This week I spoke with Josep Borrell, among the most prominent Spanish figures on the international stage. Currently he’s serving as the president of CIDOB; until 2024, he was High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HRVP). That extensive experience and his time as Spain’s Foreign Minister gives him a privileged view of the geopolitical balances at present. In this conversation, the former engineer and economist focuses on the breakdown of the international order, addressing the war in Iran and Israel’s role in the Middle East. All of this forms part of a fundamental discussion on the future of the EU.
In his opinion, the present moment has laid bare the dire fragility of a Europe paralyzed and held hostage by its own alliances. The ongoing offensive against Iran has revealed an entente in which Washington is following the dictates of an Israeli government currently dominated by “authentic madmen.” Borrell dismantles the official narrative justifying this preemptive war, calling the alleged imminence of an Iranian atomic bomb a “falsehood” and accusing the NATO secretary general of acting as a “vassal of Trump” to legitimize that position in global public opinion.
Far from projecting real influence capable of combating this drift, the continent now finds itself a mere U.S. “military protectorate.” At the same time, Donald Trump’s return to the White House symbolizes the triumph of the “apostles of the dark Enlightenment” – an influential technological and financial elite convinced that democracy is incompatible with freedom. In that context, European resistance appears sterile, while the U.S. superpower is able to subdue and extort its allies under the lethal threat of “unplugging the satellites” that deliver information and intelligence to the Ukrainian front.
According to the president of the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, this strategic vulnerability threatens to precipitate a capitulation by Ukraine, condemning the EU project to irrelevance. To avoid a definitive shipwreck in this new era of empires, Borrell warns that an institutional reset will be necessary to end the present chaos of a European Commission determined to usurp the diplomatic powers of Member States and to operate illegally as a dangerous “shadow Pentagon.”
This conversation marks the beginning of a series of analyses and interviews with which Agenda Pública aims to echo the debates expected to drive the forthcoming meeting “War and Peace in the 21st Century: Defending Europe without the United States?” – a gathering of experts in security and geopolitics organized by CIDOB, to be held in Barcelona on Saturday, April 11.
Josep Borrell talks to ‘Agenda Pública’. Photo: Agenda Pública / Tania Sieira
What has changed from the time you worked on a kibbutz to the Israel of today?
Yes, I worked on a kibbutz in the summer of 1969. It’s been more than half a century, a long time in which to change… After five years studying at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, at the School of Aeronautical Engineers, I was looking for a somewhat more vital experience. At that time, kibbutzim were part of the collective imagination for left-wing youths. It was one year after the Six-Day War, after May ‘68; it’s all very far away now. Back then, the kibbutz was a symbol of collective life – very collective. Children were educated together; everybody did all the work in shifts.
In that dreamy environment, Israel’s occupation of Palestine was pushed to the sidelines, although obviously it was still part of reality. At the same time, these were very progressive people. Many had escaped from Europe, either themselves or their parents. And there I met my first wife. Life is a random walk.
Now most of the kibbutzim have been privatized and serve as enterprises for agricultural production.
Many years have passed, and Israel has changed a lot. What happened?
It has changed absolutely. First, the sociological composition of Israeli society. It’s no longer that society of progressive, left-wing people with an ideal that’s sometimes romantic and sometimes biblical. Today it comes mostly from Eastern Europe. The Shimon Peres-types are dead, and there’s almost nothing left of the Labour Party.
Israel has become the regional gendarme with impressive military power, massively financed and supported by the United States. Now it no longer hides its desire for territorial expansion toward Greater Israel: they call the West Bank ‘Judea and Samaria’, they proclaim that this land was given to them by God, and that they have a biblical right to it. It’s enough to listen to ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich, true madmen of the extreme ethnicist right.
“We’ve constructed a self-congratulatory narrative that it was in fact a desert – that there were no Palestinian people. A denial of Palestinian identity”It has nothing to do with the pioneers. Although beyond the epic narrative, the pioneers were also part of the colonization process. Whatever they called it, the truth is that it meant the arrival of Jewish people to their historical ancestral land, but other people already lived there, the Palestinian Arabs.
When Ursula von der Leyen said: “When you finally returned to your promised land, you made the desert bloom.” The problem is that the desert was inhabited. I wish it had been just a desert. We’ve constructed a self-congratulatory narrative that it was in fact a desert – that there were no Palestinian people. A denial of Palestinian identity – at most, there were four Bedouins, remnants of an Ottoman occupation, without a political identity. It’s a great falsification of history.
