This year, the European Commission plans to launch a new draft Strategy for the Middle East. In the Brussels policy debates around its preparation, some are arguing that, given the ongoing divisions between Europe’s Member States, the strategy should focus on areas where there is more consensus, such as Syria’s reconstruction, and avoid taking a distinctive position on Israel/Palestine beyond support for the US/Israeli Gaza “peace plan”. This would be a historic mistake for Europe. It would further entrench the multiple errors it has made in the last few years on the region, particularly in its responses to the Gaza genocide and the accelerating dismantling of the Oslo structures in the West Bank.

In the wake of the US and Israel’s war of choice with Iran, and given its potential impact on Europe’s economy, energy security, and migration policies, it is no longer credible for an EU strategy to avoid addressing head-on what should be Europe’s fundamental interests in the region. The Commission’s role should therefore be to do some strategic thinking about what is in Europe’s collective interest in a neighborhood no less important than Ukraine and then challenge Member States to support or oppose it. Otherwise, the new strategy risks being a simple rewrite of the Pact for the Mediterranean, pulling together a few bits and pieces of largely existing policy without any strategic thread. This article argues that the new strategy should mark a genuine reset in Europe’s approach to the Middle East and provides some initial pointers as to what that reset should entail.

Europe’s Role in the Region

The damage done to Europe’s image and role in the region since 7 October has been so profound that the more honorable recent history of the relationship is often forgotten. Today, it seems that Europe’s strategy towards the region has been almost entirely delegated to the United States, even when the US strategy in the region runs counter to European interests. The only remaining independent European strategy is entirely defensive, aimed at harnessing all its policies to the overarching objective of containing migration from the region.

Yet it was not always thus. After the 1980 Venice Declaration by the then nine European Community Heads of State and Government, Europe had a very different position from the US, pushing for direct negotiations between Israel and the PLO. Europe’s strategy was based on the idea that resolving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict was the central strategic question for the region, aligning itself with the views of most regional actors. For Europe, therefore, resolving that conflict would be the key that unlocked the opportunities both for intra-regional integration and European partnership with the region.

In 1991, the US moved towards the European position, as part of the price it paid for building the coalition to eject Iraq from Kuwait. However, although Madrid hosted the resulting US/USSR-sponsored talks on the Israeli Arab conflict, the Europeans were reduced to the status of hosts and observers. This was partly because the Israelis saw the Europeans as less supportive mediators than the US, but also because Washington wanted to keep the process firmly in its own hands. After the breakthrough in the back-channel direct negotiations in Oslo, this political marginalization of Europe was repeated throughout the long, tortuous, and ultimately unsuccessful negotiations for a final status agreement.

One European negotiator at the time suggested to me that the failure of the Oslo negotiations and the marginalization of the Europeans were linked: “With US mediation, the Israelis had a trusted international interlocutor in the room that would never do anything to compromise Israel’s interests. When we [the Europeans] were in the room, the Palestinians also had an interlocutor. So, when we were frozen out at Camp David [Clinton’s failed attempt to reach an agreement between Barak and Arafat in 2000], Arafat had no one in the room that he could trust.”

In the face of this marginalization, the Europeans instead devoted their attention to two broad areas of policy, both premised on the assumption that a final status solution would be reached between the Israelis and the Palestinians:

1. Developing the economic and regional incentives for peace

The 1995 Barcelona and the Euro-Mediterranean process that emerged from it were explicitly designed to develop a “peace dividend” to the region through a combination of ambitious political, trade, and cooperation Association Agreements and sectoral regional ministerial meetings. The regulatory alignment and intra-regional cooperation this framework envisioned failed to bear fruit because no peace agreement emerged that would have normalized Israel’s relations with the rest of the region.

2. Building the Palestinian National Authority into the foundation of a Palestinian State

The EU became the main funder of the Authority (PA), and has invested close to 30 billion Euros in Palestine in the last three decades. The EU built the PA’s capacities to be able to move from responsibility for the tiny Area A to taking charge of governing the entire territory once a Palestinian State was launched. This was a major investment in the future that was only going to deliver once the final status agreement brought the new State into being.

