EGMONT POLICY BRIEF 362 Geopolitics and Geography: A Realigned EU Strategy for Stability in the Middle East

Digital technology, The lesson for the EU is a simple one: A values-based ease of air travel (bypassing the unpleasant geographic approach to geopolitics should be firmly anchored, first realities on the ground), combined with over three and foremost, in the realities of geography and the decades of peace in Europe, and 50 years in the Middle maps as they exist today. [...] CONUNDRUM Applying the logic of the primacy of geography and maps in geopolitics, the incoming Commission should resist the On 7 October 2023 (as indeed on 24 February 2022 in temptation to deal one-dimensionally with the current Ukraine) geography reasserted its primacy, unfortunately crisis in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean, with a violent, illegal and criminal actions. [...] The truth is of their magnitude from the domestic to the global, are: EGMONT POLICY BRIEF 362 | GEOPOLITICS AND GEOGRAPHY: A REALIGNED EU STRATEGY FOR STABILITY IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN domestic Israeli politics, the Israeli-Palestinian-Hezbollah/ a virtual geographic military “neighbour” of Isreal’s by Lebanon conflict, the Israeli- Iranian conflict, and the being present, thr. [...] The JCPOA, a “blueprint” for tackling in the Levant, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle the Iran-related challenges in their global dimension, East, and to defend and promote the EU’s manifest and was born. [...] The EU seemed to have simply The future geopolitical settlement in the Middle East accepted the Obama Adminstration’s global logic for the will have a direct and very significant bearing on the EU JCPOA, that left out the local and regional dimensions, beyond the narrow political confines of humanitarian, despite the fact that the EU, and member states, had, terrorism and immigration issues, and i.