Borrell recounts his experience in Israel, where he spent part of 1969. Photo: Agenda Pública / Tania Sieira
There’s a debate these days about whether Israel has forced the U.S. to intervene in Iran or whether the U.S. also wanted to do so. How would you explain it?
I think back to my former functions. Probably, hunger was combined with the desire to eat. Netanyahu has gotten from an American president what he’s wanted for 20 years: for the U.S. to overthrow the Ayatollahs by force. But without a ground invasion, just bombing from the air, they’re unlikely to succeed. At least they’ll destroy the maximum of Iran’s military capabilities, ballistic missiles in particular.
As far as we know, the Omani mediator flew to Washington days before the attack to keep pushing ahead on negotiations that he claimed weren’t going badly. The negotiators met on a Friday and were set to meet again the following Monday. And yet on Saturday, they attacked. That is, they were summoned to continue negotiations 24 hours before a massive attack was launched.
Most likely – though we’ll never know for sure – Israeli intelligence knew that some 40 leaders would be gathered around Iran’s supreme leader in his own residence. They knew they were there and didn’t want to miss the opportunity to eliminate them.
“If the U.S. said, as Ronald Reagan did during the Lebanon war, ‘enough, it’s over; either you stop, or tomorrow you’ll run out of funding and ammunition’, then Israel would stop”They should have put the U.S. ahead of their willingness to attack. The United States had two options: join from the beginning, take part, and pretend to be leading the new war; or else join later, let Israel attack first, then support it if necessary. But the second option would have made too obvious a follower of the U.S.
The U.S. had a third option – to say no. And it has very powerful instruments for pressuring Israel. If Trump said – as Ronald Reagan did during the Lebanon war – “enough, it’s over; either you stop, or tomorrow you’ll run out of funding and ammunition,” then Israel would stop, as they stopped then. But Trump doesn’t want to do that. Netanyahu has shown that he has major influence over Trump.
Who can tell Trump that he needs to stop? Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates…?
They’re the first to be harmed, the most immediate targets. Not the only ones, nor the ones that will be hurt most in the medium term, but they’re the first and, for now, the hardest hit.
Facilities for liquefaction of natural gas have been destroyed in Qatar, with exports stopped and cities bombed. It can’t compare with the intensity of Israeli and U.S. bombings of Iran and Lebanon, but the Gulf is surely being affected. Tourism has practically stopped. Tourists want to leave and, of course, it will take time to return to normal. The Gulf cities had become big centers of tourist attraction – luxury, museums, artistic centers, beaches, desert, etc. But that process has ended with this war.
“It can’t compare with the intensity of Israeli and U.S. bombings of Iran and Lebanon, but the Gulf is surely being affected. Tourism has practically stopped”And then there’s China. China gets about a quarter of its oil imports, probably more, from Venezuela and the Gulf. Even more in terms of gas. Today, the biggest consumer of Gulf gas isn’t Europe, but China and Southeast Asia. That puts China in a delicate position, energy-wise, and that will have to be entered into the profit-and-loss balance. Not right away, because Beijing has a lot of stock, it knows what’s going on and keeps its back covered. But those stocks won’t renew themselves – they’ll run out.
We Europeans will suffer – we’re already suffering – the consequences if this continues, if gas and oil prices skyrocket again and availability drops, as with the war in Ukraine.
López Plana raises questions about the current conflict in the Middle East and its possible outcome. Photo: Agenda Pública / Tania Sieira
Are you one of those who think that Iran can hold out for a while and that this could be relatively long? What resilience do you see in Tehran?
Iran has no air force. It doesn’t have the atomic bomb and is far from having one. The NATO Secretary General, putting on his Trump-vassal hat, says the U.S. had to intervene because Iran was about to get the atomic weapon and bomb us. But that’s false, and he knows it very well. If he doesn’t know it, that’s even more serious.
“Iran complied with that agreement until Trump showed up, and in May 2018 he kicked over the game board and said the agreement was terrible”We have to go back ten years, to 2015, when Obama and Europe managed to sign with Iran that agreement with an exotic name, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which camouflaged its essence very well. Iran promised not to develop military nuclear capabilities in exchange for sanctions being lifted. Iran complied with that agreement until Trump showed up, and in May 2018 he kicked over the game board and said the agreement was terrible. Since then we haven’t been able to revive it, though we tried.
