Kallas-style “diplomacy” isn't helping the EU

(Brussels) - When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

That’s the advice aides to EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas should be whispering in their boss’s ear every morning. Preferably before she attends EU meetings, picks up a microphone or speaks to journalists.

Kallas’ increasingly bewildering interventions on world affairs are turning into a geopolitical liability for a European Union struggling to convince a sceptical world that it still possesses strategic coherence.

Take her suggestion that cooperation with developing countries could depend on whether governments align themselves with Brussels against Russia or Iran.

At a time when global development cooperation budgets are being slashed, humanitarian needs are soaring and Europe is desperately trying to rebuild trust with the Global South, you would think it makes little sense to threaten countries with aid cuts or to make cooperation conditional on spurious geopolitical loyalty tests.

But you would be wrong. Kallas and others in the EU bubble still apparently believe that the EU has magical powers to shape and reshape the world.

The EU’s chief diplomat is just saying the quiet part loud.

Around the world, EU folk routinely lecture other countries on international law, the rules-based order and universal values even as the EU remains painfully paralysed over Israel’s genocide in Gaza and has yet to condemn the illegal US-Israeli attack on Iran.

And despite overwhelming evidence that Europe’s global influence is shrinking in an increasingly multipolar world, they seem convinced that the international community’s primary obligation is to align itself with the EU’s existential anxieties.

Europe’s political elites don’t seem to have understood that the era when Brussels could wag its finger and expect obedience – if such an era ever truly existed - is now well and truly over.

Countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East which refuse to isolate Russia or Iran are not suffering from geopolitical confusion. They are protecting long-standing relationships, diversifying partnerships and refusing to be dragged into binary geopolitical camps.

They are also increasingly weary of the EU’s double standards and relentlessly Eurocentric worldviews.

The EU already faces mounting criticism for shifting away from traditional development cooperation priorities such as poverty reduction, education, healthcare and social justice towards a much narrower model centred on private-sector investment, strategic infrastructure and Europe’s own economic security interests.

Under initiatives such as Global Gateway, Brussels increasingly speaks the language of investors, de-risking and supply chains rather than solidarity, equality or local empowerment.

The truth is that development cooperation is quietly being transformed into another instrument of geopolitical competition. But it is not a contest that the EU is likely to win.

The world is no longer organised around Western approval and Global South countries are no longer trapped in a Western-dominated financial universe.

European spending on development still matters, but countries have other options: China, Turkey, Japan, Gulf states, regional alliances, emerging middle powers and expanding South-South cooperation.

This means that Europe’s relations with developing nations will hinge not only on the amount of funds that are available but also on its policymakers’ ability to listen more and lecture less.

As such, Kallas-style “diplomacy” may make good headlines and striking social media posts but it will not help the EU make friends and influence nations in today’s fractured and deeply sceptical world.

END