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‘Houston, we have a problem’: Was the EEAS set up to fail?

Past and present challenges combine to make the EU’s foreign policy wing the bloc’s most difficult child.

By SEBASTIAN STARCEVIC, JACOPO BARIGAZZI, NICHOLAS VINOCUR

and ZOYA SHEFTALOVICH

in Brussels

Illustration by Natália Delgado/ POLITICO

The seeds of the EU diplomatic corps’ current challenges were sown two decades ago.

Today, past and current staff describe an institution plagued by internal tensions, ebbing morale, growing criticism over its effectiveness and a turf war between its boss, Kaja Kallas, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

But these problems did not begin with the current leadership. The arguments over its structure and governance even predate the body itself.

“Setting aside Kallas, von der Leyen and the rest, we effectively have a ‘Houston, we have a problem’ situation,” said Nathalie Tocci, a former special advisor to Kallas’ predecessors Federica Mogherini and Josep Borrell and now a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, referring to the Apollo 13 mission’s catastrophic systems failure.

EU High Representative and Vice-President for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas answers questions in an interview at the EU headquarters in Brussels on June 3, 2026. | Nicolas Tucat/ AFP via Getty Images

Many of those who helped create the European External Action Service (EEAS) — or have worked inside it since — argue the predicament reflects a contradiction built into its founding.

Launched 16 years ago to give the EU a stronger and more coherent foreign policy voice, the EEAS was born of compromise: Governments wanted Europe to speak more forcefully abroad but were unwilling to surrender enough control over foreign policy to create a fully-fledged EU foreign ministry. The result was a diplomatic service with broad expectations but limited authority, caught between competing institutions and rival national interests. As the demands on EU diplomacy have grown, so too have the consequences of that original compromise.

“You don’t need to be a university professor to see that European foreign policy is in trouble and isn’t functioning as it should,” said Hylke Dijkstra, professor of international security and cooperation at Maastricht University. “The setup in Brussels is suboptimal.”

Read more in our series on the battle over the EU’s diplomatic service:

Why the EEAS is fighting for its future

Berlin and Paris push to make EU foreign policy great — somehow

‘A mess’: Kallas predecessor Borrell accuses Commission of overstepping on foreign policy

Stronger and more coherent

The EEAS was born out of a political compromise in the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, which came into force in December 2009 and created the union we know today. It was then formally established by a Council decision in 2010. Those agreements created a beefed-up high representative role ― now the Kallas job ― and a diplomatic service to support it. But the EEAS is neither a conventional EU institution nor a traditional foreign ministry.

“Already at that time it was quite clear … that this system had significant structural and systemic problems,” said a former senior EEAS official who joined the service at its inception. “It was always a bit of constructive ambiguity.” Like others in this article, this official was granted anonymity to speak to POLITICO, as many of the issues under discussion are sensitive and officials are generally not authorized to speak to the media.

Pedestrians walk past the European External Action Service building in Brussels on December 2, 2025. | Nicolas Tucat/ AFP via Getty Images

As Pierre Sellal, France’s powerful ambassador to the EU for 10 years, who was deeply involved in the negotiations to design the EEAS, told POLITICO for the article on June 29 , it was “hashed out in a messy compromise at three in the morning.”

Those pushing for the EEAS’s creation wanted the EU to speak with a stronger and more coherent foreign policy voice — traditionally the preserve of national capitals. And part of today’s perceived weaknesses lies in the fudge agreed by leaders of the time, who weren’t fully ready to give up sovereignty on the issue.

The service sits awkwardly between the Commission, the Council and 27 EU member countries, with divided lines of authority and clashing competencies. About two-thirds of the EEAS’s 5,000 staff, who are based at its Brussels headquarters or spread across EU missions and delegations around the world, come from the Commission and the EU institutions on permanent contracts, while around one-third are diplomats seconded from member countries, typically for four-year stints.

These days, as officials rise through the ranks, diplomats from EU countries increasingly dominate senior positions, while Commission officials often feel they lack backing from either Brussels or national capitals, said the former official.

