There is only so much indignity one woman should have to take. Kaja Kallas clearly doesn’t have the confidence of the European Council of national EU leaders who appointed her two years ago. They are making it impossible for her to do the job they tasked her to do. If I were her, I would resign rather than continue to participate in this EU farce.

Ahead of the European Political Community Summit in Dublin on Thursday, Ukrainian President Vladymyr Zelensky called for the EU to quickly decide who will represent Europe in the peace talks with Russia that have so far been organised by the US with the Europeans out of the loop. That should ideally be one single person, he suggested.

According to reports, he felt it was natural for that person to be Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign affairs chief. It is, after all, her job. Those same reports said he has been growing immensely frustrated that EU national leaders were blocking her from doing the job they appointed her to do in 2024, because she has been too hawkish on Russia.

He did not get his wish. At Friday’s European Council Summit in Dublin the EU’s 27 national leaders instead decided that Europe will be represented by a team of seven people at the table in the negotiations: the foreign ministers (or another delegate) of France, Germany, Britain, Poland and Italy, plus European Council President Antonio Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Not one of those seven will be the person whose job it actually is to represent the EU in foreign affairs, – Kaja Kallas. It will be European cacophony – a team that will almost certainly be shut out of the negotiations and deemed an irrelevance by the Americans and Russians. Zelensky did not get the one thing he wanted from Europe in Dublin: unity.

As I wrote on Friday, there are two reasons that national leaders are preventing the EU’s foreign affairs chief from representing the EU on this foreign affairs issue. For one, she is seen as too anti-Russian – concerns that were already raised about her when she was first being considered for the role in 2024.

“That’s a joke right?” one diplomat told Politico this week when asked why Kallas wasn’t being sent to the negotiations, adding she is “probably the worst person you could pick.” As I wrote on Friday, this begs the question: then why did you pick her in 2024?

The other reason is about a petty territorial pissing contest. France and Germany are blocking Kallas from doing the job they appointed her to do because this is part of a larger effort to sabotage her and her predecessors which has been going on for 17 years.

Despite having created the position as part of the EU Constitution-turned-Lisbon-Treaty in the 2000s in an effort to fix exactly this ‘who speaks for Europe’ question in situations like this, national governments have been steadily undermining the role ever since it was created in 2009.

Because their natural instinct is to jealously guard their national powers, even when it is very clearly against the long-term interest of Europe. The message sent by our leaders to the world on Friday is clear: the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs job is not real, and the EU doesn’t actually have a foreign policy.

Much ink has been spilled over the past week about whether Kallas has disqualified herself from being the EU’s negotiator in the Ukraine War because of her bombastic statements about Russia, which have included a call to dismantle the Russian state. I will not weigh in on whether that is fair or not.

What I want to explore here is the implications of EU national governments appointing someone who didn’t have their confidence and then blocking her from doing her job. If the national leaders who she is working for do not feel she is qualified to represent the union on the most important foreign policy issue facing Europe, why did they appoint her in 2024, and why don’t they fire her now?

Kallas herself pointed out the absurdity of the situation while speaking to reporters at yesterday’s European Political Community summit with President Zelensky in Brussels. “All the member states agreed that I’m the one who is representing Europe in foreign and security policy,” she said. “That was in 2024 when it was clear [that talks would be needed with Russia].

I know the Russians don’t want me, but do we have a say who is representing Russia? No we don’t.”

The tension between that 2024 choice and the current moment shows that national governments still don’t view her job to be real. They appointed her despite their misgivings because they never had any intention of letting the EU have a united voice on the world stage. She made that comment about breaking up Russia before the leaders appointed her as the EU’s foreign minister.

I and others reported what we were hearing from Western and Central European governments in the month leading up to that appointment, but the misgivings were treated as an irrelevance.

As I wrote in the “Let Kallas be Kallas” section in Chapter 12 of my book The Owned Continent, this is one of the biggest flaws of the European Union. The national governments know what the right thing to do is in the abstract, so they create these positions and institutions to make a stronger EU.

But then when the rubber hits the road, they undermine the positions and institutions they created because they always give in to the urge not to hand over power to someone else.

These 27 leaders in the European Council who…