In his regular column at the Wall Street Journal Walter Russell Mead makes some observations about the European Union that you might not have considered:
The EU faces crises in the north (Belarus), east (the Syrian war and tension in the Eastern Mediterranean), south (Libya) and west (the Brexit impasse) and is struggling to produce a response to any of them. To be fair, all of these problems are tricky and none have obvious solutions, but the primary issue is that the EU isn’t set up to be a geopolitical actor.
This is partly a problem of process. The European Union is not built for speed. On important foreign-policy issues, where any one of the 27 member states can block action with a veto, getting to a consensus requires so much compromise that the ultimate policy often loses all coherence and any real chance of success. So much time is needed to reach that likely ineffective policy decision that by the time the EU reaches the station, the train has already pulled away.
Not only is the EU “not built to lead” it’s not built to follow, either. Each of the 27 members states is pursuing its own foreign policy goals and each has a veto. It’s a debating society not a sovereign state or federal superpower.
All of which would be fine if the EU were inclined to follow U. S. leadership but it isn’t. It is inclined to complain about the lack of U. S. example or leadership while providing none of its own.
I stopped reading Mead long ago. He is merely a Ruling Class shill, and he gets everything backwards. In particular, the crises he mentions have nothing to do with the EU at all, although each of them is the result of adventurism by one or more members acting under the aegis of NATO.
The Belarus crisis is the result of a failed color revolution started by the Ukrainians with support from the Poles and some others. Belarus has a pending unification agreement (or two) with the Russian federation, and EU meddling with that agreement comes dangerously close to a casus belli. Lukashenko has been dragging his feet on the agreement looking to sweeten the deal with benes for himself, too.
The WSJ had a long article today on Belarus and Russia’s request to station troops there, but the authors, based in Europe, seemed unaware of the various Belarus-Russian treaties. The authors are pretty young. Perhaps they never heard of the Eastern Front, Operation Barbarossa, Kursk…
Syria, of course, is the result of British, French, American, Turkish, UAE, Saudi et al. attempts to overthrow Assad by using mercenaries and terrorists. Their tools (which include ISIS) are actually worse than Assad, and they have only marginal support among actual Syrians. There are, of course, a number of Syrians who want to get rid of the Assad regime, but there aren’t enough of them to do it. If our terrorists were to win, they would crush the few Christians and Jews left in Syria. Assad is their best hope.
By the way, Syria is yet another example of Pentagon insubordination. Trump ordered US troops out. The Pentagon told him to shut up and sit down, which he did.
Libya was a gross war crime, perhaps the worst since WW II (not counting our bombing of North Korea). It was launched for no reason whatever by France, Italy, and Britain with support of the US. It reduced Libya to chaos, immiserated its people, and allowed for the reestablishment of actual slave markets.
The Brexit mess exists because there are other countries who might want out of the EU (Italy?), and the self-appointed EU bureaucrats need to make an example of the UK. The attempt of the Tory’s and PM May to sabotage the referendum results added to the fiasco. Right now Britain is trying to find a way to avoid taxing British goods going to Northern Ireland. A hard border with the Republic is the only solution, other than ceding NI to the Republic.
The EU and the euro mostly benefit Germany, by giving it some control over its neighbors, and by protecting its industry from the competitive disadvantages of a very hard currency. Italy and the rests of the PIIGS no longer can generate local advantages by debasing their currencies, as once they did. All-in-all, it’s probably a good thing the EU is so inactive.