Ashton’s Ashes: How Europe’s Foreign Minister Repeats the Middle East’s Biggest Cliche and Why She’s Wrong

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
24 March '10

Catherine Ashton is high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and vice president of the European Commission. The fact that she holds such a position—in effect, she's the European Union's first foreign minister—shows Europe is in serious trouble. For Ashton’s main previous claim to fame was as a leader in the Soviet-oriented movement for nuclear disarmament of the West.

To describe Ashton’s op-ed in the New York Times as calling for peace at any price is no exaggeration. Of course she only means ending the Israel-Palestinian conflict, seemingly unaware that there is any other type of conflict (non-peace) in the region.

Her reasoning goes something like this: Conflict breeds poverty and radicalism; make peace and there won’t be any radicalism or poverty. And she’s referring explicitly to shoring up the rule of the radical genocidal-intending Islamist group Hamas.

But what if it is radicalism that fuels conflict and makes peace impossible? What if the radical forces will take advantage of your activities to become even stronger, creating even more instability and hence—in Ashton’s framework—far more poverty, anger, and radicalism in an endless cycle? Because that’s precisely what has happened and what is happening.

Having built her career in large part by discounting the Soviet threat, she now prospers further by dismissing the Islamist and Iranian one. Ashton argued years ago that the Cold War was just a misunderstanding and that unilateral Western concessions would solve it. That didn’t work. But having learned nothing she applies the same model to the Middle East, substituting Israeli and Western concessions as the solution.

After a recent tour of the region, she uttered the ultimate paragraph whose sentiments direct the views of Western leaders toward the Middle East. Here it is:

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