Coast.

The Biden team is convinced that such a new trading link makes an already dangerously dependent Europe ever more addicted to Russian natural gas, as energy is now conveyed directly between Moscow and Berlin, cutting out the pro-American Polish and Ukrainian middlemen. As Russia already supplies Germany with 40 percent of its total natural gas, this dangerous dependence must now, in America’s view, be curbed, especially as, with the Navalny affair, Vladimir Putin has once again displayed his characteristic thuggishness for all to see.

Yet Germany, though slightly embarrassed, has refused to back away from completing the last 75 km of the pipeline. For Washington, all this strategically amounts to living in a Kafka novel, proving to be the height of lunacy, as the US spends billions of dollars defending the continent through NATO, only at the same time to have the most important European country within the alliance doing massive energy deals with the threat America is supposedly protecting it from. Despite this theater of the absurd, neither Chancellor Angela Merkel nor Germany has budged.

The efforts of the US and the smaller European states of Central, Eastern and Northern Europe to box in Russia have just been airily crushed by Germany’s stubborn refusal to think of anything but its own immediate concerns, whatever the consequences for the rest. This reality must amount to the death knell for any possible emergence of a common European foreign and security policy.

The untold secret is that most smaller EU member states are entirely comfortable with relying on the US for their security, while relying on their own national capitals for their specific foreign policies. This means muddle at the great power European level is the norm — the odds are vanishingly small that we could get the 27 EU member states to agree on a favorite ice cream flavor, let alone a common foreign policy toward Russia. Given this cacophony of voices, the notion of a common European foreign policy is about as real as the sighting of a unicorn.

On the other hand, European great powers Germany and France take the American security blanket entirely for granted, feeling emboldened to strike out on their own. The end result, much like a characteristically vague Kafka novel, is an unsatisfying mix of a general European geostrategic drift toward a less pro-American, more neutralist position, accompanied by constant internal incoherence as much of the rest of the continent — especially to the east and north of France and Germany — yearns for a more pro-American trajectory. The result is anti-American neutralism at worst and incoherent muddle at best.

So what is the way forward for the US in dealing with a Kafkaesque Europe? Given the endless muddle and differing voices endemic to Europe, cherry-picking still makes the most sense. As Europe is divided, work with European allies state by state and issue by issue, grouping together when common interests are involved and agreeing to disagree when they are not. The way to escape the Kafkaesque European nightmare is to recognize that the utopian European dream of unity is just that: Nothing but a mirage.

• Dr. John C. Hulsman is the president and managing partner of John C. Hulsman Enterprises, a prominent global political risk consulting firm. He is also senior columnist for City AM, the newspaper of the City of London. He can be contacted via chartwellspeakers.com.