Towards a strategic agenda for the E3

Beginning with the Iran nuclear dialogue, France, Germany and the UK have used the E3 format for effective trilateral cooperation on a growing range of issues in recent years. In today’s challenging strategic environment, there are potentially further opportunities for Europe’s ‘big three’ to cooperate. But the end of the Brexit transition period means that the three countries now operate in a different context in which their objectives, priorities and constraints are less aligned. This makes it challenging to develop a strategic agenda for the E3. The E3 format cannot resolve the issue of the UK’s status outside the EU and the lack of an EU–UK agreement on foreign policy, security and defence. France and Germany are more comfortable using the format to cooperate with the UK on issues where EU policy is either absent or fragmentary, or where they see the UK as an indispensable partner. While London is looking for flexible ways of engaging with Paris and Berlin, it is also developing new avenues for addressing international security issues. All three countries want to maintain the E3’s crisis management aspects, as well as those related to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s nuclear programme. But all see risks in further broadening and deepening E3 cooperation: Paris and Berlin worry that it could undermine EU cohesion, London that it could bring the UK into undesired alignment with the EU. The format has greatest utility as a means of coordinating policies, especially on emergent topics and evolving crises. There is particular value in the E3 functioning as a kind of ‘working practice’ arrangement that can facilitate consultation, coordination and action. The E3 has a potentially important role in dealing with diplomatic and security issues beyond Europe, although it could still be used for informal consultations across the board. But rather than aiming at wider policy alignment, France, Germany and the UK are more likely to be able to develop a shared strategic agenda by identifying specific problems which they need to solve together. A key challenge for the E3 has always been how to include other EU member states and the EU itself. This legitimacy problem has become more acute post-Brexit. One way to solve it would be to ‘build out’ the E3 on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, the Biden administration’s reinvigoration of Euro-Atlantic ‘Quad’ consultations that bring together France, Germany, the UK and the US demonstrates a central and increasing role for the E3 in transatlantic security dialogue.