This week in Santa Marta, Colombia, fifty governments sit down for the first conference in history dedicated solely to transitioning away from fossil fuels. Europe will be well represented. It usually is. The question — as it was after Moscow, and again after Tehran — is whether Europe arrives to lead, or to be seen leading. Those are not the same thing.
There is a pattern worth naming before the first plenary opens in Santa Marta.
Europe arrives at the energy transition debate carrying the moral authority of a continent that has suffered for its dependencies — and the credibility problem of one that keeps suffering for the same reason. Moscow. Tehran. Two shocks, one generation apart, both entirely foreseeable, both met with the same scramble: emergency LNG contracts, hastily reframed industrial policy, and a political narrative that retrospectively repackages panic as strategic pivot.
This is not leadership. It is crisis management dressed in the language of ambition. And at a moment when Colombia, the Netherlands, and roughly fifty countries are gathering to have an honest conversation about what transitioning away from fossil fuels actually requires, Europe cannot afford to show up playing the role it has played before: the well-intentioned latecomer who mistakes deliberation for sophistication.
The Russian gas lesson was available in 2014
When Russia annexed Crimea, the structural vulnerability of European energy dependence on a single authoritarian supplier became impossible to ignore. It was analysed, reported, warned about. The IEA flagged it. Think tanks flagged it. Governments acknowledged it in the small print of energy security reviews and then, with remarkable consistency, returned to the business of cheap gas and infrastructure lock-in.
The full cost of that choice arrived in February 2022, when the invasion of Ukraine forced a genuine reckoning — not with the transition, but with the dependency. What followed was not an acceleration of climate ambition. It was a global hunt for replacement fossil fuels. New LNG terminals. New suppliers. The same logic, reshuffled.
The transition was held hostage to the emergency of the moment, which was itself the product of failing to pursue the transition sooner. This is the loop Europe has not broken.
Tehran closes the argument
The energy crisis triggered by the US-Israel military action against Iran in February 2026 is, by the IEA's own assessment, more serious than the shocks of 1973, 1979 and 2022 combined. For import-dependent economies — and Europe is structurally among them — this is not a new category of risk. It is the same category of risk, arriving again, with higher stakes.
The honest question is not why this happened. The honest question is why, after Moscow, the architecture of European energy dependence was not fundamentally restructured. The answer is political economy: transition is expensive in the short term, disrupts existing interests, and requires governments to absorb costs that are visible before the benefits are. So the benefits were deferred, and the costs accumulated quietly until they arrived all at once.
The food security dimension
Fossil fuel price volatility does not stay in the energy sector — it travels directly into food systems through fertiliser costs, cold chain infrastructure, and agricultural energy inputs. The Iran shock is already doing this. For countries where smallholder agriculture remains the floor beneath household food security, an energy crisis is a food crisis within months.
This link is not incidental. The same structural dependency that leaves European households exposed to energy price spikes leaves smallholder farmers in West Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America exposed to input cost collapses that destroy livelihoods within a single season. Any transition architecture that treats energy and food as separate policy tracks is not serious about development. Santa Marta has an opportunity to make that connection explicit — and to resist the temptation to frame transition narrowly as a mitigation objective when it is, at its core, a question of who absorbs systemic risk and who does not.
The "coalition of the willing" trap
The framing that has attached itself to Santa Marta: a "coalition of the willing, countries ready to act, progressive versus obstructionist" - is precisely the framing that will limit the conference's impact if Europe leans into it.
It is also, bluntly, self-serving. Europe showing up as part of a willing vanguard conveniently positions it on the right side of history while obscuring the fact that it is still building LNG infrastructure, still negotiating gas supply agreements, and still asking developing nations to absorb transition costs that European consumers have been slow to accept at home.
The framing also alienates the partners Europe actually needs. China and India are leading the world in clean energy deployment, even as their coal phase-out is partial and uneven. Positioning countries not yet in the coalition as outliers misreads both the politics and the data. Any serious conversation about global fossil fuel transition that marginalises Beijing and Delhi is a conversation about ambition, not outcomes.
Europe's credibility at Santa Marta depends on whether it can resist the comfort of that narrative and engage with what transition actually requires for countries whose circumstances are structurally different: fossil fuel exporters managing economic diversification on limited fiscal space, energy-importing developing nations balancing access and decarbonisation, and emerging economies where coal is still the floor beneath energy security.
That is not a conversation that benefits from moral hierarchy. It benefits from shared vulnerability, which, after Moscow and Tehran, Europe actually has.
The finance question is the real test
Europe has the instruments: Global Gateway, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, blended finance vehicles... and likely more to come along. The architecture exists, imperfectly, to make European capital a meaningful accelerant for transition in partner countries.
The numbers tell the story plainly:
The European Parliament's own committees have deplored the initiative's lack of transparency, its top-down approach to project selection, and its failure to reflect the needs of local partners. African observers have noted that funding concentrates in sectors aligned with EU demand for critical minerals rather than African development priorities. This is not partnership. It is demand management with a development label.
The consistent failure has been deploying those instruments at the speed and scale that the moment requires, rather than as cautious, conditionality-laden interventions that protect European interests first and catalyse transition second.
If Santa Marta produces anything durable, it will be a clearer picture of what national transition roadmaps actually need in terms of international support. That picture will include demands that European institutions find uncomfortable: reform of international investment agreements that currently allow fossil fuel companies to sue governments for transitioning away from them; genuine technology transfer rather than licensing arrangements that replicate dependency; and finance flows structured around development logic, not risk-adjusted return. Whether European delegations engage with those demands or deflect them will say more about European climate leadership than any declaration signed at the close of the conference.
What leadership would actually look like
It would look like Europe arriving with an honest accounting of its own transition gaps. Not as self-flagellation, but as the basis for credible partnership.
It would look like finance commitments structured around what recipient countries have said they need, not what donor institutions find administratively convenient.
It would look like supporting the COP30 Presidency's Global Roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels as a genuine multilateral instrument, not as a parallel process to be managed. And feeding outcomes from Santa Marta into the Second Global Stocktake with structured, granular national inputs — not high-level statements that obscure how much ground remains to be covered.
Most importantly, it would look like a Europe that has learned, finally, that fossil fuel dependency is not an energy problem. It is a security problem, an economic problem, a food systems problem, a sovereignty problem. Moscow made that argument. Tehran made it again, louder.
The transition is not a long-term aspiration for careful management. It is the most concrete form of risk reduction available to a continent that has twice paid the price of getting this wrong.