That awkward arrangement has fostered acrimony on both sides. “The basic problem has never been resolved ― this imbalance,” said the official.

People power

The tension has fueled disappointment among employees, and a feeling that the EEAS isn’t quite working as it should, said four former — and one currently serving — officials. Across Brussels, staff at the EU institutions frequently complain about morale, but the mood in the EEAS seems particularly low.

“When I moved, I was told this is where you end your career,” said the first official, adding it was difficult to get a job at other institutions after the EEAS.

The service has been in a state of “severe dysfunction” for several years, stretching back to the tenure of former Secretary-General Stefano Sannino, who served under both Borrell and Kallas, a serving senior EEAS official told POLITICO.

There is a culture of favoritism in appointments and postings, with inexperienced officials elevated to management roles while resources are misallocated, said this official, adding that hundreds of employees, or about 8 percent of the workforce, were on leave for stress-related matters.

POLITICO was unable to obtain official confirmation of the number regarding stress-related leave. The Commission said this data doesn’t exist.

The “allegation is completely unfounded,” European Commission Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Anouar El Anouni, who handles queries about the EEAS, told POLITICO.

“No such statistic exists, neither for EEAS nor European Commission, as absences for medical reasons are protected by medical confidentiality,” he said. “The EEAS has adopted strict standards on staff well-being, alongside a robust anti-harassment policy. Appointments are merit-based and in full compliance with the staff regulations.”

Meanwhile, Kallas warned in 2024 that the cash allocated for the EEAS, about €1 billion, “leaves us with a significant hole, and we will have to continue with our strict austerity measures.”

The EEAS faced massive budget shortfalls for years, said the senior official, adding the financial crunch got so bad that during the winter of 2023, when energy prices surged following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EEAS was unable to heat its Brussels headquarters.

This claim is “nonsense,” Commission spokesperson Anitta Hipper countered. “The EEAS implemented energy-saving measures in line with those adopted across the EU institutions. This included maintaining indoor temperatures at 19°C.”

The EEAS HQ itself — the postmodern Triangle building on Brussels’ Schuman roundabout — has become emblematic of the service’s lofty expectations clashing with reality. The first high representative, Britain’s Catherine Ashton, had settled for it after the EU rejected her requests to house the EEAS in the Council’s Lex building and the Commission’s Charlemagne building.

“It’s one of the battles Ashton lost,” said Dijkstra.

All the way to the top

The tension is not just among the rank and file. Ambiguity and questions of performance plague the very top of the diplomatic service ― and have done so right from the start.

“If you don’t know who is in charge of what, you cannot expect to be assertive,” Josep Borrell, head of the EEAS between 2019 and 2024, told POLITICO . “The first thing to do is to say, what do we want to do?”

Since its creation, the EEAS has been led by four high representatives ― often informally called the EU foreign policy chief or chief diplomat ― each serving a five-year term.

Ashton, who served from 2009 to 2014, was tasked with building the body from scratch. Before becoming the U.K.’s European commissioner, Ashton had served as an unelected junior minister in the governments of former prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown — hardly the background, critics argued at the time, for one of the world’s top diplomatic jobs.

Former High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton arrives for a joint press conference after a meeting gathering foreign affairs ministers on May 10, 2010, at the EU headquarters in Brussels. | JohnThys/ AFP via Getty Images

“She was a Labour peer widely judged to be out of her depth,” said a BBC News report from her time in office. “She was ill at ease before the cameras and wary of the media and, early on, chose poor advisers. In the Brussels bubble she was discounted.”

Ashton herself later acknowledged that she arrived in Brussels with “few obvious credentials and lukewarm support,” but argued that building the EEAS was always going to be an unprecedented challenge.

Just a year into her tenure, Ashton’s leadership drew mixed reviews from capitals, culminating in a critical paper signed by the foreign ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden and seven other member countries.