For example, the EU played the major role in funding and training a Palestinian national police force. The Head of this force explained to me in his office in Ramallah in 2005 that the service was fantastically trained and equipped, but couldn’t do its job because even the most basic task of catching a thief was impossible: all the thief had to do was escape into the larger Area C of the West Bank, where Israel retained full responsibility for security, and there was nothing his officers could do to arrest him. As long as Israel was not prepared to transfer Area C to Palestinian control, the situation would remain the same.

The failure of the Oslo process did not result in a major strategic reassessment by the Europeans. Both policies essentially remained in place, with small adjustments. The Association Agreements all entered into force (with the exception of Syria), but the committees and sub-committees that were supposed to achieve regulatory alignment achieved little in the absence of the peace agreement that was supposed to give them impetus. The Neighborhood Policy, launched with great fanfare in 2004, turned the Euro-Mediterranean policy from a regional framework into a bilateral one, essentially recognizing the failure of its original intentions. Funding to the PA continued to pour in, but now largely to prop up the Authority in the absence of any realistic expectation that it would become the nucleus of a Palestinian State.

This stasis was shattered after the 7 October terrorist attack by Hamas and Israel’s genocidal response in Gaza. Ignoring two decades of established policy, the EU rushed to align itself with Israel and the US and initially threatened to cut all aid to the Palestinians. It then conspicuously failed to take any of the action legally required under its own bilateral agreements with Israel as the evidence of genocide mounted. In doing so, Europe destroyed the remnants of its own strategy towards the region. It effectively consigned decades of investment to the dustbin and effectively announced that the future of the region would be left to Washington, despite the US’s willingness to underwrite Israeli genocidal policy designed to make a peaceful solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict impossible.

The Geopolitical Case for a Renewed European Role

The logic of Europe aligning with the US in its neighborhood is now beginning to break down. Europeans have recognized this when looking east: witness the frantic moves to increase Europe’s defense autonomy from the US and the development of new “coalitions of the willing” to support Ukraine. However, for all the grand speeches at Davos and Munich, this thinking has not yet begun to extend to the South, where Europe still appears strangely reluctant to take any independent role. For example, the EU did not lift sanctions on Syria until after President Trump had met President Al-Sharaa, leaving the Europeans marginal players at this stage of the Syrian transition. More recently, refusal to condemn the illegality of the US/Israeli strikes on Iran has made Europe a target of Iranian retaliation. In this way, Europe has undermined its role: if Brussels is content to follow Washington decision-making, why should anyone in the region care about talking to Brussels? What difference could it make?

Yet in some ways, the case for Europe playing an independent role in its southern neighborhood is stronger than for the East, where Europe is more vulnerable to US blackmail because of its hard security dependence on Washington in supporting Ukraine’s defense against Russia. This dependency is less acute in the South. The war on Iran has made it even clearer that Europe and the US have very different interests in the region as the conflict directly threatens European energy security, undermines military support to Ukraine, and risks generating regional instability and a new refugee crisis on its borders, none of which will be directly felt in the US. It is to be hoped that one of the impacts of this war will be to provoke the same kind of thinking in European capitals about the need for autonomy from the US in its southern neighborhood as US equivocation on support for Ukraine has provoked in the East.

The US National Security Strategy released in December last year made it very clear that “the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy … are thankfully over”. For multiple reasons, not least the fact that the US no longer depends on fossil fuel imports from the region, the US is trying to withdraw from the region, even if the Israelis keep dragging them back in, especially over Iran. Unlike the Americans, the Europeans do not have the luxury of withdrawing from what is their own neighborhood, and therefore they need to think long and hard about their interests and objectives in the region and how they can achieve them.

This will inevitably involve the same policy dilemma Europe faces in the East: how can Europe develop its autonomy from the US without provoking a US backlash? The difference is that in the South, the likelihood and seriousness of such a backlash are lower.

