The rise of ‘antidiplomacy’ in a powerless Europe

Europe today practices a diplomacy that delivers no outcomes. Policies are not designed to protect interests, but rather scripted to signal virtue or hopeless transatlantic loyalty.

What emerges is not influence but illusion—driven by theatrical posturing, improvised authority and leaders performing roles the Treaties never defined. This apparatus speaks for a Union it cannot command, confronts adversaries it cannot deter and preaches values it fails to apply—notably at home. The result is a simulation of geopolitics without the means to shape it.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Kaja Kallas. As EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, she has, within months, inverted the role she was appointed to uphold—projecting the bloc onto the global stage with confrontational positions that undermine the very interests she is meant to defend.

While the US slaps punitive tariffs on Europe, openly mocks EU leaders at every opportunity or restricts visas for officials accused of censoring speech, Europe defers to Washington’s harassment while simultaneously picking fights with China’s cooperation overtures. This diplomatic inversion is so surreal it reads like satire—except it’s shaping European foreign policy in real-time.

This isn’t the misstep of an individual gone off script. It reflects the system that empowered her. Kallas is the crystalline expression of Europe’s institutional breakdown—both architect and product of a structure where someone can improvise foreign policy from a legal vacuum, issuing declarations that member states neither endorse nor recognize.

In any functioning order, this would resemble performance art. In today’s Europe, it passes for statecraft.

The decay predates her appointment. Since 2019, the European Commission has stumbled through geopolitics without strategy or constitutional authority, constrained by presidential-regime management, incoherent China positions and pathological American dependence.

What emerges is not mere incompetence but institutional abdication. What follows is diplomacy reimagined as avant-garde theater: loud, self-referential and detached from leverage.

Five-Act diplomatic tragedy

Five recent episodes chart Europe’s descent from foreign policy to geopolitical burlesque.

Act I. The “China Doctrine of Confusion” was inaugurated with Kallas’s October 2024 confirmation hearing, branding China as “partly malign”—plagiarizing Washington’s talking points without evidence or nuance. She marooned Beijing in a gray zone between rivalry and threat, manageable only through Atlantic alignment. When Trump returned and that alignment vanished overnight, Brussels found itself speaking a political dialect nobody else understood.

Act II. The “Munich Humiliation” followed predictably. At the February 2025 Munich Security Conference, US Vice President JD Vance ridiculed Europe’s irrelevance before its own leaders. The response? Crickets. Kallas later surfaced with desperate bravado: “It seems the US is trying to pick a fight with Europe,” followed by, “the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge”—a suggestion that collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. The remark blended wishful thinking, cowardice and diplomatic malpractice. Munich revealed Europe as the guest who doesn’t realize the party ended hours ago.

Act III. The “Washington Snub” came next. Kallas’s late February 2025 trip to Washington was supposed to reaffirm the transatlantic partnership. Instead, Secretary of State Marco Rubio refused to meet her after she had already arrived—rather unprecedented. What Brussels still imagined as coordination now looked like supplication. The slight wasn’t personal—it was re-educational; the US had moved from ignoring Europe to actively tutoring it in irrelevance.

Act IV. At Singapore’s Shangri-La Dialogue, Kallas declared that, “If you are worried about China, you should be worried about Russia,” painting their partnership as the unified threat of our time. She accused Beijing of enabling Moscow’s war machine with righteous indignation—while carefully omitting Europe’s own complicity.

Indeed, as Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen recently admitted, EU member states had spent the equivalent of 2,400 F-35 fighter jets on Russian fossil fuels since Ukraine’s invasion began. If any party funded Putin’s war chest, it seems it was Europe itself. Yet instead of confronting this inconvenient arithmetic, the blame is projected outward with the confidence of someone who’s never audited their own receipts.

Furthermore, the China-Russia relationship described as monolithic is shot through with friction. Moscow bristles at Beijing’s reluctance to buy non-energy exports and fears Chinese products flooding markets abandoned by Western brands. China, meanwhile, has consistently opposed Russia’s nuclear threats. But such complexity disrupts the performance. To maintain the narrative, Kallas must ignore partner contradictions and allied failures alike: don’t let truth spoil a good headline.

India-Russia worries less. While Brussels fixates on China’s enabling of Moscow, it ignores the significant arms and trade flows between Russia and India. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), India was the largest recipient of Russian major arms exports between 2020 and 2024, accounting for 38% of Moscow’s total arms transfers.

