"Stick close to your desk,
and never go to sea
and you can be a ruler
in the Euro Navy"
The Americans Did It... [Victor Davis Hanson]
The Iranian kidnapping happened at an odd time. The UK gets no meaningful EU proclamation of solidarity.
You can laugh at that, but the EU is Iran's largest trading partner and a cessation of commerce would do more than anything to weaken the theocracy.
NATO is oddly silent: the only member who could do anything is the US, and the British public has already made it clear it does not wish closer operational ties with us.
So what we are seeing is a sort of Islamist heckler at the parade of a Western emperor, screaming to the crowd about his majesty's nudity. All the Europeans have is soft power, but when that much vaunted "tool" is not used, then it is something softer than soft.
One of the more brilliantly bad things Iran has done is to remind the Europeans—the British, French, and Germans particularly—that their military assets are not assets when used far from home in solitary fashion. Instead because they are faux "military assets"—with their small size, number, and rules of engagement—they become liabilities that at any time could prompt a political crisis.
In the future, we should expect the following: greater demands from the European public to distance itself from the US (e.g. the fault for this crisis is our arrest of Iranians in Iraq, our failure to talk to Ahmadinejad, our war in Iraq, fill in the blanks) while at the same time greater demands from European admirals and generals only to venture out from their ports while in convoy with American ships or under cover of American air power.
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