President Donald Trump launched a war against Iran on Feb. 28 without consulting European allies, a defined coalition and a clear strategic objective. Three weeks later, he is demanding that those same allies send warships to the Strait of Hormuz, threatening NATO’s future if they refuse. Europe’s answer has been swift: unified and entirely justified in rejecting Trump’s demands.
The Strait of Hormuz, where roughly 20% of the world’s oil trade typically passes, has been closed since Iran retaliated against the American-Israeli assault. Trump has framed reopening it as a “very small endeavor” and suggested that European nations, as beneficiaries of the strait’s oil flow, have an obligation to help police it. But this obligation did not afford Europe any role in the decision that produced this crisis in the first place.
The absence of prior consultation is the main reason for Europe’s frustration. The EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said European allies had not been consulted and that the objectives of the war were not understood.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who had sat next to Trump in the Oval Office just two weeks earlier and described the two nations as “on the same page,” flatly rejected the request.
“NATO is a defensive alliance,” Merz said, “not an interventionist one,” and therefore “has no place here at all.” Luxembourg’s Deputy Prime Minister Xavier Bettel was more direct, telling reporters his country would not give in to “blackmail” from Washington.
These are not the responses of unreasonable and disloyal partners. These are the responses of governments being asked to put their forces in harm’s way for a conflict with no defined endpoint, no shared planning and no Article 5 obligation under NATO’s founding treaty.
The U.K.’s former Chief of Defense Staff Nick Carter made that point plainly, telling the BBC that NATO “was not an alliance that was designed for one of the allies to go on a war of choice and then oblige everybody else to follow.”
That distinction matters even more given what Trump said about those same allies a few weeks before asking for their help.
In late January, he dismissed allied contributions to Afghanistan, claiming NATO partners “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.” Coalition soldiers absolutely fought on those front lines. More than 1,000 of them died.
The only time Article 5 has ever been invoked in NATO’s 77-year history was after the Sept. 11 attacks, when Europe came to America’s aid. Trump insulted that history and sacrifice and then, less than two months later, demanded that Europe uphold it.
The pattern extends well beyond Afghanistan. Since returning to office, Trump has threatened to invade Greenland, a territory belonging to NATO ally Denmark, and imposed sweeping tariffs on European trading partners.
In February 2025, Vice President JD Vance traveled to the Munich Security Conference and used the platform to lecture European democracies about free speech, telling them the greatest threat they faced came not from Moscow or Beijing but from within their own governments.
Even more, Trump’s own National Security Strategy, released in December 2025, openly celebrated “the growing influence of patriotic European parties” and pledged to “cultivate resistance” within Europe.
This was a barely veiled endorsement of far-right parties like Germany’s Alternative for Germany, which many of the continent’s mainstream governments see as a direct threat to democratic order. It is also a form of election interference that, when practiced by adversaries like Russia, the U.S. has long condemned.
Europe also cannot ignore the ghost of 2003. European leaders remember the last time an American president assembled an ad hoc coalition for a Middle East war on faulty pretenses. The Iraq invasion cost lives, fractured alliances and left the region destabilized for decades. The memory of that miscalculation has not faded, and Trump has done nothing to suggest that this time will be any different.
Trump warned that it would be “very bad for the future of NATO” if European allies refused to send forces to the strait. This threat, however, is hollow, partly because it came from a president who had spent years making it clear he viewed NATO as a burden rather than a partnership, and because Europe had already heard versions of it before.
In a reversal that seemingly aligns with the chaotic and unpredictable nature of this conflict, Trump has decided that the U.S. no longer needed European aid to begin with.
In a Truth Social post, he said, “Because of the fact that we have had such Military Success, we no longer ‘need,’ or desire the NATO Countries’ assistance — WE NEVER DID!”
This claim is difficult to reconcile with days of public demands, calls to foreign leaders and open frustration at their reluctance to commit forces.
Alliances are built on consultation, shared sacrifice and most importantly, mutual respect. Trump offered none of those things before the war began and continues to offer none of them in the face of the quagmire he plunged the world into. Europe’s refusal to paper over that failure is not a betrayal of the alliance, but instead a pragmatic conclusion:
European governments have learned that alliances cannot be used as instruments of unilateral decision-making.
