What a year it has already been. The first three months of 2026 have seen a decade’s worth of shocks to the European security and global orders. With U.S. President Donald J. Trump pivoting away from scepticism about foreign entanglements toward the open embrace of armed intervention, Washington’s European allies must confront the consequences of U.S. military adventures undertaken without their input, by a White House indifferent to their interests and largely dismissive of international norms.

The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran is at the core of the chaos Europeans are facing right now, but this crisis arrived in steps. Indeed, the beginning of 2026 has offered more or less a textbook example of what a slippery slope looks like when it comes to degradation of the international rule of law, with much of the world scurrying to react to an ever more emboldened Trump administration. 

It started on 3 January with a U.S. raid to remove Venezuela’s head of state, Nicolás Maduro, and bring him to the United States to face criminal charges in a New York court. Most European governments were uncomfortable with the Trump administration’s dubious legal justification for the action, but Maduro was sufficiently disliked, Trump’s potential retaliation against critics sufficiently feared and the U.S. operation sufficiently surgical (it left the government in place under Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president), that most of them offered only faint protest. 

Instead of rewarding their forbearance, Trump pivoted almost immediately from Caracas to Nuuk – voicing annexationist ambitions for Greenland that Denmark (which has sovereignty over the island) took seriously enough that it began putting in place elements of an armed defence even as it tried to talk Washington down. EU member states fended off U.S. pressure by rallying around Denmark and Greenland, meeting its threats with counter-threats of economic retaliation and rattling the markets, which in turn unnerved Trump. But the episode only widened the transatlantic rift, making clear to U.S. allies across Europe that relations with Washington were doomed (at least for the remainder of the Trump presidency) to lurch from crisis to crisis.

Then, on 28 February, the slide got steeper. The U.S. and Israel launched a coordinated attack on Iran, killing the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, eliminating other senior regime officials, degrading its defence industry and taking out much of its military capability. The U.S.-Israeli campaign was not exactly a surprise to anyone – President Trump had been intimating that he might attack Iran ever since the regime brutally cracked down on popular protests that shook the country over the winter, and the U.S. had spent weeks amassing a huge naval force in the region. Yet the onset of hostilities still jolted European leaders: from their perspective, the U.S. had rushed into a war with enormous implications for their security and prosperity without any consultation with NATO allies, a clear sense of objectives or a discernible exit strategy – much less a meaningful effort to reconcile its actions with international law regulating the use of force.  

It has been rough going. Perhaps Trump expected a reprise of the June 2025 twelve-day war, in which the U.S. played a brief but substantial role before declaring the conflict over a few days later, or the lightning-fast Maduro raid. But Iran had broadcast that, as Trump was talking of regime change, this time would be different – warning that renewed attacks would result in a “regional war”, spreading out the pain to hurt U.S. Gulf Arab partners and, by extension, the global economy. As the pain sharpened, Trump has on several occasions suggested that he would like to cut a deal with a regime insider, as he did with Rodríguez, and bring an end to the war. But since the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the campaign’s opening act, the regime has appeared more inclined to close ranks than to offer concessions.

Thus, more than three weeks into a war whose footprint continues to grow, Trump finds himself hopscotching between escalatory and de-escalatory postures – making declarations of near victory that focus on the success of the campaign (or “excursion” as he has called it) at degrading Iranian capabilities; importuning NATO allies and others to help the U.S. reopen the Strait of Hormuz; lambasting them as “cowards” when they refuse; and threatening to attack power plants and perhaps even put U.S. boots on the ground to commandeer Kharg Island (a key node in Iran’s energy export apparatus) in endeavours to secure the Strait or Iran’s stockpiles of highly enriched uranium. In the latest twist, Trump has been touting the possibility of diplomacy with Tehran, postponing the threatened strike against Iranian energy infrastructure, even as the U.S. dispatches additional forces to the region. On 24 March, he asserted that Tehran had given the U.S. a “gift” that was “oil and gas related”. Details, however, remain unclear as the Islamic Republic maintains the U.S. and Israeli-linked vessels may not traverse the Strait of Hormuz, and overall traffic through the chokepoint remains depressed.

Meanwhile, the EU, member states and other NATO allies have been left scrambling to protect their interests however they can. At the most basic level, they have had to find ways to safeguard tens of thousands of stranded European nationals and defend their troops and assets – some of which have come under Iranian attack both in the Middle East and farther afield. But that is just for starters.

There are economic worries. High energy prices caused by the war and Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz (through which roughly one fifth of the world’s oil is shipped in normal times) are hitting fragile European economies hard. Several European states got a substantial portion of their liquid natural gas from Qatar in 2025 – in Italy’s case, it was 30 per cent – and Qatari authorities are now declaring that it will take up to five years to repair the damage done to its gas facilities during the war. EU member states tend to be more exposed to these price hikes than the EU’s top economic competitors. The U.S. is a net exporter of petroleum. China has significant reserves, and it appears to have negotiated the safe passage of some ships through the strait with Tehran. 

Then there is the humanitarian angle. Beyond concern for the desperate straits of civilians caught in the crossfire, many European leaders fear a greater displacement crisis sending high numbers of migrants and refugees toward their countries’ borders. They worry that, as happened during the Syrian refugee crisis in the 2010s, large numbers of displaced seeking safety in Europe could roil domestic politics, particularly given the gains by the anti-immigration far right in several EU member states.

