Europe Drafts Post-American Security Plan as Iran War Shocks Spread

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, speaking at a Die Zeit anniversary event in Hamburg, said Europe must be "completed" to avoid falling under Russian, Turkish or Chinese influence — placing Türkiye, an EU candidate and NATO member, in the same category as Moscow and Beijing. On the same day, the Wall Street Journal reported that European officials, including French and German counterparts, are quietly developing contingency plans for a "European NATO" that could maintain deterrence against Russia if Washington withdraws troops, withholds support, or refuses to invoke Article 5. The talks involve Germany, the UK, France, Poland, the Nordics, and Canada and focus on who would take over air and missile defence, reinforcement routes, and nuclear credibility. European planners reportedly work to a 2029 Russian-threat timeline against a 2035 European-readiness target.

EU officials and three European politicians separately told reporters that Russia may test NATO within two years while the United States withdraws and the EU has not rebuilt its capacity. Finnish MEP Mika Aaltola said a targeted incursion calibrated to create Article 5 ambiguity was more likely than a full ground offensive. Defence Minister Boris Pistorius committed €1.35 billion to upgrade Bremerhaven port for military supply lines and called the move a "paradigm shift"; SPD deputy parliamentary leader Siemtje Möller called for E3 talks with France and the UK after President Donald Trump suspended the planned Tomahawk deployment in Germany and announced the withdrawal of more than 5,000 US troops.

At the European Political Community summit in Yerevan, French President Emmanuel Macron urged a coordinated international reopening of the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and the United States and questioned the unilateral US-led naval initiative announced earlier in the week, saying France would not join any military operation conducted under an unclear framework and that the parallel Franco-British plan would remain on hold while hostilities persisted.

Brent crude was at $126 per barrel on 4 May with the Strait of Hormuz fully closed. Patrick Pouyanné, chief executive of TotalEnergies, told Axios the strait's vulnerability had been "probably underestimated." Sam Ori, who worked on a 2007 Securing America's Energy Future exercise on oil shocks, said a full Hormuz closure had been "laughed out of the room" as not credible at the time. A 2022 IEA-linked task force on which Atlantic Council analyst Landon Derentz served while at the US Energy Department similarly rejected modelling the scenario, on the grounds that no single institution could coordinate the response. Daniel Yergin, a 2007 exercise participant, noted that drone-era anti-shipping risk did not exist when the models were built.

Iran's 28 February strikes on airports, seaports, oil installations, and desalination plants effectively closed Hormuz, fully blocking exports from Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar and impeding those of Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. The Coalition for Labour Justice for Migrants in the Gulf says at least 24 foreign workers have been killed in the Gulf and four in Israel since 28 February, with 20,000 seafarers stranded and 44 civilian seafarers killed in the strait standoff. Remittances from Gulf states sustain the household economies of Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal, and the disruption is feeding through to staple-food markets across Asia.

Türkiye's Istanbul Chamber of Industry manufacturing PMI fell to 45.7 in April from 47.9, the deepest production cut since the COVID-19 pandemic and the 25th straight month of contraction; annual Turkish CPI rose to 32.37 percent from 30.9 percent, above the Reuters-poll forecast of 31.25 percent. Germany's Ifo auto-sector confidence index fell 4.8 points to minus 23.8 with forward expectations almost halving to minus 30.7, and the German Mineral Resources Agency flagged 40 percent of EU helium imports — sourced from Qatar — as the central supply risk. UK food prices are on track to be 50 percent higher in November than in 2021, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit reported, with the Bank of England forecasting food inflation at 7 percent by year-end and the Food Foundation finding three million UK households already skipping meals.

The IAEA said a drone struck the External Radiation Control Laboratory at the Russia-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant on 3 May, the second incident close to the plant inside a week after a 27 April drone attack that killed a vehicle driver and triggered ZNPP's 15th loss of external power supply since the start of the full-scale war. A Russian Iskander missile killed five civilians and injured 19 in Merefa, Kharkiv Oblast, on 4 May. Russian oil revenue jumped to $19 billion in March on the Iran-war windfall, the International Energy Agency reported, but Russia's Finance Ministry still missed its baseline by 234.3 billion rubles ($3.12 billion).

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said Greece and Libya had agreed to advance technical-committee talks on delimiting the continental shelf and exclusive economic zone, a step that puts pressure on the 2019 Libya-Türkiye maritime accord and the four offshore blocks Türkiye's TPAO had begun surveying with Libya's NOC in June 2025.