EUROPE OF CONTRADICTIONS

Israel, Russia, NATO, “clean” energy, protectionism, and digital censorship

Critical essay | September 2026

1. Proclaimed virtue and practiced interest

Europe’s contradiction does not lie in having interests. Every serious political power has them. It lies in clothing those interests in moral universality while applying them unevenly. Brussels speaks as the conscience of the world but negotiates like any bloc that needs markets, technology, energy, maritime routes, and security. The problem begins when ethical language ceases to discipline policy and starts to conceal it.

It is inaccurate to claim that the European Union “does not take Israel’s side.” Its institutions have condemned Hamas, demanded the release of hostages, defended Israel’s right to security, and called for the permanent disarmament of armed groups. At the same time, they demand compliance with humanitarian law, criticize settlements, and impose or consider measures against Israeli officials and actors. The serious criticism, therefore, is not an absolute absence of support for Israel, but rhetorical and operational asymmetry: Israeli security appears in diplomatic formulas, while condemnation of Israel often receives greater visibility, speed, and moral force.

2. Israel: political censure, economic integration

The figures expose the distance between rhetoric and material reality. In 2025, trade in goods between the European Union and Israel reached €43.3 billion. The EU imported €15.3 billion, mainly machinery and transport equipment (€6.5 billion) and chemicals (€2.9 billion). In 2024, bilateral trade in services amounted to €26.6 billion. Cooperation also covers research, innovation, pharmaceuticals, crisis management, and civil protection. Israel is not a peripheral curiosity: it forms part of European value chains and of a technological and security ecosystem that the continent uses.

It is legitimate to criticize decisions made by any Israeli government. It is not legitimate to pretend that Israel can be treated solely as a permanent defendant while Europe continues to acquire Israeli goods, services, and knowledge and to benefit from the stability that Israel’s military and intelligence capabilities help preserve in the eastern Mediterranean. Ethics that appear only before the cameras and disappear from contracts are not ethics; they are institutional communications.

The inconsistency becomes more acute when terrorism is removed from the center of the narrative. There is no moral equivalence between Palestinian civilians — whose lives must be protected — and organizations that deliberately attack civilians, take hostages, and instrumentalize the population. A European policy worthy of the name must uphold four propositions simultaneously: the release of hostages; the disarmament of Hamas; effective protection of Palestinian civilians; and recognition of Israel’s historical and legal legitimacy. Suppressing any one of them turns foreign policy into propaganda.

3. Russia and Ukraine: a war financed by dependence

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed a strategic failure built over decades. The European Union provided significant political, financial, and military support to Kyiv and imposed sanctions on Moscow. Even so, it entered the war dependent on the supplier it later sought to fight economically. In 2021, Russia accounted for approximately 45% of EU gas imports. The bloc reduced that share to 19%, but in 2025 the Commission itself acknowledged that the remaining dependence had to be eliminated; the phased prohibition of Russian pipeline gas and liquefied natural gas imports received the Council’s final approval only in January 2026.

The duplicity does not lie in trying to correct the mistake after the invasion. It lies in having called “pragmatism” a dependence that handed revenue, influence, and coercive power to the Kremlin. For years, European sectors treated cheap Russian energy as though commerce could neutralize geopolitics. When tanks crossed the Ukrainian border, Europe discovered that the gas bill was also a defense question.

European policy toward the war is therefore firm in its declared outcome but ambiguous in its origins and execution. It defends Ukrainian sovereignty, yet took too long to break fully with the aggressor’s energy; it announces sanctions, yet must design them around its own vulnerabilities; it demands prolonged resistance from Kyiv while its member states disagree over the pace of deliveries, financing, negotiations, and escalation risks. Ukraine pays in territory and lives for the strategic time Europe wasted.

4. Ursula von der Leyen, Washington, and autonomy without an army

Ursula von der Leyen embodies the transatlantic contradiction. In response to US tariffs in 2025, she announced proportionate European countermeasures and criticized their effects on consumers and supply chains. Defending European companies is part of her office and does not, by itself, constitute hostility toward the United States. The political problem appears when a confrontational trade tone and the rhetoric of “European independence” are not accompanied by an equivalent defense capability.

The European Union is not NATO, and the President of the Commission does not command the Alliance. But she cannot speak as though the continent’s security were already autonomously European. The deterrence architecture remains dependent on American resources: nuclear capability, intelligence, surveillance, strategic lift, missile defense, logistics, and expeditionary power. European allies have increased their spending, especially since the invasion of Ukraine, but the recent increase confirms the accumulated delay; it does not erase it.