We Europeans tried to keep it alive by telling our companies to keep trading with Iran, that we would protect them. But that didn’t work, because between risking U.S. sanctions and relying on dubious European legal protection, global companies folded their tents and left. Iran was again left without a trade opening.
Despite that, Iran tried to keep the deal alive and made slow progress in developing its nuclear capabilities. I know this well because I’ve had to talk with the Iranians for years; I probably haven’t spoken to any other country quite as much – me and our negotiator, Spanish diplomat Enrique Mora, and American negotiator Rob Malley.
Iran made slow progress in non-compliance, but it never had the possibility of building an atomic bomb. Anything it did have, we knew about from the reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency led by Rafael Grossi: the number of centrifuges, how many kilos of enriched uranium they had. These were daily topics of conversation.
Of course, Iran said: “If you don’t do your part, how can you demand that I do mine?” And we demanded it anyway, until the bombings in June 2025, after which Trump declared victory and said everything had been completely destroyed. Iran probably retained a certain amount of enriched uranium in gaseous form, although it didn’t have a nuclear projectile with a corresponding transport vector. So the argument that “we had to intervene because we were at imminent risk” doesn’t fit the reality.
Videos are circulating of U.S. senators like Elizabeth Warren leaving intelligence briefings looking very surprised. You’ve met with Trump. How do you regard him? There’s a debate between those who say that he doesn’t know what he’s doing and those who warn that we shouldn’t underestimate him.
Yes, I had the honor of accompanying the King on an official visit to the White House. If I had to rank world leaders by their intellectual capacity, I certainly wouldn’t put Trump first – far from it.
Trump thinks he’s smarter than everyone, that’s for sure, but he’s not. And remember, Trump isn’t only Trump. What’s happening in the U.S. isn’t about one person. That one person embodies and represents and gives visual form in all his egocentric exaggeration to a larger social undercurrent that elected him with a majority. He’s a pathological narcissist, yes. But, if he were that and nothing more, we wouldn’t be where we are.
Around Trump there’s a whole power-machine with an intellectual and political dimension that’s really dangerous. These are the apostles of the so-called dark Enlightenment, who oppose our historical Enlightenment and want to circumvent that world of European philosophers from Voltaire to Kant, plus others. There are even drawings in which our philosophers are seen fighting those forces, armed not with swords but with keyboards and computer screens.
“Human rights, the Enlightenment, freedoms… all of that belongs to a world that according to them no longer exists”Trump criticizes wokeness a lot, but then there’s the philosophy of darkness. Recently, one of its most notorious representatives, Peter Thiel, gave a lecture at the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in France. I recommend reading it. The amount of barbarity he was able to deliver in an uninterrupted stream of biblical, mathematical, and historical references is impressive.
The underlying message was that democracy is incompatible with freedom. It’s that clear. For them, the world has to be run like a company, by a kind of global emperor. Human rights, the Enlightenment, freedoms… all of that belongs to a world that according to them no longer exists. You have to read it to understand that Trump isn’t just Trump. And these people are using Trump more than he’s using them.
López Plana and Borrell agree in their interests for Europe and their concerns about certain U.S. positions. Photo: Agenda Pública / Tania Sieira
What does that mean for Europe?
Trump has the enormous power of the U.S. in his favor. On the one hand, there’s the huge power of money from digital billionaires like Thiel, Palantir, Musk, and other lesser-known names. Then there’s the power of information – or disinformation, which in the end is adulterated information. Finally, there’s the gigantic military power of the U.S.
We Europeans felt very comfortable under the protective umbrella of the United States. Let’s be clear: today we are, and we have been for decades, a military protectorate. Germany first, because it lost the war and had no choice. But it’s the same with the others. We’ve spent very little on defense. When the Cold War ended, we thought there would never be a war again. The military seemed to us almost decorative.
Then came the euro crisis; budgets had to be adjusted, and the first variable for cuts was military spending, then came social spending. Since then, Europe as a group of countries has been disarming: fewer arsenals, fewer troops, less training, less ammunition. And for what? The other element was already there – NATO Article 5. In case anything happened, Big Brother would help.
That Big Brother in Obama’s time went to the Baltic countries and said he cared as much about the security of Tallinn as that of London. Today, I doubt very much that anyone would say so. With Trump, that story is over.
