Iran crisis puts EU foreign policy turf war back in spotlight

BRUSSELS — The EU’s response to U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran has laid bare familiar divisions at the top, with two of its most senior officials on a collision course over who coordinates the bloc’s reaction to the crisis.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, as smoke rose over Tehran, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa raced to set the tone of the response with a joint statement calling for “maximum restraint.” But they were beaten to it by the EU’s foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas — who had published a solo missive half an hour earlier saying she was exploring diplomatic solutions.

Kallas and von der Leyen didn’t speak to each other directly this weekend, one official said, despite the flurry of diplomatic activity and the scramble to take a united line. That sort of disconnect is symptomatic of the relationship between the EU’s executive and its foreign policy arm, said a further five diplomats and officials involved in the behind-the-scenes efforts to get on top of the fast-moving events.

“The rivalry between Kaja Kallas and Ursula von der Leyen is evident,” Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, liberal chair of the European Parliament’s defense and security committee, told POLITICO. “It reflects a division of competences in European foreign policy that is not always clearly balanced.”

The clash underscores a broader problem for the EU at a time of overlapping crises, from Russia’s war in Ukraine to fresh turmoil in the Middle East. As the bloc seeks to stay aligned with Washington and project transatlantic unity, institutional infighting in Brussels has complicated efforts to be a credible geopolitical actor.

“The only way the EU can have relevance in this crisis is when we stay united,” said one EU official, granted anonymity like others in this story to speak freely about the sensitive diplomacy. “This is constant in terms of their dynamic,” said another of the fragmentation, with a third saying it is “no secret and nothing new” that von der Leyen and her team of commissioners are content “to sideline Kallas.”

Questions of protocol and portfolio have become a defining issue for the bloc, said an EU diplomat involved in Sunday’s meeting of foreign ministers. “The Brussels bubble is focused on who should speak — and on what legal basis.”

Historically, international relations have been the remit of whoever has held Kallas’ role as high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, and she and her European External Action Service (EEAS) — the EU’s diplomatic arm — have a mandate that exists separately from that of von der Leyen. But with geopolitics increasingly impacting the EU’s basic functions, the Commission president and her team are playing an ever more central role.

“Emergencies, aid, support for our nationals, consequences for supply chains, airspace closures, any potential increase in migration, cyber, competency over potential Iranian sleeper cells — all these things are [coordinated] by the European Commission,” said a fourth official.

While it is Kallas’ prerogative to deal with diplomats, the official said, the Foreign Affairs Council held Sunday failed to produce a clear consensus, so it’s now up to von der Leyen’s Commission to work out how to move forward. Talk of a personal split between the two is just “a media cliché of two women not getting on,” the official added.

Representatives for von der Leyen and Kallas declined to comment.

Von der Leyen to the fore

As violence spiraled in the Middle East over the weekend, with Iran launching counterattacks against U.S. bases in the Gulf, the Commission president raced to spearhead the EU’s response — firing off statements, calling regional leaders and projecting a message that she was in charge. In just 48 hours she posted 10 times on X, a burst of digital diplomacy that contrasted sharply with her more reticent handling of other recent crises, including the unrest in Venezuela earlier this year, when she stressed she was coordinating with Kallas.

Ursula von der Leyen and her chief of staff, Bjoern Seibert, who on Saturday reached out to the teams of top commissioners to inform them of a decision to convene a Monday “Security College” meeting. | Martin Bertrand/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

On Saturday, while Kallas was trying to drive discussion forward at the foreign-minister level by convening a Foreign Affairs Council for emergency talks the following day, the Commission chief’s powerful chief of staff, Bjoern Seibert, reached out to the teams of top commissioners to inform them of a decision to convene a Monday “Security College” meeting to coordinate a logistical and practical response.

Established at the start of von der Leyen’s second mandate, the body has primarily served to signal political priorities rather than exercise operational crisis-management powers. But that is changing.

Since last year, von der Leyen has pushed to strengthen the Commission’s hand in foreign policy, notably through the creation of a Directorate-General for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf (DG MENA) under Commissioner Dubravka Šuica. The move was widely interpreted in Brussels as an effort to draw influence from the EEAS toward the Berlaymont. 

A Commission official told POLITICO that DG MENA is expected to take a “central” role in the discussion concerning Iran and any implementation of the EU’s strategy on the Middle East, as the Gulf countries and Iran are in its portfolio. 

But some lawmakers have pushed back against the Commission’s assumption of a more active role. “The EU has a high representative and she should rather be supported in doing her job,” said Dan Barna, a lawmaker from Renew, the centrist party in von der Leyen’s own coalition, and a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

The EEAS has consistently opposed any transfers of power away from its specialist teams, and Kallas’ frustration with the Commission is well documented. The former Estonian prime minister strongly opposed a push to set up an intelligence cell under von der Leyen’s remit, and riled colleagues by trying to bring back controversial political operator Martin Selmayr in a top role. Several EU officials described the move at the time as an attempt to give Kallas the same kind of political heft von der Leyen has in Seibert.

“We need to decide whether we want an institutional change — whether we want to give more foreign policy functions to the Commission,” Nacho Sánchez Amor, the Socialists’ lead EU lawmaker in the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, told POLITICO. “Our partners around the world are right — they often don’t know whom to address.”