European leaders have doubled down on their insistence that they will not be sucked into the conflict in Iran, despite repeated demands from the Trump administration for help to unblock the Strait of Hormuz.
France and other Nato countries have declined to take part in any US plan to send warships into the Gulf to reopen the key shipping route, which supplies a fifth of the world’s oil and gas.
Tit-for-tat strikes on gasfields in Iran, Qatar and neighbouring countries have separately heightened concern the war may cause lasting damage to oil and gas production in the region, prolonging the short-term shock to the global energy market.
A recent strike by Israel on South Pars, a huge gasfield shared by Iran and Qatar, drew retaliatory attacks on Qatar’s gas facilities from Tehran.
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US president Donald Trump has threatened to “massively blow up” the entire South Pars site if Iran continues to attack neighbouring countries’ energy sites.
French president Emmanuel Macron said the destruction of the region’s oil and gas production facilities would have a “much more lasting impact” than a temporary closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The French leader called for the US and Iran to agree to refrain from strikes on energy infrastructure.
There are diverging views at EU level about launching a diplomatic push with the Iranian regime to secure safe passage for ships carrying oil to Europe, as China and India have done.
Iran closed off the strait shortly after the US and Israel started the war nearly three weeks ago.
“We didn’t start this,” Macron said on Thursday, before heading into a summit of the EU’s 27 leaders in Brussels.
“None of the European countries have been involved and we don’t want to get drawn into a conflict that we have not been consulted about,” Luc Frieden, Luxembourg’s prime minister, said.
The summit is expected to be dominated by the energy crisis the war in Iran had set off.
Governments across Europe are mulling short-term interventions to insulate households and industry from the worst of the spiralling fuel costs.
Belgium’s hard-right prime minister Bart De Wever said Europe would be in “deep trouble” if the steep prices bedded in. “We are very worried about the energy crisis, we were already worried before the start of the war,” he said.
A group of 10 countries, led by Italy and Poland, is making a push at the summit to get some relief on energy prices by easing part of the EU’s ambitious climate agenda.
The coalition of mostly central European states wants to relax the EU’s emissions trading system, which limits how much carbon certain industries can produce, through a system of allowances and offsets that can be purchased. The idea is to reward companies who swap fossil fuels for greener energy.
Another group of states – Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Spain and Portugal – will resist any backtracking on the union’s big climate commitments.
The emissions system has its roots in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an international pact on climate change that was a forerunner to the Paris Agreement.
Finland’s prime minister Petteri Orpo separately warned the war in the Middle East could pull the focus from Ukraine.
“Who benefits the most from this chaos and rising energy prices? It’s Russia,” he said. “That’s why we need to continue pressure against Russia and continue our strong support to Ukraine.”
