The EU's new Pact for the Mediterranean is timely, but risks defaulting to short-term, piecemeal deals rather than the comprehensive partnerships Mediterranean countries require. Launched against a backdrop of growing rivalry from China, Russia, Turkey and the Gulf states — all actively eroding European influence in its own neighbourhood — the pact represents an opportunity to reframe Euro-Mediterranean relations on more strategic footing. Yet its current "menu" approach, which encourages south Mediterranean governments to activate individual EU programmes from a catalogue of ready offers, fundamentally misjudges the EU's partners and miscalibrates how best to bring them closer to Europe. Southern Mediterranean governments are unlikely to order from the menu when they can maximise their gains by exploiting competition between different powers, playing European states off against each other in their own brand of raw transactionalism. EU member states themselves may further push the Commission towards reactionary deals focused on short-term imperatives like migration management, repeating the failures of the Barcelona Process and the Union for the Mediterranean before it. Europe's winning move would instead be to bundle the pact's initiatives into "grand bargains": comprehensive packages of investments, energy partnerships, visa programmes and infrastructure tailored to individual countries. Only the EU can offer agreements that simultaneously address migration, jobs and energy — a stronger hand than the bloc currently realises it holds. Deals of this scale and ambition would be too substantial to refuse or weaponise against European countries, ending the cycle of European states being played off against each other by the very neighbours they are trying to bring closer.