The writing has been on the wall for two months, but yesterday EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made it official. In a landmark speech to EU ambassadors, she acknowledged that over the past year, the international rules-based order built by the United States has collapsed. But she did not name who has caused that collapse. She framed it as if it was a natural disaster that Europe must simply accept being the victim of, rather than a man-made choice in which Europe has been complicit.
“Europe can no longer be a custodian for the old-world order, for a world that has gone and will not return,” she told the ambassadors. “We will always defend and uphold the rules-based system that we helped to build with our allies, but we can no longer rely on it as the only way to defend our interests or assume its rules will shelter us from the complex threats that we face.”
Let’s be clear here. The US government has ended the rules-based international order that they built together with Europe over the past eight decades. And European governments have collaborated in that destruction by spending the past months cheering on Trump’s violations of international law – most notably in January after his invasion of Venezuela. It is therefor impossible to believe that President von der Leyen and EU national leaders like German Chancellor Friedrich Merz will “always defend and uphold the rules-based system,” when they have already demonstrated that they will not defend it as long as it is America doing the violating.
Chancellor Merz made that very clear last week after the outbreak of the war. Like every other European leader other than Pedro Sanchez, his initial response was to only condemn Iran’s retaliatory attacks (as if they had come in a vacuum). He would not criticise the US-Israeli attack on Iran. When asked, Merz said that Iran should not be protected by international law. This was "not the moment to lecture our partners and allies," he told journalists, because Germany shares "many of their objectives" of the war and wants to see regime change in Iran. Von der Leyen also endorsed the US-Israeli goal of regime change. America is good, Iran is bad, and therefor international law should not apply to this war.
Merz was only the most blatant among European leaders refusing to condemn the war. That same day, French President Emmanuel Macron said that he cannot “approve” of the the Israeli-American operation – but he did not explicitly criticise the intervention until several days later. "History never mourns the executioners," Macron said at the time. The UK government has adopted the same stance: ‘Neither for nor against’. With the war on Iran, just like with the invasion of Venezuela, we have seen “Europe’s complicit silence on international law” as the French newspaper Le Monde put it.
International law died yesterday. And Europe helped kill it.
Macron, Starmer and Meloni gave their stamp of approval to Trump's illegal invasion of Venezuela to run the country and take its oil. Who can take them seriously now on Russia's invasion of Ukraine?
Is Europe the victim, or the villain?
President von der Leyen yesterday tried to portray Europe as a victim of the death of international law, and she would not name the murderer. That’s because she, Merz, and most other European leaders have been accomplices in that murder. The dose of reality she tried to deliver in yesterday’s speech was unsatisfactory not just because it obfuscated Europe’s own failings, but also because it did not really wrestle with the grave implications of this admission for the future of Europe.
“We need a clear-eyed and hard look at our foreign policy in today’s world, both in how it is designed and how it is deployed,” she said. “We urgently need to reflect on whether our doctrine, our institutions and our decision making – all designed in a postwar world of stability and multilateralism – have kept pace with the speed of change around us. Whether the system that we built – with all of its well-intentioned attempts at consensus and compromise – is more a help or a hindrance to our credibility as a geopolitical actor. I know this is a stark message and a difficult conversation to have. But I also know that many of you have felt this tension in your everyday work.”
She may always be a few months behind current events, but at last the EU president has acknowledged that the world has changed. The problem is her speech contained no real solutions and no ambition to structurally change the EU in a way that would really address this new reality. As Alberto Alemanno noted yesterday:
“This marks a historical departure from the EU’s foundational logic. The Union wasn’t just a defender of that order, it was built on the same principle: binding rules, institutions above states, disputes settled by law not power. Questioning it externally means questioning the architecture of European integration itself. But there is a deeper contradiction the speech never addresses. VdL frames this as European strategic autonomy, realism, grown-up power politics. Yet what triggered it were US-Israeli strikes on Iran widely seen as violations of international law. Her response was not an independent European position. It was to decline legal condemnation and echo the Trump-Netanyahu framing. True strategic autonomy would have meant holding the normative line precisely when Washington wouldn’t , which is what historically gave the EU its distinct weight. Instead, vdL has aligned European doctrine with the new Washington consensus while dressing it in the language of European autonomy.”
”For the EU’s political direction: vdL has picked Merz over Sánchez, power politics over principled multilateralism. That position is now Commission doctrine…A Union that suspends its own normative logic for geopolitical urgency doesn’t easily get it back. The exception becomes the new normal.”
Europe’s reaction to the Iran War over the past week has just been a continuation of its year-long “strategic lunacy”, as the European Council on Foreign Relations put it yesterday. We’ve got centre-right leaders like Merz and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni speaking from both sides of their mouths, on one hand cheering the US-Israeli action while on the other hand insisting that their countries will have no part in it because they know how unpopular it is with their citizens (something that will only increase as the war’s effects are felt by all Europeans). Then we have liberal and centre-left leaders like Starmer and Macron who refuse to cheer the war but have also refused to clearly condemn in, and in the meantime are steadily allowing their countries to get more and more dragged into the war. They have thus been mostly acting in ways that are clearly contradictory to the interests of the citizens they are representing, all in order to continue their year-long appeasement of Donald Trump.