These include systems that would be considered destabilizing if sold elsewhere, alongside exports that help soften the impact of Russia’s attempted economic isolation. Meanwhile, last February, the Commission staged its largest-ever diplomatic mission in Delhi, dispatching 21 commissioners while pointedly avoiding any mention of India’s deepening ties with Moscow or the penurious condition of local human rights.

None of this fits Brussels’s narrative, so it is simply ignored. To question India would complicate the EU’s Indo-Pacific fantasies; to confront it would expose the incoherence of a strategy that treats China as a menace and India as a partner, even when their behavior toward Russia overlaps. The issue is, therefore, not the scale of coercion—it’s the selectivity of attention.

Act V. The” Tyrolean Theater” marks the logical endpoint, a final act approaching with operatic absurdity. The EU is staging a spectacle in the Tyrol, showcasing “multilingual education” alongside Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. As Finbarr Bermingham of the SCMP reports, the aim is to contrast Europe’s supposed linguistic tolerance with China’s “coercive” policies in Tibet and Xinjiang.

Kallas will star in this surreal production while Spanish Prime Minister Sanchez pushes to make Catalan, Basque and Galician official EU languages—despite all speakers being fluent in Spanish. The move isn’t about linguistic rights; it’s about securing Sanchez’s grip on power through a pact with a fugitive from justice, even though Spain’s own Constitution doesn’t recognize these languages as official.

The parallel is unmistakable: what Sanchez does inside the EU, Kallas does outside—politicizing institutions not to serve European interests but to consolidate personal leverage. Same logic, different scales.

The Russo-Ukrainian war has exposed this parallel, revealing the theatrical void at the heart of European diplomacy. Kallas had a chance to become a serious voice by supporting a credible peace process. Instead, even Trump moved first. Her confrontational stance—driven more by Estonia’s historical trauma than by her current responsibilities—only highlighted her inability to represent Europe as a whole.

Sanchez is no different. Since the war began, Spain has spent 6.9 billion euros on Russian energy, nearly seven times what it has pledged in military aid to Ukraine (1 billion euros). That hasn’t stopped the Spanish prime minister from posing with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at every photo-op. By Brussels’ own logic, for every euro sent to help Kyiv resist invasion, seven go to “enabling” the invader.

And yet, from this circus of contradictions, Brussels now prepares to lecture Beijing on language rights. While English is official in Hong Kong and Portuguese in Macau, the EU—lacking a unified language policy and operating beyond any Treaty mandate for foreign affairs—positions itself as arbiter of linguistic freedom. It does so while unable to define its own foreign policy, lacking the expertise, coherence and unity it claims to embody, and all while courting the trade of those it publicly scolds.

All in all, since the Treaties never equipped the EU with functional foreign policy machinery, Kallas has reimagined her role as a late-stage European Parliament resolution: maximally loud, thoroughly self-congratulatory and utterly inconsequential.

The July reckoning

All this choreography builds toward the July EU–China summit in Beijing. To ensure its failure, Kallas is deploying every tool at her disposal—inflammatory statements, staged moralism and the inspired Tyrolean gambit: sabotage repackaged as statesmanship, a masterclass in how to alienate partners while accomplishing nothing.

In pushing this agenda, Brussels has confused activity with authority, noise with leverage and moral posturing with purpose. Foreign policy is now produced like conceptual art: provocative in form, hollow in function and legible only to fellow insiders. The Kallas doctrine—if it deserves the term—is not a strategy but a method: generate friction, claim virtue and ignore the fallout.

And yet she is not alone in this European opera buffa. The system allows it. The Union’s institutional design enables gestures without mandates and declarations without coordination. What passes for diplomacy is, in truth, a vacuum being filled—because no one else in the EU system knows what to say or wants the responsibility of saying it.

The rise of “antidiplomacy” is not about Europe failing to act; it is about acting when no one asked, on behalf of no one, with tools no one agreed to use. Brussels acts abroad not because it is empowered to but because the machinery keeps moving even when its purpose is unclear.

Unless someone pulls the brake structurally, the Beijing summit won’t just fail. It will confirm what many partners already suspect: that Europe can no longer tell the difference between having a position and staging one.

Sebastian Contin Trillo-Figueroa is a Hong Kong-based geopolitics strategist with a focus on Europe-Asia relations.