“When you have such vast dependencies, you can’t get too angry, either. That’s why we accept certain trade agreements, to give them a name”Our dependence on the U.S. has only grown. Before the war in Ukraine, we imported 40% of our gas from Russia; now we import 40% of our gas from the United States. It would be enough for the cloud to be disconnected for us to lose not just our photo albums, but the information systems that make our societies and economies work. The same with social networks, with transcontinental fiber-optic cables, with intelligence satellites, even with supplies of weapons.
When you have such vast dependencies, you can’t get too angry, either. That’s why we accept certain trade agreements, to give them a name, like the Turnberry agreement, where they raise tariffs while we lower them… You can’t win a commercial battle against the country that guarantees your military security. There are colleagues who say it openly: “How could we say ‘no’ to them? The immediate reaction would have been to unplug the satellites that guide Ukrainian missiles.” That said, it’s clear that appeasement doesn’t work because Trump always asks for more, as happened with Greenland. We have to put a stop to it.
How should the recent meeting between Friedrich Merz and Trump be read? It’s been said that Merz is trying to embrace Trump so he doesn’t abandon Europe to Russia.
That’s exactly what everyone who carries water for Trump says, starting with von der Leyen. The farther East, the more convinced they are that this has to be done. They keep repeating that the U.S. is still our great ally, that we have disagreements, but that deep down we’re united.
We live in denial of reality.
Until we find ourselves in a situation that I can’t rule out: that Trump might leave us alone in the face of Russia.
That fear – and I’d say that terror – is what dominates many Europeans today. The further East, the stronger the feeling that we cannot afford to let Trump get angry and leave us alone.
“Today, Ukraine’s great financial and military backer is not the United States, but Europe: the EU, its Member States, the United Kingdom, Norway”But somehow that’s already happened. Under Biden, the United States gave weapons to Ukraine; Trump doesn’t give anything, he sells it. “Do you want to give weapons to Ukraine? Very well: I’ll produce them and you buy them from me.” He no longer contributes a dollar in weapons. And so far, the Europeans, for better or worse, have increased what they spend and what they buy from the U.S. to give it to Ukraine. Today, Ukraine’s great financial and military backer is not the United States, but Europe: the EU, its Member States, the United Kingdom, Norway.
Fortunately, Washington has maintained the satellite intelligence system, which is critical to the functioning of Ukrainian defense and which only the United States, and to some extent the United Kingdom, can provide. Washington keeps it up because they know that, were they to cut it off, Ukraine would go blind and be unable to guide its long-range missiles – which, by the way, are quite successfully destroying Russian refineries. But cutting that off would be tantamount to saying to Ukraine: “Surrender.” And even Trump has to think twice about that.
The former High Representative led European diplomacy through one of the most turbulent stages for the EU (2019–2024). Photo: Agenda Pública / Tania Sieira
Ben Hodges, former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, once said something very blunt to me: “I don’t know what’s going on between Trump and Putin, but I do know that everything Trump does is what Putin wants.”
It seems so. We the Europeans and Biden’s United States had set out to isolate Putin internationally. He’s an aggressor and he had to be punished, blocked, and isolated. But the rest of the world, especially the so-called Global South, hasn’t followed us, because among other things it has enough problems of its own, with Russia continuing to sell it energy or grain.
However, Trump hasn’t just failed to isolate Putin – he’s enthroned him. I have the impression, and it’s nothing more than that, that Putin won Trump over. Before their meeting in Alaska, Trump said he was going to impose his own conditions or sanctions on Russia. But it hasn’t been the same since he left Alaska. I fear that they forged an agreement. And Putin should have told him: “Now talk to your friends, prevent the Europeans from boycotting this agreement, and tell Zelensky about it.”
Immediately afterward Trump called Zelensky and summoned him to the White House. The Europeans had the reflex of gathering around the Ukrainian in that photo we found so humiliating. But that scene had at least one virtue: in front of everyone, Trump didn’t put on the table the hardest part of his agreement with Putin. If Zelensky had gone to that meeting alone, he would have had to swallow it. With everyone there, he thought that a better opportunity would arise.
That opportunity has come. As Zelensky says, there are things that Ukraine can accept and others it cannot. It can accept a ceasefire, but not a peace treaty that includes the loss of territories – including those that Russia has failed to conquer. Putin and Trump call it an “exchange of territories”, but that’s keeping the other person’s portfolio without giving up anything.
