The EU’s Foreign Policy Is a Failure
As Libya and Iran show, Europe generally loses in the rough-and-tumble of world politics. It needs to drop its illusions about power.
Destination: Europe.
Photographer: Soulemaine Ag Anara/AFP
As President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sends Turkish troops to Libya, he’s implicitly reminding the European Union just how impotent it is in foreign policy. It should be European powers intervening diplomatically in Libya. Instead, Turkey and Russia appear set on carving up the country, like Syria, into spheres of influence that will damage the EU’s interests.
The EU looks just as irrelevant in Iran, as that country descends into a spiral of retribution with the U.S., following the American killing of Iran’s top commander. Now the mullahs are pulling out of their 2015 nuclear deal with six world powers including the EU’s “big three” (France, Germany and the U.K.). That deal used to be held up as the greatest achievement of European foreign policy. Now it looks like just another indulgence in European naivety.