Ukraine and Gaza aside, is the EU's foreign policy gaze actually shrinking?

In the last two weeks, the EU has been all over the world — but for all its talk of being a global power broker, a closer look at the union’s diplomatic efforts reveals it remains a regional power at best.

On 22-23 November, EU leaders traveled to Johannesburg for the first ever G20 meeting hosted in an African country.

They then moved to Angola for a summit with the African Union on the “promotion of peace and prosperity through multilateralism.”

These engagements followed the UN Climate Summit in Brazil (COP30), a cooperation council with Tajikistan, and a joint council with Chile.

For all the diplomatic heft of Europe’s fortnight of international engagement, the EU’s momentum was immediately halted by the flawed 28-point peace plan that US president Donald Trump tried to impose on Ukraine.

Initially sidelined by Trump, European leaders had to scramble — in the middle of the EU-African Union summit — to “update and refine” the US proposal to lead to more positive and balanced outcomes.

The tension between maintaining a sustained level of engagement with the rest of the world while having to face the existential crisis of Russian aggression has defined the EU’s foreign policy since Ursula von der Leyen became European Commission president in 2019.

Now, one year into her second mandate, it is time to learn the lessons of the first.

As a new study from Carnegie Europe reveals, during the first von der Leyen commission (which spanned from December 2019 to November 2024) the focus of the EU’s external action took a decisive turn toward the union’s neighborhood, with a decisive emphasis shift to countries in Europe’s east.

Leaders talked more, provided more aid, and deployed more personnel to neighboring countries than in the two previous commission cycles.

The reason for this is obvious: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The von der Leyen commission’s foreign policy can, in fact, be divided into two periods — pre- and post-invasion. From that moment onward, responding to Moscow’s aggression has become the priority for EU leaders.

In the context of this refocusing, Ukraine and the rest of countries in Europe’s east absorbed the largest part of the EU’s foreign policy bandwidth. This is making the EU a regional power, not the global one it wants to be.

Between 2019 and 2024 Ukraine was the second-most-visited country by EU leaders, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the most recurrent topic in declarations of the European Council and the Foreign Affairs Council.

Beyond Ukraine, EU leaders also paid more attention to Moldova and Georgia, which were put on a path toward EU accession (with diverging fortunes). 

Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus

Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Belarus captured the EU’s attention at times, particularly with Minsk’s falsified 2020 presidential election and the renewal of conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020 and 2023.

Countries in the Western Balkans—a region where the stalled enlargement process has picked up some momentum — received more leadership visits, declarations, and aid than in previous commission cycles.

Additionally, since 2022, most EU sanctions have been directed at individuals and entities in Russia.

Meanwhile, half of the missions initiated in 2019-2024 under the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) have been deployed in Europe’s east.

Trade negotiators have been busy upgrading agreements with Moldova and Ukraine.

Other international crises that occurred during von der Leyen’s first mandate — the most important among them being post-Brexit negotiations, the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and Hamas’s attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023 — contributed to focusing the EU’s attention on problems closer to home and overwhelming the union’s global agenda.

Not coincidentally, global partners have repeatedly accused the EU of losing the plot on all the main international crises it has faced recently.

The EU’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic was criticised for its lack of solidarity with the so-called Global South.

The union’s almost exclusive focus on Ukraine has been criticised for ignoring other conflicts around the world, while many have condemned the union’s moral double standards on the conflict in Gaza.

And even as EU countries celebrate their diplomacy at COP30, the summit’s conclusions betray a loss of European leadership on climate issues since the Paris Agreement.

Is this shift an irony for a commission that had the ambition to elevate the EU’s role as a global player? Only if the union fails to strike the right balance between focusing on problems closer to home and broadening its horizons. 

The EU is still the world’s biggest trading power and the largest provider of official development assistance.

It has ambitious, globally-focused policies and partnerships that could elevate its international role.

It has worked hard to build new alliances — under von der Leyen, outreach efforts toward Central Asia and the Persian Gulf stand out. 

But this engagement with the rest of the world is being reduced in uneven ways.

Going forward, the EU needs to invest more in building cooperative relations with like-minded countries. It needs to provide adequate resources to sustain its global ambitions — a crucial point as the union negotiates its next multiannual budget.

Finally, and crucially, it needs to actually adopt a strategic culture and mindset, rather than just speaking about it. Only then can Europe learn how to go beyond the fragmentation of its political systems and reaffirm its core values and interests on the global stage. 

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