The traditional world order is rapidly crumbling under mounting violations of international law and the European Union must adapt to this new age of chaos and coercion, Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas warned on Monday in back-to-back speeches.
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Their interventions come as the United States and Israel continue their strikes on Iran, a campaign that has upended the balance of power in the Middle East, thrown global energy markets into disarray and driven a wedge between Western allies.
The conflict has also raised questions on whether von der Leyen’s active diplomatic outreach is encroaching upon Kallas’s role.
“Europe can no longer be a custodian for the old-world order, for a world that has gone and will not return,” the president of the European Commission said on Monday morning, addressing the annual conference of EU ambassadors in Brussels.
“We will always defend and uphold the rules-based system that we helped to build with our allies, but we can no longer rely on it as the only way to defend our interests or assume its rules will shelter us from the complex threats that we face.”
Von der Leyen argued that, “in times of radical change”, the EU faces a binary option between clinging to well-known “habits and certainties” or crafting a “different destiny”.
“We can build a foreign policy that makes us stronger at home, more influential globally and a better partner to countries around the world,” she said.
“A foreign policy that is a core pillar of European independence, that protects our interests and advances our values. Not with nostalgia, or by mourning the old world, but by shaping the new one.”
Speaking after von der Leyen, High Representative Kaja Kallas pointed the finger at Russia’s decision to launch the full-scale invasion of Ukraine four years ago as the cataclysm that precipitated the “erosion of international law” seen today and enabled the return of what she described as “coercive power politics”.
“That (invasion) did not go unnoticed. Instead, it sent a signal around the world that there is no more accountability for one’s actions: the rulebook has been thrown out of the window,” Kallas told ambassadors.
“Without restoring international law, together with accountability, we are doomed to see repeated violations of the law, disruption and chaos.”
Notably, neither von der Leyen nor Kallas explicitly condemned the American-Israeli strikes on Iran as a legal breach. Instead, von der Leyen said the EU should move beyond analyses and address “the reality of the situation” and “the world as it actually is”.
The burden of unanimity
Monday’s conference of ambassadors coincides with a profound reckoning for the bloc’s foreign policy.
In their wide-ranging speeches, von der Leyen and Kallas agreed that the EU should, on the one hand, substantially ramp up its defence and deterrence capabilities, and, on the other hand, expand its network of trade deals and security agreements to remove any vulnerable dependencies that its adversaries might try to exploit.
The potential for new partnerships is high, they said, as mid-size countries search for stability and cooperation to cope with an increasingly hostile environment.
“Like us, they have learned that dependencies make us weak and give undue leverage to those who seek to carve the world into spheres of influence,” Kallas said.
“And like us, they understand that a rules-based international order is vital to avoid the inevitable anarchy and suffering that would come from this.”
Von der Leyen added another key priority on which the EU should focus to reinforce its geopolitical clout: its internal decision-making rules.
Under the EU treaties, the bloc’s foreign policy is strictly bound by unanimity, which means the 27 member states must agree on a common line of action before moving forward. This means individual vetoes extremely powerful, as a result making the EU seem divided, hesitant or even paralysed on the global stage.
Brussels is currently struggling with Hungary’s last-minute veto on the €90 billion loan that EU leaders agreed to provide Ukraine. Once again, von der Leyen vowed to break the deadlock on the loan, which, she said, has put the EU’s credibility “at stake”.
“We need a clear-eyed and hard look at our foreign policy in today’s world, both in how it is designed and how it is deployed. We urgently need to reflect on whether our doctrine, our institutions and our decision making, all designed in a postwar world of stability and multilateralism, have kept pace with the speed of change around us,” she said on Monday.
“If we believe, as I do, that we need a more realistic and interest-driven foreign policy, then we need to be able to deliver on it.”
Still, von der Leyen admitted that, no matter how much the bloc reforms itself, invests in deterrence and diversifies its partners, there will always be limits to its ambitions.
“We have to be honest that we cannot solve every global issue or perfectly reconcile our values and our interests on each occasion,” she said. “But what we can control is what guides our foreign policy, and how we choose to conduct it.”
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