Von der Leyen has the right to challenge Washington’s tariffs. She does not have the political luxury of treating the American partnership as a disposable accessory while Europe still needs the United States’ military umbrella. Mature diplomacy allows disagreement; what it does not allow is strategic ingratitude combined with material dependence. If Brussels wants autonomy, it must fund it, produce ammunition, integrate commands, maintain stockpiles, and assume risks. Autonomy without force is merely vocabulary.

The relationship also requires American reciprocity. Indiscriminate tariffs and public doubts about defense commitments weaken Atlantic trust. That caveat, however, does not absolve European leadership. The correct criticism of Ursula is not that she should obey Washington, but that she must calibrate her economic antagonism to military reality: negotiate firmly, avoid gratuitous hostility, and accelerate a European defense that complements NATO rather than free-riding on it or pretending to replace it.

5. The electric car and the electricity no one wants to see

Europe’s energy transition has produced real progress that should not be denied. In 2024, renewable sources accounted for 47.3% of electricity produced in the EU; fossil fuels for 29.2%; and nuclear power for 23.4%. In 2025, hard coal and lignite together fell to 9.2% of electricity generation, their lowest historical level. These figures rule out the caricature that every European electric car is simply “powered by coal.”

Yet green propaganda also omits facts. In use, an electric vehicle is only as clean as the grid that charges it; its full footprint includes mining, refining, battery manufacture, transport, electrical losses, and disposal. The continental average hides stark differences: charging from a nuclear or renewable grid is not equivalent to charging in systems still dependent on coal and gas. In 2023, fossil fuels accounted for 67.4% of all gross available energy in the EU — a category broader than electricity — and solid fossil fuels carried particularly high weight in Poland and Czechia.

The hypocrisy does not lie in electrifying the fleet; it lies in selling a complex industrial choice as instant moral purity. Moving emissions from the tailpipe to the power plant, shifting mining to third countries, and ignoring the battery’s origin do not eliminate environmental cost; they merely change its address. A serious transition requires life-cycle assessment, clean electricity, recycling, infrastructure, and transparency. Without these, “zero emissions” is a regulatory slogan, not a physical description.

6. Free trade in speeches, barriers to competition

The EU presents itself as the guardian of rules-based trade, yet practices sophisticated mercantilism whenever its industry loses ground. In October 2024, the Commission imposed definitive countervailing duties on battery electric vehicles imported from China, with different additional rates by manufacturer. The formal argument was that Chinese subsidies harmed European industry. There may be a technical basis for trade defense; the critical point is different: when Chinese industrial policy favors its producers, Brussels calls it a distortion; when Brussels subsidizes, regulates, and protects its own champions, it calls it strategic autonomy or green transition.

The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism follows a similar logic. It may reduce “carbon leakage,” but it also converts European regulatory standards into a cost of access to the European market. The continent has not abandoned protectionism; it has merely translated it into the contemporary language of sustainability, economic security, and values. The wall remains, now painted green.

7. Social media law and the temptation of control

The Digital Services Act — Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 — introduced important duties of transparency, redress, and platform accountability. The danger lies in the risk architecture it establishes. Very large platforms must assess and mitigate “systemic risks,” including those related to illegal content, electoral processes, public security, and fundamental rights. The regulation acknowledges that even content that is not illegal may contribute to systemic risks. It is precisely there that protection can slide into political supervision of speech.

“Disinformation,” “hate speech,” “civic risk,” and “harmful content” are categories that can describe real harms. When broad and subject to administrative pressure, they can also serve as side doors for restricting lawful opinions. The state need not issue a direct order: it need only impose enough fines, vague duties, and reputational risks for platforms to remove more than necessary. Precautionary censorship emerges — private in execution, public in incentive.

Europe’s vice is to imagine that freedom can be preserved through ever-growing bureaucratic supervision of speech. Fundamental rights do not survive merely because they appear in a regulation’s recitals. They survive when citizens can express unpopular opinions and criticize governments, religions, ideologies, migration policies, and institutions without depending on the goodwill of private moderators guided by public authorities. Concrete incitement to violence must be punished; dissent, satire, religious criticism, and factual error cannot be merged into a single moral category.

8. Public prayer, zones of silence, and conceptual confusion

There is no general law in the European Union prohibiting public prayer on the ground that it is hate speech. On the contrary, Article 10 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU and Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights protect freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, including its public manifestation, subject to lawful and proportionate restrictions. The sweeping claim would be factually false and would weaken the entire argument.

There is, however, a troubling and revealing European case: “safe access zones” around abortion clinics in the United Kingdom. Since 31 October 2024, section 9 of the Public Order Act 2023 has established 150-meter areas in which acts intended, or recklessly likely, to influence access to abortion services may constitute an offense. Official guidance accepts that silent prayer may be caught depending on intention and context, while also stating that silent prayer, by itself, should not automatically be deemed unlawful. The United Kingdom is no longer part of the EU, and the offense is not simply classified as “hate speech.” These qualifications do not remove the problem: when the law investigates the intention of a motionless, silent person, it comes dangerously close to thought policing.

