Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has steadily sought more influence over EU foreign policy, clashing with Kaja Kallas on significant issues including the bloc's relations with Israel. A Franco-German proposal circulating in Brussels would formalize that shift, placing the EEAS under the European Commission president's supervision while expanding the High Representative's portfolio. Into that contested institutional landscape, Kallas chose last week to announce plans for a new defence advisory group. By this week, she was forced to abandon it.
Kallas announced the body at an informal gathering of EU defence ministers in Ireland around September 1. It would bring political and military leaders together to develop new approaches to European defence — ambitious in scope, but deliberately limited in authority.
"The aim is to have some of the brightest minds on security and defence come together and really provide out-of-the-box solutions on how we can be faster in fulfilling these gaps and how we can be more effective," she told reporters at the press conference.
The group was purely advisory. It held no authority over member states, no power to bind governments to any course of action. Several governments pushed back anyway. "Some member states felt this was not the right path to pursue at this moment," a source said.
The collapse was swift. Invitees had been scheduled to gather Monday, September 7, at a Brussels venue for a fireside chat with Kallas. They received word of the cancellation Sunday afternoon. Participants had never been publicly identified. The group never officially launched.
For the EEAS, the episode is damaging on two levels. Kallas had only recently assembled a new leadership team at the foreign policy service to reinforce her standing — the advisory panel's cancellation before its first meeting is a public indication of her limits within the bloc.
The cancellation comes as von der Leyen seeks a greater role in foreign affairs. The available reporting does not establish a direct link between the Commission's ambitions and the decision to abandon the group.
An EU official steered the conversation back to the central problem. "The diagnosis has not changed that Europe needs to deliver faster on defence. Europe still needs to confront the question the group was designed to address, how to strengthen European defence faster."
A defence advisory group announced publicly in Ireland and cancelled quietly on a Sunday afternoon in Brussels — the sequence tells its own story about where authority over European foreign policy actually sits.
