Skip to content
Media coverage | 20 August 2019

Alice Billon-Galland quoted on the front page of De Volkskrant

Source: De Volkskrant

EU Europe JCPOA Transatlantic relations European Defence YGLN

ELN Policy Fellow Alice Billon-Galland gave an interview to the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant about a possible European military operation in the Strait of Hormuz.

See below the article on the front page of De Volkskrant.

 

Read a translated excerpt of the article below:

Last week Chancellor Merkel announced that a European Hormuz mission will be on the agenda during informal EU consultations in Helsinki at the end of August. According to Alice Billon-Galland of the European Leadership Network think tank, France was enthusiastic about a European mission until it turned out that it would be impossible without American assistance. Billon: “France wanted to prevent the US from being involved in any way, so as not to jeopardize its own position as an honest broker in the nuclear agreement with Iran.”

A recent study by a German think tank on European options describes two options: an observer mission and a security operation. The mission would swallow up nearly a third of the European naval capacity. Billon: ‘This discussion is a reality check for European defense cooperation. Europe needs more resources to be able to carry out its own operations in the way Europeans want. “

Related content

Default image
Media coverage

ELN Policy Fellow Katarina Kertysova interviewed by Euractiv

ELN Policy Fellow Katarina Kertysova was interviewed by Euractiv about a recent NATO survey looking at how citizens perceive the principles of collective defense, increasing funding, or working with the EU, Russia or China. She argued that the government and ministries in Slovakia must...

Commentary

Network reflections: What should we expect from the new German security strategy?

This month, Chancellor Shultz wrote, “Germans are intent on becoming the guarantor of European security that our allies expect us to be, a bridge builder within the European Union and an advocate for multilateral solutions to global problems”. But to do so requires a “new strategic culture” in Germany’s security strategy – What shifts should we expect in the new Security Strategy and where do the main challenges lie?

Default image
Media coverage

ELN Policy Fellow Alice Billon-Galland in De Volkskrant

On the day of the second ministerial meeting of the European Intervention Initiative (E2I) in the Netherlands, Alice Billon-Galland spoke to Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant about what is at stake for France and what E2I means for European security.