Since the beginning of Israel’s military campaign targeting Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps across Lebanon and Syria, Israel’s partners and adversaries have seemed overwhelmed by the pace of events. From the initial airstrikes against senior Hezbollah and IRGC officials in late July to the detonation of booby-trapped pagers that killed and maimed thousands of Hezbollah operatives in mid-September, every step Israel has taken has shown how obsolete many assumptions that once guided international diplomacy in the Middle East have become.
Now, with the possibility of both an all-out Israeli invasion of Lebanon and a direct conflict between Israel and Iran looming, the European Union’s inability to influence developments along its Eastern Mediterranean periphery has become a particularly stark symbol of a wider international sense of helplessness in the face of a war that is spiraling out of control.
The extent to which EU institutions, EU member states and the U.K. have become hapless bystanders in the face of the escalating conflict is in stark contrast to the ambitions Europeans once had of becoming central players in the emergence of a peaceful and prosperous “new” Middle East. Beginning in the early 1990s, though the United States remained the most powerful security actor in the region, European initiatives to foster regional trade, economic development and infrastructure connectivity became crucial aspects of every effort to broker lasting peace in the Middle East. Ever since then, the EU has remained a steady source of vast amounts of reconstruction aid and business investment across the region, even as each new high-profile initiative designed to promote regional stability ended in disaster.