Merz’s actions are “not so much about how the German government really assesses the Israeli-American course of action, rather it is about calming the transatlantic relationship," Henning Hoff from the German Council on Foreign Relations told Deutsche Welle last week. “In reality, the chancellor arguably has a situational relationship with international law.” We saw that relationship last June following the first US-Israeli attack on Iran, after which Merz said, “that is the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us.” After the US attack on Venezuela in January Merz evasively labeled the legal situation “complicated,” despite that intervention being very clearly against international law.
As US bombs Iran, a silent Europe is rapidly losing credibility
The non-reaction and even endorsement of the Iran War from European governments this weekend shows Europe has still not learned the lessons of the Iraq War.
“Europeans had weeks of notice that US president Donald Trump was about to trigger a war in the Middle East,” note Julien Barnes-Dacey and Ellie Geranmayeh in last week’s ECFR report. “The conflict is now wreaking carnage in the world’s most energy-rich region on an hourly basis, increasing the direct costs to Europeans and boosting Russia’s war coffers. But Europe’s collective response has been, at best, a fiasco—and at worst, strategic lunacy. Instead of looking for ways to press Trump to end the conflict and help the region find a political off-ramp, several key European actors are cheerleading on the sidelines.”
“In sharp contrast to the principled stance from Spain, which has called it an illegal war devoid of an effective strategy, Germany has publicly said it will not ‘lecture’ the US on international law (despite years of doing so on Ukraine). It is also actively supporting—as European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, initially did—Trump’s call for Iranian regime change. Since the onset of fighting, European officials across the board have also focused on condemning Iran for its counter-retaliation, without reference to the US and Israel’s initiation of the war at a moment when Tehran posed no immediate threat.”
French pushback
Over the past week, as the dire consequences of the war have become more and more clear, the French government has started to more forcefully push back. Not only against the US and Israel for launching the war without a plan, but against von der Leyen and Merz for supporting it. In fact, President von der Leyen was strongly criticised for surrendering to America in the speech right after hers, by French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot.
EU citizens “will not accept capitulation in the face of wars of invasion, nor surrender in trade wars,” he said. They “expect Europe to protect, defend, and control its borders. Against all threats, against all forms of unfair competition, economic coercion, and energy blackmail. Against all foreign interference in the electoral processes of its member states.”
“May Europe stand firm, and may it know how to say no,” he said. “No to the United States when they attack what is most fundamental to Europe: its democracy or its territorial integrity.”
“Let us remember that the United States has a vital need for Europe. Major digital companies generate a quarter of their revenue and probably half of their profits on our continent. Eurozone countries hold €3 trillion more in assets than the Americans do in Europe. No one ever wins a trade war. And I would add that we have very powerful instruments to defend ourselves against any attack on our essential interests, which allow us to restrict access to European markets and close our public procurement markets.”
This was, by proxy, also a French criticism of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz – from whom the EU president has taken her marching orders both to surrender to Trump’s trade threats last year and to praise Trump’s Iran regime change goals now. And that is why Barrot also implicitly criticised von der Leyen for sidelining the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas and taking on a foreign policy remit which France believes she does not possess. I imagine that, were she more in line with the French position on European sovereignty, they wouldn’t be complaining. But in Paris, von der Leyen is viewed as simply executing German foreign policy orders (orders to surrender).
“I am aware of the institutional competition you face and the risk of the EEAS being treated as just another [Commission] directorate-general.” he told the ambassadors who work for Kallas’s European External Action Service. “That is not the French conception of your role.” “You can count on France to defend your role,” from von der Leyen, he said. “And in return, we count on a strong EEAS.”
President von der Leyen, Chancellor Merz and Prime Minister Meloni want to sound like they’re giving us some straight talk about the realities of the new era we’re entering. But their belated acknowledgement is accompanied by no strategy and no plan. Their Atlanticist ideology has blinded them to the reality of the situation. And our EU president is the ultimate embodiment of the way Europe is stumbling in the dark, reacting belatedly to things that were obvious months ago and trying to sound bold with this late acknowledgement of reality.
“In times of radical change like ours, we can either cling to what used to make us strong and defend habits and certainties that history has already moved beyond, or we can choose a different destiny for Europe,” the EU president told ambassadors yesterday. “We can build a foreign policy that makes us stronger at home, more influential globally and a better partner to countries around the world. A foreign policy that is a core pillar of European independence, that protects our interests and advances our values. Not with nostalgia, or by mourning the old world, but by shaping the new one.”
Kudos to von der Leyen’s speechwriter for these words. They are correct, and they are needed. But does anyone really have confidence in this woman to deliver on them? If the speechwriter had actual ideas to end the short-sighted national government groupthink in the European Council that has prevented Europe from standing up for itself over the past year, apparently they were cut from the speech. Because as Alemanno pointed out yesterday, this speech does not contain a plan. I don’t know if the president wants us to pat her on the back simply for acknowledging the dire situation we’re in right now. But given that she is partly responsible for that situation, her belated reaction to it doesn’t seem to merit praise.
We need real leaders in Europe right now, leaders who can cast off this continent’s Atlanticist blinders and galvanise Europe into standing up to America. President von der Leyen is correct in saying the EU needs to change in order to deal with this new reality. But she is wrong to suggest that simply casting aside international law is what will get us there.