Europe’s Blind Spots

The continent’s coddling of autocratic regimes will have steep moral and security costs

 
Dalibor Rohac

 
In testament to the paradoxes of our era, President Donald Trump appeared to be the only global leader speaking (or rather, tweeting) about the protests in Iran with any degree of moral clarity last week: “The great Iranian people have been repressed for many years,” he wrote. “They are hungry for food & for freedom. Along with human rights, the wealth of Iran is being looted.”

Of course, such tweets of support come easily and are hardly a substitute for an intelligent, strategic approach to the threats posed by the mullahs, which we have yet to see from the president. What matters, however, is that Trump’s pronouncements stood in contrast with his self-professed foreign policy realism, which normally eschews judgments about the nature of foreign regimes, (remember his rhetorical question: “Our country’s so innocent?”) and the equivocation that came from European capitals, including the promise of the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini to “continue to monitor the situation.”

If Europeans aspire to fill the vacuum created by eight years of Barack Obama’s disengagement and Trump’s current erratic behavior, they have to do better than that, notwithstanding their commitment to the Iran nuclear deal. Contrary to what many assume, the protests in Iran were not fueled simply by the country’s poor economic performance, but – as in many previous instances – by the frustration with an oppressive regime that has consistently denied its citizens basic dignity.

The danger of the EU’s current approach towards Iran is the same as in 2011, when the West ended up hopelessly behind the curve as historically irreversible developments were unfolding across Arab Spring countries. It took the Obama administration over a month into the protests to make the case for an orderly political transition in Egypt. When Syria’s Bashar Assad started killing protesters, Europeans and Americans did nothing, allowing the country to descend into civil war. The sense that the West abandoned Syria facilitated radicalization, recruitment and training of jihadi-salafi fighters. The void also invited Iran and Russia, which used the war to destabilize Europe by adding to the refugee flows.

The EU’s current blindness is not limited to Iran and the Middle East. Mogherini thought it a good idea to visit Cuba on her first foreign trip this year, with the purpose of “reconfirming the strong EU-Cuban relationship.” There she talked about “the human rights situation both in Europe and Cuba” (akin to discussing the aurora borealis situation both in Alaska and Washington, D.C.) and criticized the US administration for trying to “isolate” the island governed by a repressive communist regime.

More seriously, although the current sanction regime against Russia remains in place, Mogherini’s list of her 12 signature policies for 2018 – which included “a united Europe on Jerusalem” and a “defense of Iran deal” – made no mention of the Kremlin’s threat to Europe. In the past, she also downplayed the threat of Russian disinformation and sought to soften the sanctions regime.

In that, Mogherini is no outlier. On his recent trip to Kiev, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel – who uses every opportunity to call for an easing of the sanctions on Russia – criticized lethal aid provided to Ukraine by the United States. Last month, France’s minister of the economy, Bruno Le Maire, visited Moscow to promote Franco-Russian economic ties and launch a new fund of 300 million euros to finance new businesses operating in both countries. There, he lambasted U.S. “extraterritorial” sanctions against Russia – which can also apply to French firms with ties to Russia.

Europeans are right to criticize the current U.S. administration as unpredictable. But in doing so, they need to keep a sense of priorities and be able to weigh the gravity of various challenges facing their continent. Trump’s antics might be indeed deplorable, but the real threat to the EU is not posed by Washington, but rather by autocratic regimes including Russia, Iran, and to some degree China which is building up its economic and political leverage over Europe.

The degree to which Europe’s leaders have been oblivious to such threats points to a deep rot infecting Europe’s strategic and foreign policy circles, far more corrosive than anything that Trump has done to date. Unless it is stopped with vigor, not only will Europeans lose any moral high ground they might imagine that they occupy when engaging with the Trump administration, but they will also be risking their continent’s security and freedom.

 
Dalibor Rohac is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies European political and economic trends. Specifically, he is working on Central and Eastern Europe, the European Union (EU) and the eurozone, US-EU relations, and the post-Communist transitions and backsliding of countries in the former Soviet bloc. He is concurrently a visiting junior fellow at the Max Beloff Centre for the Study of Liberty at the University of Buckingham in the UK and a fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London.