The last two weeks were characterised by a series of violent events in the Near East. Azerbaijan forcefully took control of Nagorno-Karabakh resulting in up to 100,000 people leaving their homes. Turkey started a wave of attacks against the Kurds in Northern-Eastern Syria and the week ended with a war against Israel started by Iran’s proxy, Hamas.
Following Azerbaijan’s action, European Council President Charles Michel made a statement saying he was shocked by Azerbaijan’s actions which is a blatant lie. No one was really shocked by what Azerbaijan had done and security and defence experts were unanimous in their assessment of taking seriously Azerbaijan’s very public intentions to take over Nagorno-Karabakh. The EU did nothing to prevent it because conveniently it preferred a smooth relationship with Azerbaijan for its natural gas. The EU has become excellent at posturing but its material effect in promoting democracy and rule-of-law abroad is nil. What’s worse is that we are empowering dictators to act with impunity. Europeans have become the butt of all jokes in a dictator’s boardroom as we buy their overpriced commodities and pretend we’re exporting democracy in return.
We have become a joke and the world is a more dangerous place as a result. This is the same reason why Turkey can act with impunity in Syria, as it commits war crimes by bombing civilian targets. Turkey can get away with it because our foreign policy has been reduced to posturing. As with Israel and Palestine, Europe is mostly absent in the conflict despite this conflict taking place right across our borders. Israel finds backing in the US while the Palestinian territories depend on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Iran. Europe has opened its doors to Syrian refugees but Palestinian refugees don’t seem to have a voice speaking for them in Europe.
Europe is required to go beyond posturing in its promotion of democracy and rule-of-law not just because it is the right thing to do, but because it is also in the interest of our security and free and fair trade. In order to achieve this, Europe does not just need a cohesive and unified foreign policy (in practice we are already moving in that direction). Europe also needs to have bullish economic and trade aspirations paired with a strategic plan to become fully self-sufficient in energy. So far, we are not going that route. We are still far behind in reforming our economies and we are still failing deeply on the energy front as we remain dependent on dictators for our energy supplies.
The weaker Europe is, the more dangerous the world becomes, but we have to contend with cowardly European leaders who prefer posturing to taking things very seriously.
Website Editor
Historian and Publisher
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