The defense of religious freedom requires symmetry. Christians have no right to coerce or obstruct others; Muslims have no right to impose religious rules on civil society; secularists have no right to expel faith from public space. The standard must be objective conduct: threats, violence, coercion, harassment, and obstruction may be punished. Conviction, prayer, peaceful preaching, and criticism of doctrine must remain free.

9. Migration, integration, and political Islamism

An aging Europe needs workers and has humanitarian duties toward refugees. Neither fact requires uncontrolled borders, merely nominal integration, or communities subjected to parallel authorities. Europe’s mistake was to confuse hospitality with abdication. Entry without adequate screening, residence without civic integration, and tolerance toward extremist networks do not constitute compassionate policy; they constitute state negligence.

It is essential to distinguish Muslims from political Islamism. Muslims are diverse individuals entitled to the same rights and bound by the same duties. Political Islamism is a project for organizing power and society according to a normative reading of Islam; its currents vary, and not all are violent. Jihadism is its terrorist form. Criticizing doctrine, foreign funding, radicalization, segregation, antisemitism, or theocratic ambitions is not ethnic hostility; it is constitutional self-defense, provided the criticism does not assign collective guilt to millions of citizens.

Europe’s door has been left wide open not to a religion as an inevitably hostile essence, but to actors and networks that exploit three weaknesses: politically uncoordinated borders; elites afraid to affirm their own legal tradition; and speech laws capable of intimidating peaceful critics without necessarily neutralizing radical preachers. When a civilization is ashamed to state its limits, other projects state them on its behalf.

Conclusion: a continent that no longer knows what it wishes to preserve

The European Union has become an excessively contradictory community. It demands consistency from Israel while preserving intense economic and security integration with the country; it defends Ukraine after having built energy dependence on Russia; it claims autonomy from Washington while its military deterrence remains decisively supported by NATO and the United States; it promises clean energy while part of its electricity and much of its total energy still depend on fossil fuels; it condemns protectionism while erecting green and industrial barriers; it proclaims freedom of expression while creating incentives for the preventive removal of lawful speech; and it defends religious liberty while national experiments already allow silent prayer to be treated as a possible element of an offense.

The greater danger is not economic. It is civilizational. Europe seems to desire the fruits of its inheritance — individual freedom, equality before the law, science, pluralism, and the separation of civil and religious authority — without the courage to defend the historical roots and legal boundaries that sustain them. In that vacuum, political Islamism finds fertile ground: not because every Muslim immigrant represents it, but because insecure institutions reward those who speak with certainty and retreat before those who test boundaries.

The answer is not xenophobia, religious persecution, or imperial nostalgia. It is less moral theater and greater consistency: controlled borders; demanding integration; one civil law; objective repression of violence; robust freedom of expression and religion; transparent trade; an energy transition measured across the life cycle; and a foreign policy capable of defending Israel without silencing the protection of Palestinian civilians. A Europe that distinguishes hospitality from surrender, pluralism from relativism, and freedom from disorder can still survive. One that continues to confuse these terms will remain administratively powerful and spiritually empty — a museum of itself, guarded by regulations and incapable of guarding its own home.

Note on terminology and scope

This essay uses “Europe” in a broad political and cultural sense when discussing the United Kingdom and “European Union” when referring to the bloc’s institutions and rules. “Political Islamism” is not synonymous with Islam or with the Muslim population. The criticism is directed at projects of power incompatible with constitutional democracy, equality before the law, and freedom of conscience.

Essential sources

1. European Commission — EU–Israel trade relations (2025 data)

2. European Council — EU position on the Middle East

3. Eurostat — Energy in Europe, 2026 edition

4. Eurostat — Renewables in electricity production in 2024

5. Eurostat — Energy statistics and fossil-fuel dependence

6. Eurostat — Record-low coal share in 2025

7. European Commission — Countervailing duties on Chinese electric vehicles

8. EUR-Lex — Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, Digital Services Act

9. European Court of Human Rights — Guide on Article 9

10. UK Government — Safe access zones and prayer

11. UK Government — Post-legislative scrutiny of the Public Order Act 2023

12. European Commission — Roadmap to end Russian energy dependence

13. Council of the European Union — Phased ban on Russian gas imports

14. European Commission — Ursula von der Leyen statement on US tariffs

15. European Commission — Statement on EU–US trade

16. NATO — Secretary General’s Annual Report 2025