Ambitions versus reality: "geopolitical EU"

9 May 2025

Europe Day, celebrated on 9 May every year, is also an occasion to revisit the evolution of the European project over the last year — and in recent years, this implies increasingly assessing the EU’s effectiveness in dealing with the unprecedented security challenges it is facing. How the EU, or Europe more broadly, addresses these security challenges also defines its role in the global order and its relationship with other powers.

This week’s edition of the Geopolitical Europe Pulse brings you a compilation of articles on recent evolutions in the EU’s and Europe’s quest for geopolitical actorness in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific, which also discuss Europe’s position and positioning in an evolving global order.

In a nutshell: across regions, the aspiration of a “geopolitical EU” remains more a lip service than an actual reality: although the EU, and Europe more generally, is increasingly endorsing a “language of power” and geopolitical vocabulary, the implementation of its ambitions suffers from a lack of resources, coordination, and alignment between ambitions and actual policy.

Ukraine

A geopolitical EU? Although the thinking in the EU towards Eastern Europe as a region has evolved within the EU with its wartime assistance to Ukraine, the authors of the piece “Geopolitical EU? The EU’s Wartime Assistance to Ukraine” call for managing expectations: According to the authors, an assessment of Europe as a geopolitical actor appears to be “somewhat premature, as there is limited evidence at this stage that the EU is willing to provide leadership on the geospatial (re)ordering of the region.”

Between an ethical and a powerful geopolitical actor? The article “Ukraine's Challenge to Europe: The EU as an Ethical and Powerful Geopolitical Actor” unpacks the dichotomy between “values and interests” in the EU’s reaction towards Russia’s war against Ukraine. The authors argue that “it is in the EU's strategic interest to strengthen its commitment to values-based foreign and defense policies, revive a meritocratic and credible enlargement process, and work with the United States to provide more effective military assistance to Ukraine in its fight for liberal democratic values and a rules-based European security order”.

Middle East

Does Europe matter in the Middle East? To a very limited extent — not at least because Europeans are granting less attention to the Middle East than other regions, because the main focus of interaction with the region remains stability. Nevertheless, engagement with Lebanon and Syria could constitute a real opportunity for Europe to step up in the region as an actor in terms of humanitarian, political, and military assistance, especially at a time where the US approach to the region remains uncertain. This episode of the Babel Podcast unpacks Europe’s role in the region.

Iran: While Europeans played a critical role in the negotiations on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal, their role has been marginalised in engagement with Iran in recent years. The authors of the paper “Advancing a geopolitical Europe: the new EU leadership and the Iranian conundrum” argue that “argues that the EU's current Iran policy is misaligned with its geopolitical ambitions, depicting Iran–EU relations as a geopolitical contestation between a defender and a challenger of the existing international order. In this context, the perspective of a geopolitical EU would create a foundation for the new EU leadership to formulate its foreign policy towards Iran”.

Indo-Pacific

Multipolarity and waning European influence: The policy brief “The geopolitics of multipolarity: How to counter Europe’s waning relevance in Southeast Asia” illustrates how new patterns of non-alignment as a active strategy of regional powers and multi-alignment make it more challenging for the EU and European states individually to remain relevant in the region or reclaim relevance. The author suggests that Europe needs to fine-tune its strategy through prioritising five steps: consistency, long-term commitment, collective influence through a “team Europe” approach, informal cooperation with regional players, and streamlining bureaucratic processes.

Ambition versus reality: While the EU’s Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific had laid out high ambitions, especially the focus of Europeans on Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2022 question to what extent the EU can actually live up to these. The article “Ambition, meet reality: The European Union’s actorness in the Indo-Pacific” argues that “although there are opportunities for greater engagement with the region, they have grown more complicated given the war in Ukraine. Moreover, much will also depend on recalibrating the European Union’s relationship with China, as well as finding the most effective way to leverage the affordances of transatlantic cooperation”.

The big picture

Three theatres: Europe, the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific — these three regions constitute key security challenges for Europe, and there is a good case to be made for assessing and addressing these challenges in a holistic way. The article “Navigating the Geopolitics of a Three-Theater World” provides a big picture perspective how Europe can navigate these three theatres simultaneously and prioritise across theatres.