On June 23, foreign ministers of the European Union were due to meet to discuss how to punish Israel for the nature of its military campaign in Gaza after an internal report concluded that Israel may have violated human rights there, in breach of Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement. But by the time the event occurred, such concerns had been overtaken by the conflict between Israel and the United States against Iran.
Europe issued calls for restraint in Israel’s latest theater of bombing, but those appeals were ignored. Their attempts at diplomacy having failed, European ministers were left scrambling to decide their next move.
A day before the United States bombed Iran’s key nuclear sites in Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan, the EU’s top diplomat and the foreign ministers of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom—the so-called European three (E3)—had met their Iranian counterpart in Geneva. Nothing came of it, as Iran said it would not resume negotiations with the United States until Israel stopped bombing.
“Tehran knows what’s at stake,” Kaja Kallas, the EU’s high representative for foreign policy, posted on X.
According to a diplomatic source in the EU who spoke on the condition of anonymity, there had been one tiny win. Even though a date for the next meeting had not been decided, Iran was ready to keep talking to Europeans, although thus far without conceding anything. Nevertheless, before any such meeting could take place, U.S. President Donald Trump concluded on June 20 that Europe “is not going to be able to help” resolve the conflict and ordered a hit on Iran over the weekend with so-called bunker buster bombs that he claimed “obliterated” the nuclear sites.
The Europeans may be hiding their true feelings about the nature of the Trump administration—and how successful they believed the strikes had been—but few would deny how difficult it has become for them to work in concert with a U.S. administration that does not really feel that it needs the European art of dealmaking.
“It was never an option for Trump to rely on Europeans, because he thinks he is better,” Cornelius Adebahr, a nonresident fellow at Carnegie Europe, told Foreign Policy.
The E3 nations are worried about their word having any weight as Washington operates on whim, follows its own timeline, and threatens to scuttle yet further diplomacy—probably without even taking them on board. Germany and the wider EU were not even informed before the United States struck Iran over the weekend. Yet they face a crisis in their deeply intertwined and dependent trade and security relationship with the United States—being forced to pledge defense spending worth to 5 percent of their national GDPs at the NATO summit this week as they struggle to keep the United States committed to the alliance, all while trying to convince him to drop or reduce his threat to impose 50 percent tariffs on imports from the EU starting on July 9. They must now, more than ever, toe a Trump line.
At the same time, these nations realize that Europe will be at the receiving end in the long run—more so than their ally across the Atlantic—if Iran, a country of 90 million inhabitants, destabilizes. Hence their desperation to find a way back to some sort of diplomacy.
Back in 2018, when Trump unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear deal with Iran that was put in place during the Obama administration, the E3 countries remained in the deal, reflecting their belief that Iran had not violated the agreement. Fundamentally, they backed Iran’s right to enrich uranium to the minimum levels required for civilian purposes.
However, as the ministers met in Geneva last week, French President Emmanuel Macron backed Washington’s calls for zero enrichment, in tow with Israeli policy. “It’s absolutely essential to prioritize a return to substantial negotiations, including nuclear negotiations to move towards zero [uranium] enrichment,” he said.
Officials from the United Kingdom, Germany, and the EU reiterated that Iran cannot “be allowed” to build a nuclear weapon and seemed to back Israel—they did not condemn Israel’s attacks on Iran. “This is dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said in blatant support for Israel. (Macron also, somewhat paradoxically, questioned whether military methods could achieve the desired objective of neutralizing Iran’s nuclear program.)
Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group, told Foreign Policy that there was no fresh intelligence report or evidence that Iran was planning to build a nuclear weapon, adding that the European narrative was meant to merely offer an explanation as to why it was backing Israeli and U.S. attacks on Iran.
“Until a week ago, Europe didn’t have a zero-enrichment policy—now they do. That basically proves Europeans are nothing but vassal states for the U.S.,” Vaez told me. “None of the Western intelligence agencies have said anything about Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb.”
