On the EU's strategic weakness
Journalist Thomas Fazi has published an article titled Not in our name, which is a translation from Italian written by Marco Travaglio. It urges Europeans to cut ties with Israel:
Benjamin Netanyahu, the world’s most ruthless terrorist, has once again managed to delay his political downfall using the only method he knows: war.
Except now his private war — masked as self-defence against the Evil Empire of the ayatollahs who dare to want nuclear weapons like Israel has — now risks dragging his allies into a third world war. If it were up to him, it would have already started. In twenty months, he has opened seven fronts in other people’s countries as if they were his own: Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Yet none of his allies, beyond the usual pious words and condemnations, have done anything to distance themselves from him.
I will get to the role of the European Union in all of this, but first a brief comment on the salient point here. Depending on which date you pick, you can come up with the sequence of events that best fits your narrative. History is complex. Framing it along the lines of good versus bad guys is neither descriptive nor constructive. Many truths can exist at the same time, such as Netanyahu indeed having self-serving ends and Israel being part defendant part aggressor in these multifaceted international relations. The specifics are beside the point. Our world is a messy place. What we always get is some morally grey arrangement out of the prevailing conditions.
What is pertinent is whether a stable state can be established, so that the cycle of violence does not continue unabated. This is not merely a matter of desire though, but of the ability to support one’s position of principle and fight for it if they must. Words have to be backed by deeds; fancy proclamations need to be buttressed by raw power. Legality comes down to something basic: force. It is about wielding power in pursuit of a lofty target. Strongly worded letters and peace-loving vibes do not deter a determined foe. Without the requisite capacity for exercising brute force, a polity cannot render material any legal provision. This is what sovereignty has always been about: supreme authority, which ultimately rests in the hands of the superior agent of potential violence.
Absent the capacity for coercion, a political order can only react to the initiatives of another. The European Union is a case in point. It has no means of making events take the direction that favour it. Instead, it remains in a state of weakness characterised by indecision, always responding to phenomena and always failing to come up with a decisive set of measures for reversing the trend. All due to its power deficit, not lack of want.
The Israelis got this memo a long time ago and is why they have taken their fate in their own hands. Is it pretty? No. But what makes anyone think the world is meant to be all sunshine and rainbows? Moreover, what are the detractors going to do about the problem they are commenting on? Appeals to the international community are effectively an admission of powerlessness. There is no such entity. The United Nations are impotent. What we have are powerful actors, each with their own agenda, operating within a global architecture of rules absent a sovereign; rules that are, in other words, unenforceable or enforceable whenever some superpower needs them as justification for its policies. If you wish to make your political opponents do things differently, then you need to come up with a compelling plan.
We Europeans have gotten used to (i) having America take care of much of the work for us, primarily on military spending, and (ii) on the matters we control, do too little too late. The best example of the latter is the response to the post-2008 financial crisis. We basically needed to outfit the European Monetary Union with a fiscal union, such that there would be a treasury as a counterparty institution to the European Central Bank. Instead of fully addressing the systemic flaws in the Euro architecture, namely the asymmetry between a Europe-wide monetary policy and national fiscal policies, our political leaders went from one European Council to another, treating each instance of the crisis as an isolated case. We got grinding austerity for the masses and oodles of effectively free money for the banks and mega corporations in the form of monetary easing.
The Euro Area was not fundamentally redesigned. The problems persist only now we have spent over a decade of under- and mal- investments. The latest initiative for concerted action on defence spending under the rubric of ProtectEU is something I agree with, in principle, though am concerned that we are not seeing enough in terms of commensurate political reforms. What we might get, assuming things go as intended, is a more streamlined procedure for coordinated spending coupled with better procurement. This is a net positive, though it is not sufficient to make the EU a protagonist in global affairs. A fully fledged defence union is more than ten years away—and that is a charitable estimate.
Concretely, the EU does not have the means to enforce its will under the prevailing conditions. What it can do, though, is use whatever economic levers are available to campaign for its priorities. Diplomacy is available and has to be used to full effect. The review of the EU-Israel Association Agreement is one such example. Though I am afraid no assertive course of action will come out of it, based on my reading of the situation. On the 4th of June 2025, Carmen-Cristina Cirlig published a review of the state of affairs in the EU-Israel Association Agreement on behalf of the European Parliament’s Research Service, which includes this:
Article 79 [of the EU-Israel Association Agreement] outlines a gradual procedure whereby the alleged breach must first be discussed within the Association Council, in order to find an acceptable solution (i.e. consultations). If a solution is not found, then the aggrieved party may take appropriate measures – for the EU, these would be reflected in a Council decision. Moreover, preference should be given to those measures that would least disturb the functioning of the agreement, thus making suspension a measure of last resort. Nevertheless, Article 79 provides that, in cases of special urgency, appropriate measures may be adopted immediately without prior submission of the matter to the Association Council.
All this legalese is a long way of saying “it ain’t happening bro!” Not the author’s fault, obviously: they are merely informing us about what is happening. The gist is that decision-makers will continue to dither and Eurocrats will keep publishing walls of well articulated text. Unless we witness a qualitative shift unlike anything that has transpired in the history of the European integration process, the Union shall remain a second tier actor in all of the major international affairs that directly influence its wider region.
As concerned citizens we will, of course, blithely tell ourselves how none of this is done in our name, as if that changes anything. What we need is to start talking about whether the EU apparatus is actually serving the longer-term interests of our respective countries. The EU’s democratic legitimacy is still lacking. The economic upside of being in the Union is of dubious value or has proven to be outright calamitous. And we are not even benefiting from membership in some military powerhouse (we could still be part of NATO without the EU, if that is the issue). Meanwhile, Israel is showing us that a fairly small country can do a lot when it is determined enough. Whereas we have internalised the defeatist narrative that we are powerless without Brussels and Frankfurt bossing us around.