For years, Europe’s rising far-right parties have wrapped themselves in the language of sovereignty. Draped in their respective national flags, each has promised to put national interests and national identity above all else. France’s Rassemblement National deploys the slogan “Les Français d’abord,” meaning “the French first,” while Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland follows suit with “Deutschland zuerst.” In her first postelection speech, Giorgia Meloni, leader of Italy’s governing party, Fratelli d’Italia, promised to “start from national interests,” asserting it as a bedrock principle from which all other considerations must flow. The movement’s entire political vocabulary revolves around the claim that only the European far right can defend domestic priorities against pressures from abroad.

The genocide in Gaza and the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon have laid bare the hollowness of that rhetoric. In the United States, the new war has once again disproven the notion that Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is less imperial, less militarist, or more committed to peace than the liberal establishment. In Europe, it has revealed that when Washington or Tel Aviv calls, self-proclaimed sovereigntists suddenly lose all interest in national independence.

The war on Iran is setting the entire Middle East ablaze, with devastating consequences, and Europe is not immune from the reverberations. A continent already suffering repercussions from the war in Ukraine now faces the fallout from a second major conflict close to home. As energy prices skyrocket, all polling suggests broad public opposition in Europe to the US-Israeli war. If Europe’s far right really believed its own rhetoric about national interest and independence, now would be the moment to prove it. Instead it has fallen obediently into line.