Others argued that a recent resolution by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which indicated that Iran had failed to comply with its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, had increased anxieties in Europe.
The resolution said that Iran has “failed to provide the co-operation” specified under its agreement with the IAEA, “impeding Agency verification activities, sanitizing locations, and repeatedly failing to provide the Agency with technically credible explanations for the presence of uranium particles of anthropogenic origin at several undeclared locations in Iran.”
Iran’s failure to satisfactorily disclose critical information about its nuclear stockpiles has worried Europe, especially since Iran has extended uranium enrichment to 60 percent purity—a relatively short technical step away from the 90 percent threshold that is considered missile-ready weapons grade.
“Iran says the enriched uranium is not for military purposes, but we find that hard to believe,” said a European diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He added that his country, one of the E3, was pushing for more inspections and safeguards as opposed to military action, and he rejected a complete denial of uranium enrichment, so long as Iran convincingly dispelled all doubts around its use.
Vaez believes that the IAEA resolution may have been used by Israel as an excuse to attack Iran. The report came out on June 12, and Israel launched its first strikes a day later, on June 13. While Europe may not have anticipated the Israeli move, Vaez said that an escalation of the conflict will first and foremost be detrimental to Europe’s interests.
“Iranians think that Europe has failed to condemn a war of aggression against them, whilst opposing Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine,” Vaez said. He added that if the Iranian government survives, then Europe can expect it to double down on the kind of behavior that it has been bothered by, “such as covert ops inside Europe” and “more European hostages.” He also said that “the flow of narcotics could increase. Iran is currently a major obstacle on the path to narcotics smuggling from Afghanistan to European borders.”
Julien Barnes-Dacey, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told Foreign Policy that an “unjustified and unprovoked” Israeli attack on Iran will “harm Europe” in the end, too.
“Regional instability will feed into migration; ungovernable spaces will feed terrorism,” he said, adding that the tensions will disrupt energy flows and prices: “A conflict at the heart of the Middle East will have global consequences very quickly.”
In one of her rare conversations with Trump, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen raised concerns over a hike in energy prices if tensions escalate, especially if Iran shuts down the narrow Strait of Hormuz, through which around 20 million barrels of fuel pass daily. She has also called for a high-level meeting of her security team to discuss the impact of the war on the EU.
Some believe that for a continent still reeling under the impact of the Syrian war and the concomitant influx of refugees, Europe is still too lackadaisical in its response and strategy. It has lost influence over Washington, but it also lacks creative diplomatic thinking. Experts agree that the proposal floated by the Trump administration prior to the current conflict with Iran—a multinational uranium consortium in the region that would involve Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, and would meet civilian needs and provides ample inspection opportunities—was a more original idea for resolving the impasse with Iran than anything Europeans had proposed.
For Europe, the biggest irony of the situation is that even after Washington’s bombing of the nuclear sites in Iran, the death and destruction in Iran and Israel, and the feared impact on Europe, there is no clarity about whether the United States has indeed eliminated all of Iran’s enriched uranium or whether Iran had already moved it elsewhere and hidden it.
“It is stored in gas cylinders, not hard to move. One would imagine Iran had contingency plans,” for strikes such as the United States carried out, Vaez added. The only way to end Iran’s nuclear program, he said, “was through boots on the ground or through diplomacy.”
Macron had indicated earlier that the location of the enriched uranium was unknown. “Today no one knows exactly where is the uranium enriched to 60 percent,” he said. “So we need to regain control on [Iran’s nuclear] program through technical expertise and negotiation.”
Meanwhile, Europe has found no unanimity, or now even interest, to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement. Kallas said the idea was not to punish Israel, but to improve the humanitarian conditions on the ground in Gaza, implying that there was no cost to pay if human rights are violated. And the Iranian parliament has not only approved shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, a key trade artery, but has also threatened to leave the Nonproliferation Treaty.
What’s clear is that Europe finds itself in a more dangerous place in the Middle East, with less say there than it has at any time in recent memory.