President Donald Trump appears on the verge of unraveling one of Europe’s smugger foreign policy successes: the nuclear deal with Iran, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Smug, because while America led the actual deal-making, it was European companies who were among the first to race in to Tehran and cut big business deals. If Trump does throw a wrench into the Iran deal, it is EU nations that will feel the pinch first.
Then there is the Ukraine crisis and European relations with Russia. The EU has looked flat-footed for some time now on coming up with any kind of plan to stop the rot.
Perhaps, however, the weightiest and most distracting item in the inbox exposes some of Europe’s deepest fault lines: competing French and German visions of a more integrated Europe and the very future of the continent.
More is being expected of the EU now than in recent years and when put to the challenge, walking whilst talking has thus far not come easily.
The EU’s stumbles seemed most stark in the week leading up to Puigdemont’s halfway announcement of independence.
On October 1, Spanish police injured more than 800 Catalan voters while they tried to cast their ballot in the independence referendum.
In the following days, senior EU officials appeared to condone Spanish police brutality against the Catalans in the unconstitutional referendum. Frans Timmermans, the EU Commission’s vice president, went as far as saying that the police had a right to use “proportionate force.”
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