“Trump ultimately has the ability to end the war through Ukraine’s surrender: unplugging the satellites and leaving it in the dark”That’s where we are. Russia fails to make decisive progress, and Ukraine destroys part of Russia’s oil refining system with an increasingly weakened economy. Russia tries to destroy the Ukrainian electricity system to make the country unlivable, and Ukraine hits Russian refineries and energy infrastructure. Each one attacks the other’s weak point. How long can that last? They’ve been at war for four years, during which Russia has also paid a very high price.
Trump ultimately has the ability to end the war through Ukraine’s surrender: unplugging the satellites and leaving it in the dark. We can buy weapons from the United States, but we can’t buy what we don’t have if the U.S. doesn’t want to supply it to Ukraine.
What’s at stake for Europe in a good or bad agreement on Ukraine? Its very existence – its credibility?
Europe is running the serious risk of becoming a spectator of global fragmentation. The world is reordering itself, and we run the risk of just watching how others are doing it. What Trump has done in Venezuela is an example. He’d like to do something similar in Iran, but it’s more complicated there.
The world is reorganizing around two great poles of power: China and the United States. Russia isn’t a pole of power. Russia is a troublemaker, a gas station with an atomic bomb. Economically, that’s not enough. But if they were to win the war in Ukraine – if they managed to install a regime in Kiev more or less equivalent to the one in Belarus, a puppet regime – which, by the way, is what Trump has done with Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela – that would amount to winning the war.
European public opinion covers the whole range. Some people say, “Well, Ukraine is part of Russia, Crimea was always Russian, what have we lost there?” Others say, “We’ll be next.” And others argue the inevitable, that we have to arm ourselves to replace our American ally, because we can no longer trust it.
“Can a country still at war, or in a latent war, really enter the Union? What if Putin got away with it, and Ukraine became a Russian submarine – even more than Hungary already is?”But however much we arm ourselves, we won’t be able to completely do without our American ally. So the Europeans are trying to do both at the same time: rearm, and not lose America’s friendship, as the current HRVP Mrs Kallas stated very clearly and rightly in a recent interview. Although we shouldn’t underestimate the public opinion that asks, “What more does the Donbas give us, if it can guarantee peace?” The problem is that capitulation won’t guarantee peace. Rewarding the aggressor only invites new aggressions in the future.
Then there’s the promise to make Ukraine a member of the European Union. Where are we in that? Can a country still at war, or in a latent war, really enter the Union? What if Putin got away with it, and Ukraine became a Russian submarine – even more than Hungary already is? But Ukraine has been promised – especially by von der Leyen – that they would become part of the Union in a very short time. If the war ends through capitulation, Ukraine wouldn’t enter the Union if it’s subjected to Russian control.
Borrell was among the top leaders from the European Union during the early stages of the war in Ukraine. Photo: Agenda Pública / Tania Sieira
Also, all this is happening at a time of greater political fragmentation within Europe, with less capacity for unity. How does that internal fragmentation work with the need to act in an increasingly fragmented world?
Fragmentation in the world begins at home, because the first fragmentation is in the European Union itself. The Gaza war already made that clear, and Iran even more so. The positions are polarized; to simplify, we could say that on the one hand we have Spain, and on the other we have Germany representing the majority position.
In Gaza it was very clear. Spain asked Europe to act; Germany gave carte blanche to Israel. Spain and I myself, as HRVP, argued that flagrant violations of humanitarian law could not be accepted. But that’s a minority position. Now even more so, because it’s no longer just a question of asking Europe to act, but of acting alone with the instruments you have. In the case of Spain, for example, the use of the U.S. joint bases on our soil.
“The U.S. can’t threaten us commercially as if it didn’t know that we’re all part of a customs union with a common trade policy”That fragmentation, plus the fact that some countries have already used whatever margin of action they had against the United States, puts us in uncharted territory. The U.S. can’t threaten us commercially as if it didn’t know that we’re all part of a customs union with a common trade policy. Nor is there any plan to expel anyone from NATO. But if you look for retaliatory mechanisms, you’ll find them.
On the matter of Spain’s position. You were Foreign Minister. What’s on the scale when a decision like this is made? For me, protecting Spanish sovereignty today means protecting Europe’s sovereignty and, to a certain extent, NATO’s as well.
We’ve moved from declaration to action. It’s no longer a question of just saying: “International law must be respected.” No – if you don’t respect international law, then I won’t help you. That’s different.
