Let’s rewind to 2017. Picture a panel discussion at the Tweeps Forum in Riyadh — a gathering of global power brokers talking about extremism and social media. The UAE’s Foreign Minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, leaned into his microphone, looked at the audience, and decided he’d had enough of the diplomatic niceties. He even switched from Arabic to English mid-speech — just to make sure no one could claim they didn’t understand him.
“There will come a day when we see far more radicals, extremists and terrorists coming from Europe because of a lack of decision-making, and trying to be politically correct,” Arab News he said. He didn’t stop there. He warned that countries failing to address the problem should be publicly identified and classified as “incubators of terror,” and pointed out that voices calling for bloodshed were being broadcast openly from London, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Arab News
The reaction from European capitals at the time? Polite dismissal. Human rights groups pushed back. Critics called it overreach. And Europe went right on doing what it had always done — absorbing, accommodating, and reassuring itself that it understood the complexities of Islam and immigration better than anyone else.
The minister’s exact words on that point were blunt. He said the problem stemmed from Europe “assuming that they know the Middle East, and they know Islam, and they know the others far better than we do.” His verdict? “That’s pure ignorance.” Foreign Policy
Fast forward nearly a decade and those words don’t sound like a political opinion anymore. They sound like a weather forecast that nobody wanted to believe.
The Prophecy That Came True And Then Some
When a popular account on X posted a short clip of that speech years later, it reached over 67 million viewers. Commentators called his words “prophetic.” All Arab News Even Elon Musk weighed in approvingly. The resurgence of interest in that 2017 clip wasn’t nostalgia — it was recognition. Europe had watched the Amsterdam violence of late 2024, had seen radical networks exposed across the continent, and had begun, quietly and uncomfortably, to reckon with the fact that the UAE minister might have been right all along.
The political correctness Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed called out wasn’t just social awkwardness. It was a structural failure — a refusal by European governments to draw lines, name problems, or make hard calls, all out of fear of being labeled intolerant. The irony, of course, is that this same paralysis has now produced the very intolerance those governments feared most.
So Why Is Europe on the Sidelines in Iran?
Here’s where it gets interesting — and frankly, a little uncomfortable for Brussels.
Right now, as the United States and Israel have dramatically reshaped the situation with Iran, Europe finds itself at a point of near-total sidelining when it comes to shaping Iran policy. Chatham House The United States initiated nuclear talks with Iran without consulting its European allies, raising concerns in Paris, Berlin, and London. Modern Diplomacy There were no European negotiators in the room. France stated its intention to participate but was not included in the talks. Wikipedia
Let that sink in. The Europeans — who spent more than two decades as central architects of the nuclear diplomacy framework, who championed the JCPOA, who see themselves as the world’s indispensable multilateralists — got shut out entirely. Qatar, Egypt, Turkey, Oman, the UAE, even Pakistan got a seat at the table. Not Europe.
Why? The official explanation is transactional — Trump prefers bilateral dealmaking, the E3 (France, Germany, UK) have been seen as unreliable partners since diverging from Washington over Ukraine, and European leverage is limited since they can neither bomb Iran nor write it a sanctions-relief check. But there’s a deeper current running beneath all of this that nobody in polite European society wants to talk about openly.
Europe’s reaction to the Iran crisis has been disunited and meek, a far cry from its previously leading role in diplomacy with Tehran. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace While European countries have found common ground in condemning Iran’s retaliatory strikes, their positions have been confused and incoherent in reaction to the U.S.-Israeli actions that triggered them. Al Jazeera German Chancellor Friedrich Merz publicly aligned with the American position, stating that recalling international law was irrelevant, and that Europeans should stop criticizing U.S. conduct. Al Jazeera Meanwhile, Spain held to principles. France hedged. The EU Commission called for de-escalation. Nobody moved together, and the result was irrelevance.
Is some of that paralysis driven by fear of what a confrontation with Iran might stir up domestically? It’s a fair question. Europe has millions of Muslim citizens, significant populations from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco, Algeria, and beyond. European governments have spent years threading the needle between external foreign policy and internal community relations. Any hard move on Iran — any perceived alliance with Israel, any militaristic posture — risks becoming a flashpoint on European streets. And European governments know it.
That’s not Islamophobia. That’s the consequence of years of political miscalculation that Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed warned about back in 2017. When you never draw the line between political Islam and violent extremism — when you treat every critique of ideology as an attack on a people — you eventually lose the ability to make foreign policy without looking over your shoulder at your own cities.
The Deportation Vote: Europe Finally Hitting the Alarm
Then came the end of March 2026, and suddenly the EU Parliament did something nobody who’s followed European politics for the last decade expected: it voted like a country that was genuinely scared.
The European Parliament approved a law aimed at speeding up the return of irregular migrants by building deportation centers outside the EU, alongside stricter rules reflecting a shift in political priorities as Europe pivots to the right. Euronews Members of the European Parliament voted 389 to 206 in favor, with 32 abstentions. The Washington Post
The law increases the legal detention period to up to two years and imposes entry bans on returned migrants. It enables EU countries to return irregular migrants to third countries unrelated to their origin, as long as bilateral agreements are in place to build so-called “return hubs” in those territories. Euronews
Far-right parties across Europe praised the move, and it was the mainstream conservative European People’s Party aligning with far-right groups that pushed it over the finish line. France 24 That coalition would have been unthinkable in Europe’s political culture just five years ago. The cordon sanitaire — the informal agreement among centrist parties not to cooperate with the far right — is gone.
One ECR lawmaker declared simply: “The era of deportations has begun.” ECR Group
| Europe is waking up to a new consensus: illegal migrants will be returne…Weimers: “The era of deportations has begun.” |
Now, reasonable people can debate the human rights dimensions of this legislation, and the critics raising concerns about people being sent to countries they’ve never set foot in deserve to be heard. But let’s not pretend this vote happened in a vacuum. It happened because European voters, across nearly every member state, have been sending one message consistently for years — and their governments are finally listening, not out of ideological enthusiasm, but out of raw political survival instinct.
Connecting the Dots
Here’s the thread running through all of this: Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed wasn’t just warning Europe about security. He was warning them about credibility. He was saying that a continent that refuses to be honest about problems it can see clearly — in its own cities, in its own mosques, in its own neighborhoods — will eventually lose the ability to act at all.
And that’s exactly what happened. Europe spent years being too politically correct to name the problem at home, too afraid of domestic blowback to make hard moves abroad, and too fractured internally to project any unified foreign policy weight. The result? Sidelined on Iran. Paralyzed on domestic extremism. And now rushing to build deportation hubs in Africa to make up for a decade of inaction — a decade the UAE minister saw coming before most European leaders had even acknowledged the weather was changing.
The March deportation vote might signal that Europe is finally waking up. But the question hanging over all of it is whether they’ve waited so long that the tools left available to them are blunt ones — ones built more for optics than outcomes — while the diplomatic table on Iran gets set without them.
The man from Abu Dhabi said it in plain English, nine years ago. Europe didn’t want to hear it then. The price of that choice is being paid right now, on multiple fronts at once.
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