A New Strategic Approach to the Middle East

On this basis, any new European approach to the region needs to start from three basic premises:

1. Europe needs to recognize and deploy effectively and coherently the assets it has.

Europe remains an active player in the region. It is still, overall, the largest trading partner for the MENA region, even if China has overtaken it in the Gulf States. Europe talks to everyone in the region through its extensive diplomatic network and has broad-based partnerships through the Association Agreements with all the Mediterranean countries, with the exception of Syria. In addition, Europe remains for the moment the world’s largest humanitarian player, and the extensive European diaspora from the region gives Europe a deeper understanding of the region than any other external actor. In a world where big powers are not afraid of using their muscle, Europe should be more honest about both its role and what it seeks from the region.

While much of Europe’s focus on the region in recent years has been on preventing migration through bilateral deals (Tunisia, Egypt, etc.), there has been relatively little emphasis on tackling the causes of migration. A more confident and assertive Europe would instead define its overarching objective in the region as seeking to achieve a more peaceful and prosperous neighborhood by strengthening its relationships across the region. Any move towards achieving that as an objective would in itself reduce both the numbers of refugees and of economic migrants.

2. Europe needs to work with the region to rebuild the trust lost in recent years.

The starting point, building on the 2025 New York declaration on , should be the recognition that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict remains the central strategic question for the region, and that working with the region to find a solution to it should be the first priority for Europe. A meaningful strategy would have many implications. First, it would involve going beyond the so-called Trump/Netanyahu peace plan, which is already looking set to fail. Instead of sending European Commissioners to be observers (and, no doubt, funders) of the Board for Peace, Europe would be working with partners in the region, notably in the Gulf, to develop plans to strengthen Palestinian agency in the rebuilding of Gaza. It would not be frightened of using its trade muscle to show Israel that moves towards annexation of the West Bank, the strangling of the Oslo governance structures, and illegal bombings and extensions of its territory in Lebanon and Syria, have consequences, if necessary, by suspending the preferential trade arrangements under the EU-Israel Association Agreement.

Such an approach would not only change how Europe is seen by the Palestinians, it would also have an impact on Europe’s relations with the whole region and allow it to strengthen its historically close ties to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, and the Gulf. In turn, this would open the door to a much more significant European role in Syria’s post-war rehabilitation and reconstruction, working in partnership with Turkey and the Gulf.

Europe could, for example, put back on the table the Association Agreement with Syria that was initialed in 2008 but never ratified. It could also enable Europeans to play a more meaningful role in helping Lebanon recover from the latest Israeli bombings, going beyond humanitarian support to strengthen State institutions and security forces, building on their earlier engagement after the civil war.

3. Europe needs a qualitatively different relationship with the Gulf

Such an approach would also logically lead to a step change in Europe’s relations with the Gulf States, especially with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, based on a more closely shared approach to the region and its security. The policy toolbox for achieving this is already there, thanks to the EU Partnership with the Gulf Strategy adopted in 2022. A more assertive and strategic Europe could build on this foundation and potentially help foster a cooperative security framework in the region, not least in the area of maritime security.

This may seem a long way off at a moment when the US and Israeli war on Iran has provoked Iranian retaliation across the region and placed enormous pressure on Gulf States to enter the conflict. However, if regional de-escalation efforts eventually prove successful, the vulnerabilities of both Iran and the Gulf States to military aggression that the latest events have demonstrated could generate a much greater willingness to invest in a more stable cooperative security framework. If Europe were willing to distance itself from illegal US and Israeli action, it would be in a much better position to play a role in facilitating the development of the much and long-needed regional alternative to Pax Americana.

Last, but not least, such an approach would at least help repair the damage done to Europe’s reputation as a defender of international law, not only in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. As such, it would be a starting point for the development of the kind of alliance of middle powers that Canadian Prime Minister Carney was advocating at Davos and in which the EU, as a collection of middle powers bound together by laws and rules, should logically play a central role.