If Spain weren’t a member of the European Union, what it’s doing now couldn’t be permitted. It’s what I call the ‘inverse sovereignty’ theorem: the less formal your sovereignty, the more real sovereignty you can exercise. That is, the more sovereignty you’ve shared or transferred, the greater your capacity to act in a way that, otherwise, you could not.
If the peseta still existed instead of the euro, we wouldn’t be able to do what we’re doing, because the peseta would be hyper-devalued in the financial markets. That happened to the franc in the early 1980s, when Mitterrand attempted to adopt a more expansive policy and the currency was devalued three times – until they surrendered to budgetary discipline. We remember it very well because a year later, the Spanish Socialists were in government and we’d learned the French lesson: nothing of the sort, because the monetary sign might cease to be valid.
“We’ve dispensed with our monetary and commercial sovereignty and, in exchange for being less formally sovereign, we can act with more independence”Fortunately, we’re in the euro, and they can’t devalue the Spanish currency – if they tried, they would do it for everyone. The same in trade matters. We don’t have autonomous trade relations with the United States – the European Union has them. The U.S. can’t boycott Spain alone; if they try, they’ll face the whole Union. Those are big words.
We’ve dispensed with our monetary and commercial sovereignty and, in exchange for being less formally sovereign, we can act with more independence. We’re protected. How much is that protection worth? A lot. How long does it last? However long the partners want it to last. Nevertheless, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to imagine that it could break apart at the monetary level. At the trade level, a rupture would almost mean the end of the European Union.
Now, contradicting Trump so clearly, so sharply, and on so many fronts – defense spending, immigration policy, the Middle East – has its risks. I don’t know exactly what Trump can do, but he has several geopolitical levers. We are where we are, and we have the neighbors we have. One can imagine everything from forced migratory flows to border problems. But Spain also has weight – it is not a small republic of a million and a half inhabitants.
On the other hand, we have historical experience. Aznar got us into the war in Iraq. Zapatero took us out. And he took us out by picking up the phone, calling Washington and saying: “Tomorrow my soldiers are leaving.” The U.S. didn’t need our troops. The problem wasn’t military. In Iraq, it was shown that the U.S. knows how to start wars but doesn’t know how to end them.
The economist’s political career includes having served as minister with both Felipe González and Pedro Sánchez. Photo: Agenda Pública / Tania Sieira
There’s a current that maintains that shared European sovereignty isn’t incompatible with Spain accentuating its bilateral relations with other countries. Charles Powell, for example, put it that way. Has Spain renounced bilateral foreign policy?
No. Spanish foreign policy hasn’t renounced that. Rather, I would say that Spain has made greater efforts than others to maintain, for example with China, a positive relationship. I understand very well what Charles Powell means – he’s a very fine analyst and a great connoisseur of the Anglo-Saxon reality. And indeed, it shouldn’t be incompatible.
Neither should we underestimate the importance of the transatlantic relationship for Spain, in economic terms. Not only in military terms. Spanish companies get a very significant portion of their best profit ratios from their U.S. investments. If you look at the Spanish foreign investment portfolio, you’ll see it used to be highly concentrated in Latin America, but now the U.S. occupies a central position. In addition, we have a favorable trade balance.
No one underestimates that relationship. Every effort must be made to ensure that a political position taken in opposition to a conflict doesn’t deteriorate a mutually beneficial economic relationship. But we live in a world where the economy has become another weapon. The weaponization of the economy is visible at the most elemental level: tariffs have become the first stick used to beat the head of anyone who doesn’t behave as desired.
“If the relationship with the United States becomes complicated, then not only Spain but Europe as a whole will have to look for other friends and other markets”That’s why I completely agree that we must try to avoid that. And the Spanish government is certainly clear on that point. Opening up to others is something Spain has already done, and it has even received criticism for doing so. We can’t be asked to open up, then to censor those to whom we’ve opened up, as has happened with China. We’ve been great apostles of the agreement with Mercosur. We’re willing to open up even if we sacrifice, in relative terms, some of our own sectoral interests. So, yes: if the relationship with the United States becomes complicated, then not only Spain but Europe as a whole will have to look for other friends and other markets. Also, in general, to sustain the multilateral order despite great powers with imperial temptations.
We haven’t talked about the European Commission – which you know well. What problem do you see today in its operation?