The 12 ministers, who said they wanted to help the EEAS “develop its full potential,” criticized everything from poorly organized foreign affairs councils to the scarcity of policy papers, warning the service risked becoming “a new structure disconnected from the member states.”

While Ashton’s tenure is viewed far more positively in hindsight — she won plaudits for helping broker the Serbia-Kosovo dialogue, cultivated a close working relationship with then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and was praised for leading talks on Iran’s nuclear program — the arguments over her leadership reflected the political battles over what the EU’s fledgling diplomatic service was supposed to be.

Hard to escape the criticism

Ashton’s successors scarcely fared any better in navigating the difficulties of the role while they were in it.

Italy’s Mogherini took over from 2014 to 2019. She had at least served as Italy’s foreign minister, albeit for only eight months. Mogherini also played a central role in the Iran nuclear negotiations but was criticized for being soft on Russia , and she has since been caught up in a fraud probe that led her to resign as rector of the College of Europe in 2025. Mogherini has not been convicted and has denied the allegations .

Spain’s Borrell took over from 2019 to 2024. He had also been his country’s top diplomat ― for a year and a half. His tenure earned praise for helping Europe speak with one voice after Russia invaded Ukraine, but it was also marked by what many EU officials and politicians claimed were some diplomatic gaffes .

Former European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini addresses a press conference after a bilateral meeting with Indonesia Foreign Minister at the European Union Commission in Brussels on December 14, 2017. | Riccardo Pareggiani / AFP via Getty Images

Kallas has been in the post since 2024. And under the former Estonian prime minister, who some diplomats feared might be too Russia-obsessed even before she was confirmed — “If you ask Kallas where Africa is, she might tell you it’s south of Russia,” quipped one senior European diplomat — the role has increasingly clashed with those of the chiefs of the European Council and particularly the Commission.

Those competing mandates are so well known that when Kallas and von der Leyen gave a joint press conference announcing sanctions against Moscow in 2025, a senior Commission official at the time said it was proof the two could put their differences aside and work together despite their obvious “tensions.”

Kallas has also irritated other commissioners and leaders with her outspokenness, from reportedly comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid to likening China’s trade practices to a “cancer .”

“The high representative, while having a foot in the Commission as VP [vice president], also has that treaty authority and mandate to do things on their own,” said Dijkstra. “And this is what’s causing quite a number of problems.”

Treaty change?

The EEAS’s difficulties are compounded by its peculiar position in the EU’s legal architecture. The service itself occupies only a small place in the treaties that form the bloc’s basis.

That means reform is possible with a simple decision by the EU’s 27 leaders. “You don’t need to change the treaty to do something with the EEAS,” said Dijkstra. “You just need a Council decision which requires unanimity.”

Some current and former officials have even floated abolishing the EEAS in its current form and folding it back into the Commission.

“Probably merging the EEAS with the Commission” would make sense, argued Dijkstra, particularly given its problems with administration, budget and institutional standing.

Others are less radical but agree that reform is needed.

“It is in the Commission’s interest to have a strong-performing EEAS,” said the second former senior official. “You need strong diplomats.”

Yet any overhaul would also have to confront a more fundamental question: what EU diplomacy is actually good for.

The second official argued that European diplomacy had failed to adapt to a changing world, with EU representatives approaching partners with abstract, values-based talking points rather than concrete interests.

“When you meet a Chinese or Vietnamese counterpart, he looks at you and says: ‘Really?'” said the official. “Usually people come with specific asks. We come with generic statements,” such as “’improve democracy.’”

That also means the body lacks clear objectives and accountability, the official argued.

“In most European Commission services they ask you very clearly … what you will achieve in one or two years,” said the official. “Do we know where we want to be with Afghanistan in one year’s time, or anywhere in the world? It’s very hard to see where you are succeeding or not.”

There has been a slow decline in the quality of EEAS diplomats too, said Dijkstra.

“In the early days, member states really did send some of their most senior personnel to the EEAS.” Today, however, “if you’re currently in the foreign service [of a member state], a secondment to the EEAS is not a good career move.”

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