The EU is in a slow-moving identity collapse crisis. Disunity in the EU is growing more obvious each month and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is casting about for ways to rebuild a consensus without much luck. Last week she called on Turkey to step up as a strategic partner, but in the very same breath, included it in a list of enemies together with China and Russia.

In what is now widely seen as a gaffe, it was more of the half-in, half-out attitude to Turkey the EU has had since accepting it as an EU candidate country over 27 years ago. The EU wants Turkey in as it has the biggest army in Europe, is a major manufacturer, and has real pull in the south east of Europe extending into the Middle East. But the problem is that the elite in Brussels have never seen Turkey as particularly “European”. When she was Chancellor, Angela Merkel let slip that Turkey would “never join the EU.”

Now von der Leyen has made the same slip. Speaking at a gala dinner in Hamburg on April 19 to mark the 80th anniversary of the German newspaper Die Zeit, von der Leyen was making the case for EU enlargement as a geopolitical necessity. Then came the phrase that stopped diplomatic circles across three continents:

"We must succeed in completing the European continent so that it does not fall under Russian, Turkish, or Chinese influence," she said.

The grouping of Turkey — a Nato ally of 74 years, an EU candidate country since 1999, and the host of the alliance's next summit in July — alongside Russia and China as external threats to be countered made Turkey one of the EU’s enemies, not a partner.

With the Nato alliance in rapid decay, Brussels needs Turkey to be part of its Euro Nato to provide security from a mooted Russian invasion at a time when the Trump administration has threatened to take the US out of Nato on at least two occasions and no one has any confidence that the famed Article 5 collective security guarantee works anymore.

The reaction was immediate and damning. Turkish state media, led by the Anadolu Agency, picked up the story and slated von der Leyen. Turkish government spokesperson Ömer Çelik called the statement a "manifestation of visionlessness" that would trigger tension lines in the Balkans, adding that the EU's "entire political springs have run dry."

A survivor, von der Leyen quickly moved into damage control mode. A spokesperson issued a formal clarification, walking back the remarks, saying that "Turkey is unquestionably an important partner," stressing that von der Leyen's remarks were a recognition of Ankara's "geopolitical clout, size and ambitions" and not meant as a comparison with other countries. The spokesperson added that Turkey remains a key economic and political partner, particularly in strategic initiatives such as the Connectivity Agenda and the Trans-Caspian Middle Corridor.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a consummate player of international politics and chose silence over a formal retort. A Turkish official told Middle East Eye that "there will likely be no formal statement of criticism or condemnation since the Commission has released an official clarification," signalling Ankara showed little appetite for confrontation at this stage.

The episode might have passed as a diplomatic misstatement. What made it significant — and what elevates it beyond a single gaffe — is what happened simultaneously in Brussels.

Two officials, two visions

At almost the same moment von der Leyen was speaking in Hamburg, EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos was addressing the European Parliament with a radically different message. "We need Turkey in light of the changing geopolitical realities in Europe and the Middle East," Kos said. She described Turkey as the EU's fifth-largest trading partner, with bilateral trade volume twice as large as that with Mercosur or India, and called it "vital for trade routes between Europe and Asia."

Kos went further, telling the parliament that "Turkey will be needed for any peace arrangement for Ukraine, as we will face a new security environment in the Black Sea region," and outlined plans to develop new transport, energy and digital connections through Turkey and the South Caucasus. "Since 2022, trade volume along this route has quadrupled," she said.

Turkey has played an important role in the attempted ceasefire deals. It hosted the failed 2022 Istanbul peace deal that nearly brought the war to an end in the first month. It supervised the Black Sea Grain Initiative in the first year that reopened Ukraine’s maritime grain exports. It remains a major trade partner for all three of the EU, Russia and Ukraine. And Erdogan has repeatedly offered to host trilateral meetings between the US, Ukraine and Russia. Istanbul remains one of the few venues that would be acceptable to all three players, thanks to Erdogan’s cautious fence sitting between the warring parties and refusal to impose sanctions on Russia.

The contrast between von der Leyen and Kos’ comments could not have been more different, said Sinan Ülgen, a Senior Fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in a note on April 28. One top EU official had framed Turkey as a threat; another described it as an indispensable strategic partner on the same day.

The credibility cost

The episode is not merely an embarrassment but an indictment of the European Commission Doublethink when it comes to Turkey and foreign policy.

"The importance of consistency in foreign policy has rarely been demonstrated as vividly as when two top European Commission officials adopted radically different language on the EU's relationship with Turkey," Ülgen writes. "In foreign policy, the long-term effectiveness of a state actor in shaping the nature of its bilateral ties hinges on its credibility. And consistency is an essential component of credibility."

The damage, Ülgen argues, runs in both directions. "Constructive ambiguity has its place in international diplomacy. But publicly rehashing the geopolitical cleavages on Turkey goes further. It underlines a severe and detrimental lack of a cohesive vision." He warns that the inconsistency is not merely a communications failure but a strategic one: "Such egregious inconsistency should trigger a re-examination of how the EU can become a genuinely geopolitical actor."

