Brussels Didn’t Start This War. It’s Paying For It Anyway.

Five months ago, Washington and Tel Aviv killed Iran’s Supreme Leader in a single night and called it a win. Ali Khamenei was dead within hours of the first strikes on 28 February 2026, and for about a week, Operation Epic Fury looked like the textbook case for decapitation strikes: hit the head, watch the body stop moving.

It didn’t stop moving. And the parts of it still thrashing have landed, of all places, on Brussels’ desk — in the gas bill, in a treaty conference nobody outside Vienna paid attention to, and in a set of foreign policy decisions the EU is now making on a clock it doesn’t control.

I keep coming back to Thomas Schelling’s old distinction between deterrence and compellence. Deterrence stops something before it starts. Compellence tries to force a change in behaviour after the fact — and it’s almost always the more expensive, less reliable tool. Epic Fury was sold as the first. Five months on, it reads like the second, and Europe is discovering that compellence campaigns don’t stay contained to the country they’re aimed at.

Start with the gas bill, because that’s where most people will actually feel this. Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz on 4 March, and shipping through it dropped to its lowest level since the operation began. Brussels likes to point out the EU’s direct exposure is small — 8.5 per cent of LNG, 7 per cent of crude — but that framing does a lot of quiet work, because up to 40 per cent of Europe’s jet fuel and diesel comes through the same chokepoint. Dutch gas prices went from roughly €32/MWh at the end of February to above €60/MWh by midsummer, dipping only briefly after a June ceasefire memorandum that didn’t hold. Europe spent three years and no small amount of political capital getting off Russian pipeline gas after 2022. It has, functionally, traded one single point of failure for another — and walked into this one with storage levels already thinner than the past two years.

Then there’s the treaty Brussels has spent thirty years pretending gives it a seat at the grown-ups’ table. The EU has always leaned on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as proof it matters on hard security questions, even without an army to back it up. The 11th NPT Review Conference ran from late April to late May this year, and collapsed without a consensus outcome — sunk by exactly the fight you’d expect, over how to characterise Iran’s programme after Epic Fury. The EU’s contribution to that fight was to repeat, more or less on loop, that Iran must never get a nuclear weapon and that everyone should show “restraint.” Carnegie’s read is blunter than mine: Europe wasn’t just disappointed by the outcome, it was sidelined from producing one. Thirty years of treaty diplomacy, and Brussels had a statement instead of a seat.

Meanwhile the Gulf isn’t waiting to see how Europe feels about any of this. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are pulling in different directions — Riyadh toward a more formal security alignment, Abu Dhabi toward keeping every option open rather than picking a patron. Goldman Sachs’s mid-March estimate had continued conflict costing Saudi Arabia and the UAE three to five per cent of GDP, and Kuwait and Qatar as much as fourteen. Those are the partners Brussels has spent a decade courting for energy diversification, and none of them is currently treating “what does the EU think” as a relevant input.

Even the alliance itself started fraying at the edges. Italy turned away a US military aircraft headed to the Middle East via the Sigonella base in late March. Spain shut its airspace to US planes tied to the strikes and refused to let Morón and Rota be used for anything connected to the war. Both governments later called it procedural, not political — which, sure, maybe it was. But procedural or not, two NATO members drew their own red lines around a war they had no part in starting, mid-operation. That’s not nothing.

And then there’s the part closer to home: the EU’s own foreign ministers spent July arguing over whether to restrict trade with Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, and the bloc rolled out a nearly €900 million Team Gaza Initiative for early recovery. Neither of those was on Brussels’ own timeline. Both are downstream of a war it didn’t choose.

None of this is what a successful decapitation strike is supposed to look like. Kill the head, the theory goes, and the rest resolves itself quickly, cleanly, somewhere far away. What’s actually happened is slower and messier: a war that was meant to be short has left everyone several steps removed from Tehran — including a European Union that never had a vote — scrambling to improvise a response in real time.

Brussels didn’t start this. It’s paying for it anyway.