As European and Ukrainian leaders firm up plans for possibile Western security guarantees in the event of an end to the Ukraine conflict on Thursday, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte warned against giving Russian leader Vladimir Putin any say in the matter.
Being very much a consensus based talk-shop of competing interests and varied points of view is both the EU’s weakness and it’s greatest strength: it takes ages for it to act but when it does, it does so in a far more organized way, with more staying power and better long term results than the “rush in, break shit up, rush out leaving it all broken” of players like the US (as seen in places like Iraq and Afghanistan).
The “American Way” has a lousy track record of delivering stability by itself (did it ever manage to do so after WWII?) whilst the EU Way has a lousy track record of actually going all the way to the stage of actually doing something (though it tends to act in ways other than the military).
In the long run I think the EU’s way delivers much better outcomes for everybody involved, if and when it does manage to get around to actually act in an assertive way.
In summary, then EU is pretty shit when it comes to immediate reaction and at actually doing anything but it works in long-running situations which are complex to untangle and creating long term stable outcomes.
A good example of the EU Way is the handling of the break up of Yugoslavia, though one could say it was more a cooperation of the American Way and the EU Way.