A week into the American-Israeli military campaign against Iran, Europe’s leaders remain united in their misgivings about an operation they never asked for. But the reality is, they are being dragged into it more by the day, and that is causing political and diplomatic headaches from London to Berlin.
The tensions are visible in the growing gap between the words of European leaders and the orders they are giving their military commanders to send warships, planes and other combat equipment into West Asia.
“We are not at war,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said on social media on Thursday. “We don’t want to go to war,” Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy told broadcasters the same day. “We are not joining the US and Israeli offensive strikes,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain said in Parliament on Monday.
Europe is caught in a deepening dilemma. On the one hand, its leaders need to protect their citizens stranded in the region, honour defence pacts with Arab states and, in some cases, allow the US to use their military bases to avoid antagonising US President Donald Trump.
On the other, they need to avoid too overt a show of support for American
actions, to avert a military backlash from Iran as well as electoral consequences from their restive publics, which are anxious to avoid the quagmire of another West
Asia war.
New York Times News Service