On October 7, 2023, at 6:29 a.m., Israel paid the price for a failure that was not of intelligence. It was of imagination. For years, Hamas had broadcast its intentions openly: in its charter, in its military parades, in the tunnels it dug, and the rockets it stockpiled. Nobody missed the signals. What failed was the political will to believe that a declared enemy means what it says.
Europe should recognize this failure. It has made it before.
In the 1930s, Europe watched a hostile ideology announce itself in plain language and chose not to believe it. It sent diplomats, signed agreements, and told itself that accommodation was wisdom. It was not. It was the most catastrophic strategic miscalculation in modern history, and it was entirely avoidable.
Today, Europe is making the same calculation about Iran. The declarations are just as explicit. “Death to Israel. Death to America. Death to the West.”
These are not internal slogans for domestic consumption. They are a statement of strategic intent from a regime that has spent four decades building the infrastructure to act on them through Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and a network of terror cells that European security services have been quietly disrupting for years in Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, and Tirana.
The question is not whether Europe understands the threat. It is whether Europe has decided, once again, to look away.
Europe is not watching from a distance – it is already in the war
Let us be precise about what is happening right now, in 2026, on Europe’s doorstep.
Iranian-manufactured drones are striking civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. This is not an allegation; it has been confirmed by EU member states’ own intelligence assessments and by forensic evidence recovered from the wreckage. Iran is an active belligerent in a war being fought on the eastern edge of the European continent.
In the Red Sea, Houthi forces – armed, directed, and sustained by Tehran – are disrupting global shipping lanes, forcing vessels to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope, and driving up costs borne by European consumers and businesses. This is not a Middle Eastern problem. It is a direct economic assault on Europe, conducted by an Iranian proxy, in plain sight.
And at home, European security services have spent recent years in a quiet race against Iranian-linked assassination plots and terrorist networks operating on European soil. The infrastructure is there. The intent has been demonstrated repeatedly. The threat is not imported; it is resident.
Europe is not a bystander. It is a target that has not yet decided to take the fact seriously.
The JCPOA: a well-intentioned failure
Europe invested enormous political capital in the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). The intention was sound engagement over isolation, and verified constraints over unchecked development. But the outcome requires an honest assessment.
Iran used the period of sanctions relief to accelerate its ballistic missile program, which was deliberately excluded from the agreement. Enrichment levels rose. The centrifuge counts increased. The regional proxy network, which was never on the table, expanded dramatically in capability and reach. The JCPOA did not constrain Iran’s strategic ambitions. It provided the economic breathing room to advance them.
A nuclear Iran is no longer a theoretical worst case. It is the near-term trajectory of current policy. And a nuclear Iran would function precisely as North Korea does, operating below the threshold of direct confrontation, providing an umbrella for proxy violence, and exporting its destabilizing technology to the highest bidder. But with one critical difference: Iran’s missiles have already reached Cyprus. European capitals are not out of range. They never were.
Israel has been fighting on the front line of this confrontation not by choice, but by geography and by the declared intentions of its enemies. It has paid for that position in blood. What it has not received, in adequate measure, is the strategic solidarity of allies who benefit from the same security architecture it is helping to sustain.
Three things need to change in European policy.
Europe must stop treating condemnation of Israeli military action as a substitute for a coherent Iran strategy. Criticizing the response while ignoring the threat that necessitates it is not neutrality; it is a policy that Tehran reads, correctly, as an invitation to continue.
Europe must acknowledge that the JCPOA framework has failed and that a new approach to Iranian nuclear ambitions is required – one built on verified behavior, not diplomatic optimism.
And Europe must recognize that the assumption of indefinite American security guarantees, while publicly distancing itself from American and Israeli decisions, is neither strategically sustainable nor politically viable in Washington.
Churchill, who watched Europe make its accommodation with aggression in the 1930s, understood the underlying dynamic precisely:
“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”
Europe has been feeding the crocodile for years. From Jerusalem, we can see it getting hungry.
The writer is the CEO of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA), a Jerusalem-based think tank founded in 1976.