The EU Sees a World That Isn’t There

Twenty-five years ago, Europe stood poised to administer a world where all nations sought peace and prosperity. Despite the recent unpleasantness in the former Yugoslavia, the new European Union could count on a shared rationality that would exclude war as an instrument of national policy. Conflict killed your people and destroyed their property; Rational states would avoid it in favour of commerce and its attendant prosperity. That this worldview was last in vogue just before the carnage of the Great War did not trouble the Eurocrats eager to place Brussels at the centre of a peaceful, rules-based world order. Nor were they concerned that their grand vision might be a highly contingent artefact nursed in a walled garden patrolled by brutish Americans.  Unlike their predecessors who’d bumbled their way into war in 1914, they would get it right this time, and Europe would reclaim its rightful place as the regulatory arbiter of global prosperity.

Unfortunately for the EU, other nations placed the material enrichment of their citizens far below more primal concerns. A few years after the Maastricht Treaty birthed the European Union, Vladimir Putin was consolidating his hold on power in Russia, determined to avenge the loss of the Cold War and the destruction of the Soviet Union. Peace and prosperity were useful tools as he rebuilt his army and infused his people with a neo-imperial vision of a Great Russia entitled to treat Ukraine as lost territory and its people destined to be elevated to true Russians.  The stubbornness of Europe’s belief in a world at odds with reality became acute in early 2022 as American intelligence officials toured capitals with hard evidence of Putin’s coming invasion, yet were dismissed as such plans made no rational sense. Which they didn’t, to European leaders clinging to their belief in peace and material prosperity as the ne plus ultra of national policy.

The sorry history of Europe’s serial attempts to forge a durable agreement with Iran’s mullahs over its nuclear enrichment programme marks another grotesque misapprehension of strategic peril.  After the exposure of the programme in 2003, the EU-3 took the lead in negotiating an end to enrichment in exchange for substantial aid and the withdrawal of economic sanctions. European diplomats repeatedly explained the fundamental illogic of Tehran’s nuclear programme to their Iranian counterparts: A nation sitting on a vast reservoir of oil and gas had no need for nuclear energy. An agreement with the West would preclude the military threats that a nuclear weapon might deter. The EU-3 offered what some termed a “coming out party,” an invitation for Iran to join polite society and reap the rewards of peace. But again, Europe failed to grasp that the Islamic Republic placed the material prosperity of its people well below its true objectives: The defeat of the West, the destruction of Israel, and the subordination of Sunni Arabs to a nuclear-armed Shiite state.