This article was first published on 10 March 2026 on Kirsty Hughes’s substack at https://kirstyhughes.substack.com/p/the-european-union-and-the-uk-amidst?.
By Kirsty Hughes
Yesterday, France’s President Macron was aboard the French aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle – and before that visited Cyprus. In Cyprus, he met Greek Cypriot and Greek leaders, President Nikos Christodoulides and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and asserted that “When Cyprus is attacked, then Europe is attacked.” Around a dozen French naval vessels are being deployed to the Mediterranean and might (or not) be used ‘defensively’ (that favourite European word of the moment) in the Strait of Hormuz.
President Macron is, of course, a lame duck president – he cannot stand in next year’s presidential election, he faces challenges from local elections due in the coming couple of weeks, and France faces a simmering, chronic political crisis. Still, compared to the UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, Macron looks rather strategically and assertively placed amidst the US-Israel chaotic, goalless, widely destructive and destabilising war against Iran and, too, against Lebanon.
In the UK, to some embarrassment, the HMS Dragon, Royal Navy destroyer, has only just at the end of today (Tuesday 10 March) left on its deployment to Cyprus. Since the UK base in Cyprus was attacked by drone, possibly from Hezbollah, there have been local protests there against the UK having two bases on the island. Starmer, should he have thought to visit like Macron, might have concluded he wouldn’t be so welcome. Importantly, too, the reason Macron visited Cyprus so rapidly is that Cyprus (albeit divided still) is an EU member state. The EU is rallying round to say they will defend Cyprus as a fellow EU state – not so much concern is visible for the airbases of a non-EU state, the UK.
There has been some minimal coordination between the UK, France and Germany. A week ago they issued a joint statement saying they would potentially take defensive action to protect their interests and allies in the context of the Iran war. But their positioning since then has, to varying degrees diverged, and the EU itself is somewhat fractured on responding to this conflict too – though nothing like as split as it was over the Iraq war in 2003 (France and Germany staying out of that conflict was welcome, so an EU split, with Tony Blair and the UK backing George Bush, was a preferable outcome).
EU Differences over the War against Iran
France has been both active and cautious since Trump and Netanyahu launched their illegal war. A week ago, Macron said that the war did not fall within international law – similar, in that way, to Starmer’s statement. But Macron has allowed the use of the Istres airbase in France for US aircraft providing operational but not combat support. Meanwhile, Starmer has allowed bases to be used for US aircraft carrying out ‘defensive’ attacks on Iranian missile launchers and bases – here the line between active support and defensive seems rather more blurred.
Meanwhile, German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has allowed the US Ramstein base in Germany to be used as the core control hub for the US’s operations. Merz has chosen not to comment on the legality of the war. And, when he met Trump in Washington last week, Merz failed to defend Spain’s government in any way when Trump chose to attack it in Merz’s presence for failing to allow US planes to use airbases in Spain for this war.
Politico reports Spain’s deputy Prime Minister, Yoland Díaz, as saying, just yesterday, “What Europe needs today is leadership, not vassals who pay homage to Trump.” Trump’s threat to place a trade embargo on Spain resulted in other key EU leaders rapidly defending a fellow EU member state – from Macron to European Council President, António Costa, to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
So, the EU is rather lacking a wider common front. Pedro Sánchez, as Spain’s Prime Minister, and President Macron, have looked clearer and more confident and kept away from any substantive involvement in hostilities (up to now at least depending on how France’s naval mission develops).
Von der Leyen has, more broadly, been rather hawkish and relatively supportive to the US and Israel. This has ruffled many feathers in EU capitals, not least as she is stepping beyond her remit as Commission President in many ways. It is more for Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy supremo, to represent the EU (if there is a common position) and it is not for either her or von der Leyen to take EU positions without fully consulting member states.
An Unstable World
President Trump’s pronouncements on the war keep shifting – it might end soon or perhaps not that soon. The real winners, for now, out of this destabilising conflict look like being firstly, Israel (from its point of view), carrying on its forever wars in all directions (with Human Rights Watch reporting the use of white phosphorus in Lebanon) and Russia – as attention once again shifts away from Ukraine. Israel has allowed a trickle more aid into Gaza but the spotlight is not on the dire situation there either. Yet, the UK and Germany – as well as the US, Israel’s partner in war – are still supplying arms to Israel.
Nor is the EU rising to the moment of the wider geopolitical instability to push forward an acceptable peace deal for Ukraine. In the last week, the European Commission’s idea that Ukraine might be brought into the EU as a partial member state as soon as 2027 – President Zelensky’s demand – was shot down by a number of EU ambassadors in a key, albeit informal meeting. Iceland’s slow moves to re-open EU accession talks, with a referendum only on doing that (not yet on rejoining) now possibly taking place in August, represents a slower and cautious approach to EU accession and fits with the bureaucratic EU politics of enlargement – taking rapid, highly political and strategic enlargement decisions remains beyond the EU’s comfort zone.
At G7 level, France, Germany, Italy and the UK – alongside the US, Japan and Canada – have been coordinating on potentially releasing emergency oil stocks, in case the accelerating oil price increase of the last week continues, with stagflation a real and very serious threat. President’s Trump’s announcements that the war has been won but not yet won quite enough pushed that price back down a little. But the economic, political, stability, environmental, migration and other impacts of this foolhardy war will be substantial whenever it ends.
Other states are trying to adapt. Canada’s Prime Minister has been in Australia talking up strategic partnership. But like the UK, Canada is in a relatively more isolated position compared to the broad, multi-layered relations amongst (most of) the EU27.
And now?
The focus, for now, is inevitably on the US and Israeli attacks on Iran, and on Lebanon, and when the conflict may end and what state the Middle East will then be in, as well as wider geopolitics and geoeconomics. And whenever the war against Iran ends, there will also then be a question of where Trump, with his apparently increasing predilection for conflict, will focus next – might it be Cuba, or somewhere else.
What this deliberately-created geopolitical mayhem ensures is that Trump’s destruction of democracy in the US is not the main focus of its erstwhile, and nervous, western allies. And whether it may, as some US commentators have suggested, provide a reason, or one reason amongst others for Trump to suspend the autumn mid-terms, time will tell. And it also takes political attention away from the deep need for a renewal of democracy in different European countries, including in the UK, and for an effective demolition of the various far-right parties in different European states.
Living in a perma-crisis, created by Trump’s US, requires clear-sighted, political and strategic leadership and serious, widespread political debate and participation. That is today’s challenge for European states – some may manage it more effectively than others. But all must keep it as their goal.
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