In the morning on March 17, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, was still entertaining the idea of helping the US to unblock the strait of Hormuz. An initial cheerleader for Donald Trump’s war in Iran, she was desperately trying to marry Trump’s war in Iran with her own pet project - defeating Russia in Ukraine.

Talking to reporters on the eve of EU’s Foreign Affairs Council, she said that the Hormuz operation could involve the Aspides, the European naval currently deployed off the Yemeni coast to tackle the Houthis. She added that it could be somehow modelled on Ukraine’s sea corridor for grain exports - a weird proposition, given that the latter relies on the vessels sticking to the territorial waters of NATO countries, Bulgaria and Romania, which Russia would not attack. She also mentioned that she spoke to UN Secretary General António Guterres in this context, suggesting that she wanted to seek a UN mandate for this operation - another strange proposition, since it requires Russia and China to be on board.

Her remarks sounded like outlandish improvisation in a dire situation when Trump’s war badly undermined EU’s current agenda of prolonging war in Ukraine until some black swan event or divine intervention compels Vladimir Putin to end his aggression without achieving his goal of turning Ukraine into a neutral and demilitarised buffer state.

Reacting to Kallas’ statement, Russian envoy for Ukraine settlement Kirill Dmitriyev couldn’t suppress his sarcasm. “We are holding our breath for breakthrough, intelligent solutions to emerge from this pivotal meeting”, he wrote on X.

He was right to expect that Kallas would fail to convince national foreign policy chiefs to sign up for Trump’s ill-thought military adventure in some shape or form. The ministers threw all of her ideas out of the window. That led to something few people could envisage just a few weeks ago - Kallas turning on the US and attacking Trump administration for its reckless moves. A notoriously unreflective Atlanticist, Kallas has always been the most unlikely critic of American belligerence. Her change of tack manifests a major tectonic shift in Trans-Atlantic relations.

Between Two Fires

EU’s crisis of loyalty has been in the making for at least a decade. Ever since Donald Trump was elected for the first time in 2016 and his Democratic rivals blamed his win on Russian interference, the union has been stuck between two brands of populism, both primarily of American origin.

One is the unhinged far right populism embodied by the figure of Donald Trump. Another one is the more complex and diverse, albeit equally unhinged, populism of neoliberal and neoconservative interventionists. Both rival camps are using the same political technology of exploiting wedge issues, promoting conflict and xenophobia, but - due to their rivalry - they have a different set of pet boogeymen. For Trumpists, it is Iranians and Muslims at large, Venezuelans and Cubans, Latin American migrants, you name it.

For the opposite camp, it is of course the Russians. As soon as Joe Biden took over the White House in 2021, the de-facto ceasefire achieved by Ukraine and Russia as a result of the 2019 Paris summit was immediately derailed and the buildup towards full-out conflict began. Ukraine and the US-led West embarked on crossing each of Putin’s red lines - from clamping down on his allies in Ukraine to a provocative freedom of navigation mission of the British destroyer HMS Defender in the summer of 2021.

The fact that each of the rival American camps has its own preferred conflicts generates a fundamental pattern: These conflicts eventually come into conflict with each other, resulting in a conflict of conflicts. This is exactly what happened with the wars in Iran and Ukraine. This is why people like Kallas, whose prime political instinct is to go with anything the Americans wish, are currently compelled to chose between two US-driven military projects that are just not compatible with each other in real life.

While at the start of Trump’s attack on Iran, Kallas and the least intelligent part of the Atlanticist crowd hailed it as something that annihilates a “Russian ally” and “weakens Russia”, it soon became apparent that Moscow is emerging as one of the conflict’s main beneficiaries - what with the higher oil prices, the partial lifting of American sanctions against Russian oil and the depletion of weapons stockpiles which Ukraine could previously count on in its defensive war.

The American Barricade

The epoch of American-centric globalisation in the last few decades has at least partially transformed European politics into the extension of American - with American culture wars, wedge issues and the main political barricade being emulated at the national level in Europe. EU’s political leadership tended to ally with the more ideologically proximate neolib-neocon camp, building their foreign policy along the lines of advice produced by unashamedly warmongering DC think tanks like Atlantic Council and CEPA.

Trump’s MAGA movement was naturally allied with the anti-establishment far right opposition in Europe, like Germany’s AfD and the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. In its second reincarnation, Trump’s administration embarked began interfering in the European domestic politics on the side of these forces.

