Live from Spain and Brussels: why EU leaders don't want to know what's behind the Ceuta crisis

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EU home affairs ministers recently held an emergency video summit on the Ceuta crisis, but by the time they met, nearly all 72,000 people who crossed from Morocco last Thursday had already been sent back. Not one made it to the EU mainland.

And as is usual when there are incredibly ridiculous political situations in the EU, Dave Keating and I sat down yesterday for a Substack Live to unpack what happened and why it matters. Here’s what stood out:

• The obvious question: why, if the evidence is to be believed that Moroccan authorities let 72,000 people cross in the first place, was this point never raised

• The summit looked more like damage control than a real response, papering over a clear lack of EU unity

• Morocco wasn’t mentioned once, reportedly because Spain didn’t want to risk retaliation from Rabat

• On the ground in Spain, Dave found fury at what people see as a total absence of EU solidarity

• In another piece I wrote in The French Dispatch , I broke down the case that this was a hybrid attack by Morocco, and that European governments are choosing to pay Morocco off rather than investigate or retaliate

And of course, it wouldn’t be a Dave and Julien episode if we didn’t touch upon American intransigence: we discussed the leaked US State Department memo suggesting Washington could back rival claims to European overseas territories, including Ceuta and the Falklands, as retaliation for Europe staying out of the Iran War.

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