For years, the rising far right in Europe has wrapped itself in the language of sovereignty. Decorating itself with the national flag, it has promised to put national interests and national identity first. Its entire political vocabulary has revolved around the claim that it alone puts its own country before everything and everyone else.

The genocide in Gaza and the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon have exposed just how hollow that rhetoric always was.

In the United States, the war has once again shattered the illusion that Donald Trump’s part of the right wing is somehow less imperial, less militarist, or more committed to peace than the liberal establishment it claims to oppose. Similarly, in Europe, it has revealed that when Washington or Tel Aviv call, self-proclaimed sovereigntists suddenly lose all interest in sovereignty.

This war has already produced a repugnant death toll in the thousands and is setting the entire Middle East ablaze, with devastating consequences for the region and beyond. This also has knock-on effects on Europeans. Because of the war, energy prices are skyrocketing, economic instability is deepening, and a continent already hit by the repercussions of the war in Ukraine now faces the prospect of a second major conflict close to home, with all that this entails. All recent polling suggests broad public opposition in Europe to the war.

If Europe’s far right really believed its own rhetoric about national interest and independence, this would be the moment to prove it. Instead, it has done the opposite, falling obediently into line.

In Italy, that subordination has taken on an almost tragicomic form. When the war broke out, Guido Crosetto — the defense minister from Giorgia Meloni’s pro-Trump Fratelli d’Italia party — was in Dubai, reportedly for family reasons. He was unaware that the war was about to begin because, he admitted, the United States had not informed him of the imminent attack. He was stranded in Dubai, amid Iranian retaliation and closed airspace. The image was almost too neat: a senior minister of a government obsessed with national strength and prestige caught in the middle of a regional war whose timing and escalation had clearly been decided elsewhere. Even this humiliation did not stop Meloni’s far-right government from authorizing the use of US bases on Italian soil for the war on Iran, even if making vague and largely cosmetic distinctions about the limits of technical or logistical support. This happened in the same days that the Italian parliament approved a controversial new law equating many criticisms of Israel with antisemitism.

This is especially striking given Italy’s own history. During the second half of the twentieth century, despite the limits imposed by the Cold War, Italy had developed a foreign policy based on dialogue and cooperation with the Middle East, including with Palestine and Iran. That approach gave it a degree of sovereignty in foreign policy and a certain standing in the region, both of which have now been lost in an ever-deepening subservience to the United States and Israel.

The same pattern can be seen elsewhere. In the Netherlands, far-right leader Geert Wilders praised Israeli genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu for making the world safer by bombing Tehran, even reiterating that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, and attacked the Dutch government for not supporting the United States and Israel with sufficient diligence and immediacy. In Britain, anti-immigration politician Nigel Farage accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer of endangering the “special relationship” with Washington by showing some initial hesitancy in his support, warning that without the US, Britain would be “defenceless.” In Spain, the ultranationalist Vox party’s Santiago Abascal lamented that the Spanish government had “hindered” the bombings and angered Trump. Again and again, the parties that claim to put “nation first” have proven the most eager to betray their own people’s interests in order to appease Trump and Netanyahu.

In all this, the far right has become ever more closely aligned with the liberal-conservative establishment that governs the European institutions. The distance between them has been narrowing steadily for years, and this war has made that convergence even more visible.

Since the outbreak of the war, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has repeatedly condemned every Iranian attack in the region as “reckless,” “unjustifiable,” and “indiscriminate.” She airily speaks as though these were not retaliatory acts in response to US-Israeli strikes, which are hardly ever mentioned and never condemned. She has even welcomed the prospect that the war offers “renewed hope for the long-suffering people of Iran.”

The moral double standard of the European Union’s institutions is impossible to miss here. In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they constantly invoked the language of “the attacker and attacked,” along with the sanctity of international law. Yet that posture has now been abandoned entirely — already over the genocide in Gaza, and now over the war on Iran.

Yet in this bleak landscape, there has been a flicker of a defense of sovereignty. It has come not from the nationalist right but from the Left. Spain’s social democratic government headed by Pedro Sánchez, in coalition with junior partner Sumar, has been outspoken in opposing the war. It has denounced the attack on Iran as illegal and unjust, emphasized the severe economic and political costs for Europe, and refused to allow the United States to use Spanish bases on its territory for military operations. It is no surprise that this stance has enraged Trump and, with him, Spain’s own far right.

To be fair, there has also been criticism from the Left of Sánchez for not drawing all the necessary conclusions from such a pacifist position, above all regarding Spain’s membership in NATO. But we must also understand the isolation in which Spain currently finds itself within Europe on this issue. At a time when almost every major government has lined up behind the war, Spain’s position is a step in the right direction, reminding us what an actual sovereign posture looks like: not theatrical nationalism but the willingness to say no to imperial escalation even under immense pressure.

That is ultimately the lesson of this moment. For the Left, sovereignty has never meant hatred of migrants, militarism, or fantasies of ethnic and cultural homogeneity. It means popular sovereignty — and thus upholding European citizens’ preference for peace — as well as state sovereignty, both with regard to one’s own country and to others’, as a pillar of peace, cooperation, and international law. That is the only sovereignty worthy of the name.

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