Its visible affinity with Vladimir Putin also comes naturally. Geopolitics aside, Putin largely emulates the same far right (aka “conservative”, as its flag-bearers like to call it) agenda that now engulfs much of Eastern Europe. His “traditional values” ideology is American import, complete with a founding Fox News producer who set the main TV channel promoting Bible Belt-like Christian fundamentalism, with an Orthodox and Russian nationalist twist, the Tsargrad.

But the main reason is that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Putin’s full-out aggression in Ukraine is “Biden’s war”, according to Trump who also claimed - rightly, perhaps - that it simply wouldn’t have happened on his watch.

It has never been the choice of the continental Europe either, apart from some rabidly Russophobic ultra-nationalist forces in the east, often nurtured by North American diasporas. Europe was gradually steered into it through its complacency and subservience to American, as well as British, lobbyism.

It started with Clinton administration opting for a model of NATO expansion that explicitly excluded Russia and was clearly aimed at its isolation. The US historian Mary Sarotte brilliantly described in her book Not One Inch how middle-ranking Clinton staffers were instrumental in making it happen, despite massive opposition and for purely selfish reasons. As critics of that model warned at the time, it resulted in Russian securocratic milieu prevailing over pro-Western liberals and embarking on building a stringent authoritarian system that we now know as Putinism.

It proceeded with the geopolitical rivalry between Russian and Anglo-American companies over pipeline projects for gas exports into the EU in the early 2000s. That rivalry led to confrontation over Ukraine which surfaced during the Orange Revolution in 2004. The entire achievement of bringing Russia in from the cold after 70 years of communist rule, an endeavour that better generations of Western politicians can take credit for, was finally ruined at the 2008 NATO’s Bucharest summit when president George Bush Jr. persisted in opening the path for Ukraine’s and Georgia’s membership in the alliance.

A few years earlier, Putin was the first foreign leader to phone Bush after 9/11 and he had provided crucial logistical support for NATO’s operation in Afghanistan, which involved the use of Russian military bases. But Bucharest summit put Russia and the US-led West on the collision course.

A Union on its Own

Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and war crimes committed by the Russian army can never be excused, but the truth is this war has always been preventable or could have been cut short at different points in time - when far right militants derailed Maidan agreements in February 2014, within the Minsk framework, after Paris talks - when the armed conflict simply fizzled, at Istanbul talks in 2022 and later during “Milley’s window of opportunity” - when the Ukrainian counter-offensive peaked at the end of 2022. The destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline - an ostensibly Ukrainian operation with no other beneficiary than American LNG companies - was another key point of counter-productive escalation as far as European, not to mention Ukrainian, interests go.

If Trump’s Iran war was an instant moral and military failure - Iran is nowhere near to surrender or change the regime - the attempt to undo Russia by sacrificing Ukraine was a slow-motion debacle. It may have taken decades, but the result is clearly the opposite to the intended and far worse than the one in Iran. At the end of the day, there is a much more stable authoritarian regime that’s anything but isolated in the modern world, a powerful army with an experience in modern warfare that’s unparalleled to that of Western armies, lots of cutting-edge military technology tested in the fired the West now needs to compete with.

The policy of deliberate alienation resulted in a major nuclear country, once ripe for fully-fledged integration with the West, turning into a larger-than-life anti-Western Frankenstein. It also resulted in massive and pointless devastation of Ukraine for which Ukrainians will keep blaming not only Russia, but also their Western allies for decades to come. For the EU itself, the loss of cheap Russian energy meant massive economic damage and a long-term impact on its competitiveness with the US and China.

Although few will talk about it openly, it is the realisation of this failure which must have contributed to EU members’ much firmer and better articulated refusal to accept America’s latest war. It is also the fear of opposition. Today, the rejection of conflict-mongering is no longer the realm of East European geopolitical dissidents, like Hungary’s Orban and Slovakia’s Fico. It also easily transcends the left-right divide.

Spain’s left-wing prime minister Pedro Sanchéz has become the strongest voice of principled opposition to Trump’s Iran war. Belgian prime minister Bart de Wever has emerged as the voice of reason and common sense on the issue of Ukraine. Europe is hopefully beginning to transform from an willing absorbent (and often victim) of American neolib/neocon belligerence into an entity that has a distinct political identity based on adherence to universal values and on a much better understanding of its own geopolitical interests.

After all the avoidable damage brought by the war in Ukraine, the choice regarding the war in Iran - which sent fuel prices across Europe soaring - was a no-brainer. Even so, for people like Kallas, or German chancellor Merz, the initial instinct was to support Trump in what was a clearly illegal and counter-productive aggression from the outset. But even they had to succumb to reality. Europe’s interests can not be fully aligned with those of the US in its current unruly and turbulent form. The pain of separation appears to be inevitable.