The Blogs: Why the EU’s Letta Mandate Will Fail Without Israel

I will soon be heading to Florence, Italy, to attend a status lecture given by Enrico Letta at the European University Institute on his landmark report, “Much More Than a Market”—proposals that have been formally adopted and are currently being enacted by the European Commission. I am thrilled and honored to listen in person and meet a superstar of EU affairs whose recommendations are actively guiding EU policy. I am about to cross the Atlantic for this experience, which includes walking the halls of the European University Institute—set up by EU member nations for advanced European studies and housing the historical archives of the EU’s founders, including Simone Veil. But, as detailed in the following article, the EU will not accomplish its strategic aims without Israel.

Flaws in EU Policy Lawmaking

A serious impediment which stems from a flaw in EU lawmaking procedure is causing a structural shift and is going to completely impede the EU’s ability to be a geopolitical player in the Middle East and make it irrelevant. The European Union is destined to be an economic hub with no geopolitical relevance if it follows its current course with Israel.

Foreign policy decisions agreed at European Council summits remain frozen in time despite geopolitical and economic shifts. Often these were based on the leading nation’s economic interests at the time and are enforced by the EEAS Article 27 mandate, continuing with the changing of the guard of the High Representatives. Concerning Israel, the 1980 Venice Declaration, nearly half a century old, reads out of an anti-Semitic playbook and disregards Israel’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Moreover, it elevates the terrorist Palestinian authority to diplomatic status and, even worse, the EU has provided huge sums of money into it that have fattened the pockets of terrorists and funded their mission.

Only in the EU is two-state policy a priority, as it has now been disregarded by the US, is passé in Israel, and even Saudi Arabia is moving away from this path. The EU is making history as the first entity to completely fund the existence of another state instead of letting it occur naturally—paradoxically breaching Altiero Spinelli’s Ventotene Manifesto thesis of the nation-state as the cause of all wars by artificially underwriting one that has shouted its ultimate goal of war against Israel.

Reliance on Compromised Intelligence and Statistics

EU politicians also cite international law which is both debatable and relies on proven corrupt institutions such as the UN. UNRWA was infiltrated by Hamas terrorists, and the ICJ where votes against Israel were bought. Moreover, the UN facilitates EU member representatives with fabricated statistics to prove disinformation against Israel and assert that Israel is in violation of Article 2 of the Association Agreement.

Flaws in EU Policy Lawmaking

Reliance on Compromised Intelligence and Statistics

Actions taken by European leaders—including the recent joint initiative calling for an EU-wide ban on trade with Israeli settlements—raise a fundamental question: where is Brussels getting its information? By relying on compromised international bodies like UNRWA and politicized legal opinions rather than objective intelligence, the bloc is making major geoeconomic policy based on flawed and manipulated data. Doubling down on these punitive measures without verifying the integrity of the underlying sources only compounds a structural foreign policy error, denying Israel its sovereign rights as a nation while alienating a vital technological ally.

The Geoeconomic Consequences of a Two-State Solution

In addition, not one EU expert has considered the current geoeconomic consequences to the European Union of an actual two-state solution. It disregards that Israel today is a supernation and the world’s technical hub fueling the world’s two largest economies: the EU and the US. A two state division and penalizing Israel would create an immediate economic deficit for Europe while risking a catastrophic security crisis.

Top Jewish talent is integrated into Horizon Europe programs which provide the initiatives for the EU to achieve its economic aims in green tech and AI, lending to the EU’s goals of strategic autonomy. Severing ties with Israel’s tech ecosystem destabilizes vital joint R&D within Horizon Europe, locking the bloc out of essential breakthroughs in AI and green technology, while inflicting asymmetric trade losses on European exporters.

These policies risk jeopardizing Israel’s security infrastructure, and it would create an unfillable security vacuum—forcing Europe to spend billions attempting to manually replace the over 50% of critical Israeli defense hardware, missile defense shields, and real-time intelligence assets it relies on for its own operational survival.

Europe now absorbs over 50% of Israel’s total defense exports—equipping the EU with battle-tested missile defense shields, loitering munitions, and tactical communication systems that directly patch the bloc’s vertical operational vulnerabilities and provide critical defense equipment for the European Union’s evolving army. Adding to its strength, Israel hit another achievement by becoming the No. 1 nation in the world for using flawless intelligence to find enemy leaders and eliminate them with high-tech precision—an indispensable capability for Western security.

Furthermore, the EU maintains a massive trade surplus with Israel, selling far more goods to Israel than it purchases, making any punitive trade measures against Jerusalem economically self-defeating for European industry.

Undermining Enrico Letta’s Fifth Freedom

This disconnect cuts directly to the core of Enrico Letta’s high-level report, Much More Than a Market. While the traditional Single Market rests on Four Freedoms—the free movement of goods, services, capital, and persons—Letta brilliantly expands this bedrock by proposing a vital Fifth Freedom: the freedom of movement for research, data, knowledge, and innovation to ensure European competitiveness and strategic autonomy. Yet, the EU’s ideological foreign policy actively dismantles this vision. By penalizing and alienating Israel, the EU isolates itself from the world’s premier innovation engine and tech hub, directly sabotaging the scale, capital retention, and technological integration his blueprint demands.

