Slovenia's president calls the US-Israel war on Iran 'a mistake' — and asks Europe to start talking about its own defence

Slovenia's President Natasha Piruk Musar told reporters on 28 June 2026 that the war waged by the United States and Israel against Iran was "a mistake," and used the moment to argue that Europe should open a structured conversation on a common defence policy that reduces dependence on Washington. The remarks, carried in Persian-language coverage by Iranian outlets Fars News, Fars International and Tasnim between 18:24 and 19:05 UTC, are the bluntest on-record assessment of the conflict yet from a serving European head of state — and they re-open a debate about European strategic autonomy that EU institutions have been quietly shelving for two years.

The message is double-edged. On one side, it is moral: a sitting president, in a country that has been a NATO and EU member since 2004, is publicly dissenting from the framing used by the two states conducting the war. On the other side, it is institutional: Musar is using her platform to argue that the lesson of the war is not that Europe should rally behind the existing transatlantic architecture, but that it should diversify away from it. The two arguments are not the same, and they pull in different directions.

What Musar actually said

The Iranian outlets that carried her remarks frame them in pointed terms. According to a 19:05 UTC bulletin from Fars News International, the Slovenian president said the war was "a mistake" and called for "a dialogue about a common European defence policy." A near-identical bulletin from Fars at 19:01 UTC added the qualifier that this dialogue should also aim to reduce "dependence on America." Tasnim, writing at 18:24 UTC, summarised the position as: discussions on common European defence policy should be started, and dependence on America should be reduced.

All three Iranian state-adjacent outlets are reporting the same underlying remarks. That convergence does not by itself establish the exact wording of the original Slovenian statement, which the bulletin strings do not reproduce verbatim — the cited formulations are translations and compressions of the president's position into English. A reader should treat the phrase "a mistake" as the Iranian outlets' rendering of the president's characterisation, pending the Slovenian presidency's own read-out.

What is independently verifiable is the policy direction. Slovenia has held the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union in the past, and Ljubljana has historically been one of the smaller member states most cautious about loosening the EU's reliance on US extended deterrence. A shift in tone from that quarter is, by itself, a signal worth tracking.

The European frame

European strategic autonomy has been a slow-motion argument inside EU institutions for most of the past decade. It has surfaced in three distinct settings: the debate over whether the EU needs its own nuclear deterrent; the post-2022 push to ramp up European defence industrial production; and the more recent argument, sharpened by the war on Iran, about whether EU foreign policy should be coordinated through Brussels or through NATO.

Musar's intervention lands squarely in the third setting. By framing the war as a mistake and coupling that judgment with a call to reduce dependence on America, she is effectively arguing that the transatlantic bargain — Europe free-riding on US security guarantees while deferring to Washington on the use of force — is no longer stable, and that the war on Iran is the occasion to renegotiate it.

Two structural facts sit underneath that argument. First, the war has been conducted without a unified European position. Several EU governments have publicly distanced themselves from the operation; others have refrained from public comment while permitting overflight or basing rights to continue. The result is that Europe is, in practice, a logistical host to a war it has not endorsed in its own name. Second, the war has accelerated the cost of energy decoupling from the Gulf, with knock-on effects on European industrial competitiveness that have already been visible in the 2024-26 data on gas-intensive manufacturing.

What this is not

It would be a mistake to read Musar's remarks as a call for Slovenian, or European, neutrality on the merits of the war. The framing is institutional, not pacifist: she is not arguing that the war is wrong in principle, but that Europe should not be exposed to the consequences of decisions taken elsewhere. That distinction matters for how readers in Brussels, Washington and Tehran parse the remarks.

It would also be a mistake to treat the Iranian outlets' coverage as a neutral mirror of the event. Fars News, Fars International and Tasnim are all Iranian state-adjacent outlets, and the framing they have chosen — emphasising the anti-American register of the remarks and eliding the more procedural language about "dialogue" — is a framing that suits Tehran's preferred narrative about European disquiet. The underlying news is that a European head of state used those words; the choice of which words to lead with is an editorial decision on the Iranian side, not a Slovenian one.

The stakes

If the Slovenian intervention is treated as an isolated remark, it will pass quickly. If it is treated as an early signal of a wider European repositioning, the implications are larger. The EU is already wrestling with whether to issue collective political guidance on the war, whether to expand the use of euro-denominated sanctions instruments against third-country actors, and whether to fast-track the European Defence Industrial Strategy. A public call from a serving EU head of state to reduce dependence on the US armed forces would, in normal times, be diplomatically costly for the speaker. That she has judged the moment worth paying that price is itself the news.

The near-term question is whether other European heads of state or government follow. The medium-term question is whether the European Council, at its next ordinary meeting, places common defence on the agenda in a way it has avoided doing since the war began. The longer-term question is what "European defence" actually means once it is freed from the assumption that the United States will always be the senior partner.

What remains uncertain, on the evidence now in the public record, is the precise wording of Musar's original remarks and the institutional channel through which they were issued — whether they came in a press conference, a written statement, or a foreign-media interview. The three Iranian outlets agree on substance; they do not provide the original Slovenian-language text. Until Ljubljana publishes a read-out, the Iranian framing is the only framing on the record, and readers should hold it lightly.

This publication will follow Ljubljana's official read-out when it is published, and will track whether other EU heads of state echo or distance themselves from the substance of the remarks.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/FarsNewsInt/
• https://t.me/farsna/
• https://t.me/JahanTasnim/