The first draft of the EU’s Strategic Compass was presented two weeks ago, nearly two years since its initiation. The strategy aims to cement the foundations for a shared vision of EU defense and security that covers four interlinked areas: crisis management, resilience, partnership and capability development. It represents the most serious effort on the part of the EU to project Europe’s interests globally, including in its immediate neighborhood and periphery, the Middle East.
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EU member states such as Germany and France have long been involved in the region’s defense and security issues, including recent active roles in the Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh and in combating piracy in the Horn of Africa. The EU, on the other hand, has traditionally appeared uneasy about such a role. EU battle groups and rapid reaction forces have existed for a considerable amount of time, but previous attempts to deploy them failed due to a lack of consensus among member states at critical moments.
The Strategic Compass could effectively bypass the notoriously bureaucratic processes of the union, so that forces could be more easily deployed to regional hotspots during crises or maintain a regular land and maritime presence as strategic deterrence against adversaries. They could also take an active role in cooperating with allied countries such as Jordan.
The evolution of the EU role in this direction should not come as a surprise. Two of the top national security issues for Europe, terrorism and migration, are inextricably linked to the Middle East. Europe’s energy security is also becoming increasingly tied to the region, given the promising oil and gas findings in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Considering the region’s proximity, European strategists undoubtedly recognize the need for the union to expand the toolkit at its disposal when considering policy options in dealing with the region. Likewise, European strategists seem to recognize that the overreliance on the United States as the sole primary security actor in the region can no longer be taken for granted.
Though the transatlantic partnership has healed considerably under the Biden administration, the trends are here to stay: the US has formally ended the “war on terror” by withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq, and is pivoting to the Indo-Pacific region to focus on China. Brexit has only served to hasten the EU’s need for increased self-reliance on defense and security, what French President Emanuel Macron has regularly referred to as “strategic autonomy”.
The regional reaction to these developments is yet to be seen. Public opinion about the EU has been generally positive across the region, with support for the EU likely to be even stronger than that for individual member states. Accordingly, an enhanced European role in defense and security would in theory be welcomed by governments and not be seen as problematic by the general public.
It is yet unclear what shape this new role could assume. To begin with, it will likely focus on capacity building and joint training, intermixed with some short-term exchanges, deployments and port visits. A European rapid reaction force could also be deployed to hotspots across the region for short periods of time without getting entangled in regional conflicts. Such a force could have been deployed, for example, to Kabul to hold the airport until further evacuation flights could have taken place.
In many respects, the EU has been a security actor in the region for a long time, though it preferred, or has been restricted, to work on security issues indirectly, often using development as a proxy and while avoiding to deal with security and military institutions directly.
The fate of the Strategic Compass will not become clear until March of next year. Even then, translating this vision for greater strategic autonomy faces considerable obstacles. The high stakes for Europe will undoubtedly add impetus to its realization.
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