Security is also a major concern – first and foremost the new war’s implications for Ukraine, which has just entered its fifth year of fighting off Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion. Most EU leaders fear that high energy prices, as well as a U.S. decision to temporarily lift sanctions on Russian oil in an effort to stabilise energy markets, will help Moscow finance its Ukraine war and ease the effects of European economic pressure on Russia. The new Middle East war also appears to be absorbing key military supplies (particularly Patriot air defence interceptors) that could otherwise have been purchased by NATO allies and provided to Kyiv, whose stocks risk running perilously low in the months to come. Meanwhile, U.S.-brokered talks between Moscow and Kyiv – already stuck before the U.S.-Israeli campaign began – are seeming even more so as Washington fixes it gaze on the Middle East. Beyond Ukraine, Europeans worry too about the threat to regional and global stability that an aggrieved Iranian regime might pose in the conflict’s aftermath. 

Finally, there are issues of principle. At the very core of the post-World War II international legal order, which the EU has vocally championed, is a prohibition – enshrined, among other places in the UN Charter, – of waging non-defensive war. Though never perfectly observed, the principle has helped define international relations by narrowing the range of options that states normally weigh when considering how to pursue their interests, as well as by creating political and reputational costs for aggressors. EU member states have traditionally seen their interests as deeply intertwined with this norm. But, at least in the opening days of the Middle East conflict, most of them (with the notable exception of Spain) were reluctant to censure Washington for attacking Iran without a serious effort to offer a legal justification. One can imagine that this reticence (mirrored widely around the world) reflected anger at the repressive regime in Tehran or anxiety that criticism of a prickly White House could jeopardise the U.S. security umbrella or cause Trump to wind down U.S. arms sales and intelligence support for Ukraine. Yet deference to norm-busting has a cost. State practice shapes international law, and the failure of states to stand by its principles when under pressure risks their further erosion, which can only make the world a more dangerous place. 

As the EU and member states try to manage their exposure to the new Middle East war and begin work on a new security strategy, as announced by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, to help them get through future crises, EU governments are in an undeniably tough spot. No playbook exists for how to mitigate the costs of a war started by a revisionist superpower that is also Europe’s most important security partner. For the most part, it is an exercise in needle threading – trying to keep NATO out of the war, while trying to keep the U.S. in NATO; providing support to Gulf partners under Iranian attack; and looking for ways to help bring the war to an end sooner than appears likely at present.

How to do that in practice? For the most part, Washington’s European allies, after struggling to get their bearings, appear to be on the right path. They have deflected President Trump’s pressure to escalate the conflict by joining it, telling the White House that NATO has no role in reopening the Strait of Hormuz because it is a defensive alliance. (Some, like France, have entertained the prospect of participating in a post-conflict naval coalition.) That said, as a practical matter, bilateral basing and other arrangements, and a desire to avoid a NATO rupture, mean that the U.S. has reportedly used bases on European allies’ territory for a range of operations relating to the war, with Spain an outlier in wholly denying access. 

As for diplomacy, it seems unlikely that either the U.S., Israel or Iran would welcome European mediation when it comes to ending the conflict, but there may be space for indirect efforts to nudge potential peacemakers toward brokering an immediate mutual ceasefire – which, as Crisis Group has argued elsewhere, is the best among messy options for ending hostilities and setting the stage for diplomacy to pursue a more durable peace. The most promising candidates for this job are likely the same Middle Eastern and other Muslim leaders who persuaded Trump to strong-arm Israel into a Gaza ceasefire in September 2025. Under fire from Iran, some of the Gulf Arab capitals will likely resist entreaties to try to end the war in a way that would not leave Iranian arsenals further degraded, but they should surely also consider the risks of continuing the escalatory spiral. European states with strong regional channels might explore whether the Gulf capitals could support or at least not oppose Pakistan’s effort to broker talks (as some already appear to be doing) – or throw their weight behind any other viable format that might emerge. Other countries with influence over Tehran, which seems increasingly committed to fighting an attritional war, will need to engage in a reciprocal effort. 

While EU member states may also struggle to influence the course of the subsidiary conflict in Lebanon, particularly while Hizbollah is firing on Israel and rejecting calls for restraint, they should at least press Israel on how the war is conducted, focusing in particular on the need to minimise the impact of its military campaign on ordinary Lebanese and desist from hitting Lebanese public infrastructure. The EU and member states should also be as generous as possible with the provision of humanitarian assistance in support of those displaced by the fighting – a priority throughout the region, as Brussels recognises. The bloc has already pledged over €450 million in additional humanitarian contributions for Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Jordan. 

The EU and member states can also do more to stand up for international law, in part by registering more clearly when they believe there have been significant violations – including by allies. Doing so will not change the fact that Russia, China and the U.S., all permanent members of the UN Security Council, are firmly in the revisionist camp, or mitigate the need for U.S. European allies to develop new military capacity to deter the threats they are facing from Moscow in the east and (stunning as it is to say) potentially Washington in the west, even as they seek ways to continue to support Ukraine in what will surely be difficult months to come. But it could help preserve a legal order that, when it is working, narrows the options that responsible states consider for advancing their interests and maintains costs for scofflaws. In the same vein, European voices are still far too quiet in their condemnation of Israel’s unlawful de facto annexation of the West Bank, its obstruction of efforts to reach a durable peace in Gaza and its treatment of Palestinians overall. Using the leverage they enjoy to press Israel on these issues would help show that European capitals will hold all countries, including a longstanding security partner, to the same standards when it comes to international law. 

Finally, the EU and its member states should be attentive to hotspots that might otherwise go ignored as the eyes of the world are on the Middle East. This Watch List thus highlights select flashpoints and regions (as always a non-comprehensive list) where the EU can make a difference and advance its interests. These range from situations in the EU’s immediate neighbourhood (Libya and Georgia) to others farther afield (South Sudan, Myanmar and Colombia). What links them for present purposes is that they are all places where the EU and its member states have tools at their disposal that can help mitigate the risk of conflict and promote stability in an increasingly unstable world.