Europe's weakness on Iran, Gaza has radicalized politics at home

By their shameful, spineless stance on the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran, European leaders have doomed whatever remained of their global influence and their pretensions to promote a “rules-based international order.”

They are also helping to dig the graves of their own political parties, and quite possibly of European democracy.

In acquiescing in a clearly illegal war of aggression (with only the faintest bleats of protest), continuing to express support for their U.S. and Israeli “partners,” and — incredibly — condemning Iran for retaliating, these governments doubtless believe that they are acting “realistically.”

That is to say, through their hysterical fear of Russia and refusal to help bring about a Ukraine peace settlement, they have — in their own minds at least — made themselves totally dependent on U.S. military support. They dare not take a strong stance against Trump, for fear that he will withdraw that support from Europe and Ukraine.

What makes this so especially ironic is that if the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran drags on, it will divert U.S. and European anti-missile systems from Ukraine to the Middle East, greatly weakening Ukrainian defenses. It will also drive a sustained rise in global oil and gas prices that will greatly strengthen Russia both economically and diplomatically.

Countries like India will have no choice but to buy more Russian energy at higher prices. Russia will also be in a position to drive a tougher bargain with China over its energy sales. And of course, in the eyes of most of the world, there is now simply no moral difference between U.S. wars of aggression and those of Russia, or the position of Russia’s satellite Belarus and that of European satellites of the U.S.

Above all, the external threat posed by Russia to European democracies is minor compared to the threats they now face from within; and coming on top of their de facto support for Israel’s war on Gaza, European governments’ acquiescence in the attack on Iran will further increase this threat.

By shifting their base and identity from the old working classes to new middle class graduates and professionals, and allowing vast levels of immigration to undercut wages, the European center-left parties have already lost most of the white working classes. As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) remarked of the Democrats in the U.S., “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,”

Now these parties are losing their new voters as well, as graduates find that their cripplingly expensive degrees are worthless when it comes to finding good jobs, and idealistic youth is repelled by the spectacle of ostensibly progressive and internationalist parties betraying every international principle for which they ever stood, however rhetorically.

Much more dangerous is the move of Muslim minorities across Europe from the center-left parties to the far left, because only the far left has taken a clear and strong stand against Israeli atrocities and European acquiescence in them. Nor is this shift on their part in any way surprising. In the glaring contrast between their treatment of Russian crimes against Ukrainians and Israeli crimes against Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians, European governments could not possibly have made it clearer that they regard Muslim lives as worth a fraction of those of white Europeans.

This fusion of Muslim minority politics with the far left is likely to drive still further the turn of much of the populist right not only to an increasingly open and vicious racist Islamophobia, but also to fierce support for U.S. and Israeli actions in the Middle East. This shift can be seen, for example, in parts of the British right-wing media that used to express some sympathy for Palestinian suffering and take a relatively detached and objective view of Israel’s actions, but increasingly give them unconditional support. This trend will be made even worse if the latest developments drive an increase in Islamist extremism and terrorism in Europe.

Most recently, this developing political crisis has been displayed in the British parliamentary by-election in the Gorton and Denton constituency in Greater Manchester. The Green Party came first, and the right-wing populist Reform party came second. Labour was beaten into third place and lost a seat that it has held for almost 100 years. The center-right Conservatives won 1.7 percent of the vote and have essentially ceased to exist in the area.

This election has been accurately described as “How Gorton beat Denton” — the Green vote from the large Pakistani Muslim population and educated (but increasingly poor) white professionals of Gorton defeated (on this occasion) the vote of the impoverished white working classes of Denton for Reform. Labour lost large numbers of votes in both directions.

Both of these left/right blocs are deeply divided internally. On the left, obsessive adherence to “woke” agendas runs up against the deep social conservatism of most Muslim communities, especially when it comes to the position of women. On the right, the working class desire for interventionist economic policies and high social spending runs up against the middle class desire for low taxes and reduced state regulations. These internal divisions are likely however only to encourage moves by the leaderships to maintain unity by increasing their supporters’ fear and hatred of their political opponents.

On the critical issue of immigration, this bitter polarization will be driven still further by the collapse of the center-left. For finally, in response to growing public outcry (and inspired by the example of the social democratic government of Denmark), center-left and center-right governments have begun to introduce policies to limit the mass immigration that was beginning to tear their societies apart.

Strikingly, among the drivers of these new policies have been politicians from immigrant communities — like the British Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and the British Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch — who recognize that a continuation of high immigration and the resulting radicalization of parts of the white population are undermining social peace and endangering ethnic minorities. If the Israeli-U.S. war on Iran leads to the collapse of the state and a flood of refugees towards Europe — as occurred after our destruction of the Libyan state and the outbreak of civil war in Syria — this problem will become even worse.

On this issue, the simultaneous collapse of the center-left and center-right parties will leave European voters with a terrible choice. On the one hand, there will be a far left committed to virtually open borders. On the other, there will be a far right increasingly flirting with the idea of “remigration” — a lightly coded formula for mass deportations.

If this is to be the future, then democracy itself is unlikely to survive, except in a radically curtailed form. As has often been observed, while democracy is good at legitimizing and gaining acceptance of policies with which parts of the population deeply disagree, it cannot solve deep and fundamental issues of cultural and national identity; for this identity cannot change radically with every election.

Middle Eastern states have faced this dilemma in the form of the split between Islamists and secularists, linked in some cases to rivalries and hatreds between different ethnic groups. The result has been to make democracy unworkable. In most of the region, the result has been dictatorship or civil war.

European democratic stability is vital to the survival of democracy in the world as a whole. It is also an essential pillar of U.S. hard and soft power in the world. In helping Israeli actions to destabilize Europe, the Biden and Trump administrations have both made a disastrous choice, and the fact that existing European governments have gone along with it should not blind us to its folly.