Duplicated Flaws in Iran Policy- Exodus of Jewish Talent

The EU’s policymaking flaw is duplicated in the 1991 Edinburgh summit for Iran, which cemented a policy of diplomacy again for the economic aims of leading nations and at the time ignored human rights abuses so horrific they mirror those of ancient Assyria and medieval times against its own people. Moreover, allowing Tehran to infiltrate EU political parties, think tanks, and television stations—especially in Spain—combined with EU leaders repeating the goal of a two-state solution, has caused an unprecedented wave of antisemitism in the EU. The EU is now a bastion of antisemitism causing an exodus of Jews from the EU. 2025 saw a 138% increase to 5,103 Jews departing, mostly aged 18 to 35, which represents a vital talent pool desperately needed by the EU to reach several of its goals. This exodus of top-tier talent directly undermines the retention of human capital and technical expertise required to actualize Letta’s plan of a fully integrated, innovation-driven Single Market.

As evidence of the failure of the current EU system and the brilliance of Spinelli’s warnings of the nation-state is the lawsuit by Shurat HaDin against Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government. It approved dual-use component exports to the Iranian regime. These materials are critical for explosives used by Tehran and its proxies which have bombarded Israel: a strategic ally of the European Union.

Pax Israeliana-EU Divorce & Snubbing Pact for the Mediterranean

As a result of the EU’s two-state policy and the EU’s bullying Israel to enforce it via boycotts, sanctions, and other threats and actions, calls are coming from within Israel to divorce the EU, such as from Ambassador Michael Oren. Gregg Roman of the Middle East Forum is calling for Pax Israeliana, and it is also the mood among Israeli political figures that Israel should punch up to its weight. Moreover, Jewish leaders are guiding their flocks to move to Arab countries and advocate for building upon the Abraham Accords. Ultimately, the Middle East will be brought peace by the Abraham Accords and the EU will be shut out as it repeats its outdated mantra that the two-state solution is the only viable path for peace. While the above pattern focuses heavily on Israel and Iran, it is repeated in the failures with Russia and China.

The Remedy: A Centralized Intelligence Brain

The only remedy to solve all of the above problems is to establish a centralized “research brain,” like the US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). EU Constitutional Architect Andrew Duff proposed in his Fundamental Law the closest thing the EU has to creating an institutional mandate for a central “intelligence brain.” In his proposal, the Commission is granted the joint right of initiative in the Common Foreign and Security Policy. Article 409 FLEU ex-Article 25 TEU: “Where the international situation requires operational action by the Union, the Council shall adopt the necessary decisions on the basis of proposals made by the Commission.”

He also adds in Article 413 FLEU ex-Article 32 TEU: “Before undertaking any action on the international scene or entering into any commitment which could affect the Union’s interests, each State shall consult the Commission.”

Andrew Duff’s proposal would also bypass any corruption coming from member states, such as with Spain or Russian-influenced nations.

Doing Too Little Too Late and the Historical Imperative

Unless the EU acts quickly, it will find itself in another crisis, caught in what Guy Verhofstadt often warns is doing “too little, too late.” Unless the Palestinian people are so remarkably important to the European Union that it is willingly prepared to risk having absolutely no say in the Middle East and remaining only an economic superpower, this broken blueprint will cause its modern Pact for the Mediterranean to become another dead deal, exactly like the 1995 Barcelona Agreement.

Letta’s Report-The EU Must Scale to its Neighborhood

Enrico Letta’s report, Much More Than a Market, explicitly states that the EU Single Market can no longer rely solely on internal integration to achieve economic scale and strategic autonomy. In a globalized economy, Europe must extend its market footprint into its immediate neighborhood to secure green energy, critical supply chains, and technological scale. Letta’s report highlights the imperative of scaling up key strategic sectors to achieve true autonomy, yet the EU’s ambitious Pact for the Mediterranean cannot succeed if it excludes, penalizes, or embarks on policy that jeopardizes the existence of the Middle East’s regions cornerstone nation, and sole technological and economic powerhouse.

Ultimately, without a secured position in the Middle East, the European Union can hold no real position as a global power—and through its own policies, it is actively shutting itself out. Historically, no Western power has ever maintained true global significance without a secured foothold in the Middle East. While past empires sought to command this geographic area by force, the European Union has the rare opportunity to secure it through a sovereign technological and economic partnership—yet through its current trajectory, it is actively forfeiting that position.

In fact, current policies are driving a Jewish exodus from the EU, with many embracing the Abraham Accords as the only functional path to peace. Moreover, mainstream Israeli discourse reflects little regard for Brussels—as evidenced by major editorial platforms like The Jerusalem Post, which prioritize primary coverage on the United States and regional integration while treating the European Union as a secondary, largely marginal player.

Israel is the cornerstone of the Middle East and should be the EU’s strategic ally, instead of having the EU-funded Palestinian Authority in that space. Enrico Letta’s One Market is going to usher in a tectonic shift for the European Union, and it is its decisions regarding Israel that will determine the rest of its history.

Note on Legal Citations: FLEU refers to the Fundamental Law of the European Union, a comprehensive constitutional draft authored by Andrew Duff and published by the Spinelli Group. The FLEU proposes a reorganization and re-numbering of existing EU treaties (TEU/TFEU) into a unified federal constitutional framework.

policy based on flawed and manipulated data. Doubling down on these punitive measures without verifying the integrity of the underlying sources only compounds a structural foreign policy error, denying Israel its sovereign rights as a nation while alienating a vital technological ally.