The war that spread out from the US and Israel’s strikes on Iran felt a whole lot closer to one state in the European Union.
The first thing that struck me when travelling to Cyprus earlier this year was just how far away it actually is from the rest of the bloc.
The distance between the small Mediterranean island and Turkey to the north, and then Syria to the east, is roughly the same as the gap between Dublin and Holyhead, give or take a few kilometres.
The republic of Cyprus government was right to be worried about the US decision to move against Tehran. An Iranian-made drone hit a UK airbase on Cyprus, believed to have been launched from Lebanon, and several other incoming drones had to be shot down in the early days of the war.
In the view of Iran and its proxy, Hizbullah, the presence of two sovereign British RAF bases on the island – there under the terms of a 1960 independence deal ending British rule – made Cyprus a legitimate target in the retaliatory attacks that also saw Iran launch a barrage of missiles at US-aligned Gulf states.
The drone attack, and the Trump administration’s threats about seizing Greenland, renewed a debate about the EU’s mutual assistance clause, which binds everybody else to aid a member state under attack.
A product of the Lisbon Treaty, the clause says an EU state subjected to an “armed aggression on its territory” can request help from the rest of the union, and obliges the others to send “aid and assistance by all the means in their power”.
There’s an important caveat for Ireland and other neutrals that such aid does not have to mean troops and tanks, but can be financial, diplomatic, technical or some other type of support. The government asking for help is supposed to spell out what it needs.
The emergency appeal has been triggered just once before – by France in the aftermath of the 2015 Paris terror attacks.
Ireland deployed troops abroad as a result of France’s request for help. The French government wanted to pull some forces it had overseas back home to help patrol the streets, and so asked EU countries to fill the gaps their departure would leave in missions in Syria, Iraq and Mali.
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Ireland agreed to increase the number of Defence Forces personnel it contributed to an EU mission training state security forces in Mali, from 10 to 18.
Putting the neutrals’ carveout to one side, it was “implicit” that other assistance should come in the form of military power, says Federica Fazio, a College of Europe postdoctoral assistant whose research focuses on the mutual assistance clause.
That implication was left open to interpretation, though, in comparison with Nato’s Article 5 guarantee, which commits countries to view an attack on one member of the US-led military alliance as an attack on the entire group.
It’s not set out exactly how the EU mutual defence clause should be invoked. There is no co-ordinating role for the European institutions in Brussels either. A lot is left flexible and up to national governments.
The European Commission said Greenland, part of the kingdom of Denmark, would be covered by the clause. That comment followed US threats to take the Arctic territory by force.
Fazio believes it is not clear if that is the case. The huge ice-covered island was a semi-autonomous overseas territory of Denmark that had voted to leave the EU in a 1982 referendum. “Legally speaking I don’t think the clause would apply,” she said.
Politically, though, EU states would certainly come to the aid of Denmark, in an extreme scenario where Copenhagen sought their help and the Nato alliance was defunct.
There was some expectation Cyprus might trigger the mutual assistance clause in response to the recent drone strikes, though in the end it didn’t need to.
Greece sent two naval frigates and several fighter jets to help defend against more drone attacks. The UK and France also sent warships to safeguard the skies above their European ally, a move that was followed by the Netherlands, Italy and Spain.
The experience has got officials in Brussels talking about getting a better collective understanding of how the mutual defence clause might work in practice.
Senior diplomats from each member state are planning to sit around a table and game out a few hypothetical scenarios, playing out their governments’ imaginary responses. “There has been different work ongoing at different levels about how do you operationalise it,” one source involved said.
Nikos Christodoulides, president of the republic of Cyprus, plans to raise the defence clause during a summit of EU leaders he’s hosting on Thursday. He will remind the rest of the room the drones launched at Cyprus last month were far from hypothetical.