Diplomacy is full of quips so brutal they can haunt generations of diplomats. For the Foreign Office, the words that still sting are those of Dean Acheson, that harsh Cold War US Secretary of State, who unforgettably said — and this was in 1962 — “Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role.” And for the European Commission, the assessment that still haunts them was from Mark Eyskens, the Belgian one-time prime and foreign minister — practically a neighbour — who said, “Europe was an economic giant, a political dwarf and a military worm.” He said that in 1991. And, unfortunately, that’s exactly what Europe looks like over Gaza.
It would be bad enough if the European Union only looked irrelevant over the war. In fact it’s worse than that as, while Acheson’s successor as the United States diplomat-in-chief, Antony Blinken, has been engaged in shuttle diplomacy, and Mohammed Bin Salman, the ruler of Saudi Arabia, has been phoning everyone he can urging de-escalation, the European Union managed to trip over itself and end up in a massive squabble over what its actual foreign policy should be towards Israel-Palestine. At a moment when senior officials across the Middle East and beyond are worried about a regional war the EU looks like a self-squabbling dwarf.