The fractures within the EU are becoming more and more obvious. Former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was the lighting rod for much of the EU’s confusion, as a body, over its policy to Russia, but since then more and more dissenting voices are making themselves heard. De Belgium’s Prime Minister Bart De Wever refusal to sign off on the Reparation Loan for Ukraine in December and Greece and Malta’s ability to gut the twentieth sanctions package of its most painful anti-shadow fleet measures being the most recent examples. Moreover, government changes in Central Europe have just reinforced the growing Eurosceptic-lite that is taking root at the heart of the EU, which is more focused on national interests than European-wide well-being. Von der Leyen has called for the end of the unanimity rule to give the EC executive and big countries more direct power, but that is being resisted by the geographic core of the bloc and most of the small countries.

The consequences in Ankara are already visible. Chatham House member and senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management Timothy Ash, described the statement as "extraordinary," noting that Turkey remained "a loyal Nato ally" with soldiers helping defend Europe's borders and the capacity to fill gaps in European defence.

"Turkey has the largest land army in European Nato, a well-developed military industrial complex and particular specialism in drones. It is insane for von der Leyen to insult Turkey in such a way given Turkey surely should be integral to Europe's defence," he said as cited by Interfax.

Riccardo Gasco, foreign policy coordinator at the IstanPol think tank, said the remarks illustrated the EU's persistent internal duality. "This is why EU policy often appears inconsistent — strategic necessity is pushing for engagement, while political hesitation continues to hold it back." He described further distancing Turkey as "politically counterproductive and strategically shortsighted," Interfax reports.

The deeper history

Ülgen places von der Leyen’s Hamburg gaffe in a long history of EU ambivalence toward Turkey, led in particular by Germany which hosts a large population of Turkish immigrants politically charging the issue.

Formal accession negotiations began in 2005. In 2007, then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy reneged on the commitment to keep the door open, saying that "I do not think that Turkey has a place in Europe" and that the country's place was in "Asia Minor." Democratic backsliding in Turkey under Erdogan, combined with rising anti-enlargement sentiment across EU member states, has left Turkey in what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy described as the EU’s
“perennial waiting room.”

What has changed, Ülgen argues, is the strategic context — and it has changed in Turkey's favour. An upcoming Carnegie Europe paper ranks Turkey as the EU's sixth most critical European partner in terms of contributions to economic security, just below Japan and ahead of the US. As a Nato ally, Turkey's defence industrial base — including its advanced drone manufacturing capability — could be key for von der Leyen’s €800bn ReArm programme to modernise Europe’s military and reduce dependence on American military hardware. Turkey's geography also moved it closer to the centre of the new geopolitical centre of gravity as the wars in both Ukraine and the Middle East unfold. Erdogan has heft in the Middle East, Caucasus and Central Asia in a way that Brussels does not. Turkey has suddenly found itself at the centre of a nexus of the energy and logistics corridors that hook Europe and Asia at a time when the EU is urgently trying to wean itself off its addiction to Russian commodities.

Brussels’ ambivalence to Turkey could now backfire. The timing of von der Leyen's remarks will only fuel calls by the Turkish Nationalist Movement Party, a key Erdogan ally, for a "Russia-China-Turkey" axis to counter Western economic pressure – further signs of the fragmentation of unity in the EU, which is now spreading to its nearby neighbours.

Analysts suggested von der Leyen's grouping may have been a direct, if clumsy, response to Ankara’s flirtations with the Eurasian Economic Union (EUU) that Russian President Vladimir Putin is championing in cooperation with China as a new geopolitical bloc in what has traditionally been Europe’s stamping ground. If so, von der Leyen's challenge was counterproductive: the remarks may have inadvertently pushed one of the bloc's most important, albeit difficult, partners further into the arms of the very rivals she seeks to counter.

In general, western diplomacy has made one strategic blunder after another. The refusal to guarantee no-Nato membership for Ukraine and 2022 extreme sanctions following Putin’s invasion have pushed Moscow into Beijing’s arms, an alliance that the West clearly should have avoided at all costs, and did throughout the Cold War. In the meantime, US President Donald Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs have pushed more leading Global South members into the BRICS+ camp and China’s reputation in particular has soared amongst the developed world nations as a more reliable partner than the US. Von der Leyen’s gaffe will only add to the momentum, by pushing Ankara closer to the EEU and possible BRICS membership.

The Ankara summit in the room

The diplomatic fallout arrives at a particularly awkward moment. What could be the last Nato summit for a while is scheduled for Ankara on July 7-8 and will bring European leaders to Turkish soil at a time when Brussels has just officially, if inadvertently, framed Ankara as a geopolitical rival. A major theme of the summit will be arming Western allies to face Iranian, Russian and Chinese military threats – and bizarrely von der Leyen has just added Turkey to that list, while at the same time relying on Turkey’s military as a Nato member, to boost European security.

Von der Leyen's Commission clarification may have been enough for a diplomatic salve to counter Ankara’s irritation, but whether it has repaired the deeper damage is a different question.

Winston Churchill said in 1952 that "it is better to be both right and consistent. But if you have to choose — you must choose to be right." The EU, Ülgen argues, has been neither in its handling of Turkey. "Being right requires cogency: cogency between the union's aspirations to transform itself into an effective geopolitical actor and the terms of its engagement with a candidate country that, in many ways, already is one."