In one of the more memorable scenes in Casablanca, a slick-haired Frenchman warns a well-heeled patron of Rick’s Café Américain to “be on guard”.
"I beg of you, monsieur, watch yourself… this place is full of vultures, vultures everywhere!” the Frenchman exclaims as he quietly lifts the unsuspecting man’s wallet and walks off. The victim’s naïveté makes it difficult to feel sorry for him – we all saw it coming.
So it is with Europe these days, as it stumbles across the world stage, treating friends like vultures and vultures like friends.
The tragedy of that wrongheadedness has rarely been as obvious as this week, as the EU struggles to formulate coherent policies on an array of flashpoints from Gaza to the war in Ukraine to U.S. trade talks.
On Gaza, the bloc is hopelessly divided between countries that do not think Israel has the right to continue to wage war against Hamas, given the large number of civilian casualties, and those who believe that Europe has a moral duty to continue to back the Middle East’s only democracy after the savagery of 7 October.
At a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, EU foreign ministers failed to resolve their differences over a proposal to effectively sanction Israel for its hard line on Gaza.
Meanwhile, just hours after Donald Trump confirmed his willingness to arm Ukraine in the face of Russia’s intensifying bombing campaign there, the EU was forced to postpone a decision over a new Russian sanctions package. The reason? Slovakia – a country that accounts for 0.7% of EU’s GDP and about 1% of its population – is blocking it.
On the tariff front, the picture is no less confused. After months of negotiations the Commission went into last weekend believing it had escaped Trump’s wrath, only to be slapped with the threat of what would be a crippling 30% tariff regime on Saturday.
It’s easy to blame Trump’s volatility and mercurial nature for the outcome. As ever, the truth is a little more complicated. It has since emerged that Brussels wasn’t willing to go far enough on China by, in the words of one senior EU official, agreeing to a Trump demand that the bloc “follow us 100% on what we do on China”.
Leopoldo Rubinacci, the Commission official, went on to say: “I don't think, as a matter of principle, that the European Union should follow examples. I think that the European Union should set its own examples.”
The example Europe has set on China is hardly one others should emulate. | 