There’s a serious institutional problem in Europe: the Commission is trying to play a role that the Treaties attribute to the HRVP. Structures, functions, and efforts are being duplicated. Portfolios are being created for which the Commission has no competence, and there’s a clear willingness on the part of the President of the Commission to act as if she, in particular, and the Commission, in general, were in charge of foreign and defense policy. And that’s absolutely contrary to the Treaties.
Article 17 of the European Union Treaty states that the Commission does not represent the Union in matters of foreign or defense policy. I limit myself to asking: is that article still in force, or not? Judging by the voices coming out of the Commission, it would seem that the President does indeed represent the Union. If she doesn’t, then what is being said amounts to some very questionable personal opinions, such as the positions on Gaza and Iran, or now on the validity of international law, all contributing to a great deal of confusion.
We saw this when von der Leyen declared in the Financial Times that Europe was prepared to intervene in Ukraine, and Pistorius, the German Minister of Defense, replied that she was “not knowledgeable in this matter and, moreover, has no competence.” We cannot live permanently like this, because in the end the rest of the world asks: “Who’s in charge here? Who sets the position?”.
Another example: when von der Leyen goes to the European Parliament and solemnly says that she’s going to take action against Israel, or that she’s going to sanction personalities and enforce the Association Agreement. First, the Commission isn’t going to sanction anyone, because the Commission doesn’t even have the capacity to propose personal sanctions. Second: none of that was done afterward. It wasn’t proposed and wouldn’t have been accepted by the Member States, even by qualified majority. Everything was just an announcement to avoid a parliamentary debate. But the world doesn’t understand that Europe works that way.
“The European Union wasn’t designed for today’s world. It’s an invention from another era, designed to solve the problems of that time”Americans used to ask: “What is Europe’s telephone number?” Now they must be even more clueless, because they hear an institution pontificating on foreign policy and defense and they deduce that it must have some say. Then the states come along and reply: “Wait a minute, that policy is ours.” The Commission may have partial competences in the defense industry, because it’s an industry after all. However, the defense industry is one thing and defense is another. The Commission can’t pretend to be a kind of shadow Pentagon.
That leads to a broader conclusion: the European Union wasn’t designed for today’s world. It’s an invention from another era, designed to solve the problems of that time. It was designed to make peace among Europeans, and in that it has worked very well. But it’s still a very loose union comprised of an increasingly large and heterogeneous group of countries that, in the end, share very little. Some share currency, we’ve made certain borders invisible, but otherwise ideological differences are increasingly marked.
Europe today has more enemies than ever, inside and outside. If we really want a Union that tackles today’s problems – especially those that have to do with security in all its senses, including the military – then it must be redesigned. We have to do a reset. If not, we’ll continue to twist the Treaties to make them say what they don’t say and make them do what they don’t allow us to do, looking for convoluted interpretations of the Treaties, sometimes on the verge of fraud, to circumvent unanimity and move forward with what some want and others don’t want.
In Madrid, López Plana and Borrell discuss what the present model of the European Union should look like. Photo: Agenda Pública / Tania Sieira
Less enlargement and greater deepening? Two speeds?
Rather than speaking in generic terms of ‘two speeds’, I would go straight to the heart of the matter. If Europeans believe that they have to unite to collectively ensure their defense, they should start thinking about creating a European Defense Union, with a new treaty, ad hoc, among those who want to join. Starting with one condition: there’s no unanimity here. It could be combined with enhanced cooperation in taxation, Eurobonds, the internal market, also without the right of veto, forming a federal nucleus.
Right now we can keep acting as if the institutional conflict within the Union were just a matter of course between a Community executive and the different national political powers. The problem is that, until recently, the parties had agreed that the Union should do certain things, but not anymore. Now there’s a standoff between an EU executive that wants to do what it can’t do and certain states that don’t recognize it, and that don’t agree among themselves, 27 states with Orbán and Fico sabotaging the aid to Ukraine and the sanctions on Russia.
“The question is whether we should remain exactly the same in order to do what we haven’t yet decided to do”That’s why I say that if we continue as we’ve done so far, with an increasingly heterogeneous mix of increasingly distinct countries, it will be very difficult to do what we haven’t yet decided to do. We are who we are in order to do what we’re doing today. The question is whether we should remain exactly the same in order to do what we haven’t yet decided to do.
If Europeans really want to make progress on defense, we will have to go much more directly to the heart of the problem. Otherwise, we’ll continue to be stuck in paralysis.
Thank you very much.
En alianza con
En alianza con