Conrad Black - Pompous: Europe in a moral quagmire between benefactor US and evil Iran

 

The Western European NATO allies of the United States appear to be celebrating what they mistakenly believe is the discomfort the Americans and Israelis are now encountering in the Iran war. 

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has unctuously announced that this war is not a NATO responsibility since NATO is a defensive alliance. He has at least had the decency to recognize that “The United States and Israel are doing the world’s dirty work for it.” President Trump has made it clear that he does not need the assistance of any other country in clearing the Hormuz Strait, but he considers it a test of the reciprocity of the Western Alliance if America’s so-called allies, who are substantially dependent upon Middle Eastern oil, are prepared to send a token warship or some aircraft to assist in this task.

Several of the Western European NATO allies have pompously announced that since they were not consulted in this action, they see no reason to assist it. The argument that Iran has not initiated hostilities against the United States and its allies is utter nonsense, since the Islamic Republic has long been recognized as the leading sponsor of terrorism in the world and for all of its regrettable existence of 47 years it has never ceased to sponsor and provoke violent acts against the West. The United States is an energy self-sufficient country. It does import some oil but exports more and is not significantly inconvenienced no matter what happens in the Strait of Hormuz.

The waffling and havering of British Prime Minister Starmer and Canadian Prime Minister Carney and even French President Macron not only amount to moral relativism as between the United States upon whom all of them depend militarily and economically, and the barbarous pseudo-theological despotism of Iran. 

It also confirms President Trump’s often expressed concerns that America’s allies are addicted to American support and protection but feel that they retain a right of collegial approval of American initiatives before that country can act. This is the old playbook that Trump has shredded of the Europeans acting as if the United States was a great and powerful mastiff that would do the work and takes the risks while the sober and sage Europeans hold the leash and give the orders. 

Trump has warned that the Western Alliance cannot function on this basis, and it is astonishing that most of the principal European allies and Canada have leapt like gazelles to confirm Trump’s suspicion that the Western alliance is of no use to the United States.

This is a very distressing degeneration of the Cold War Alliance in which eminent statesmen including Churchill, Adenauer, de Gaulle, Thatcher, Mitterrand, de Gasperi, Andreotti and Mulroney all pulled their weight and played their part. Western Europe is increasingly a moral wasteland of declining population, stagnant economies, and the lack of the moral solidity even to prevent waves of destitute people with none of the constructive motives of authentic immigrants from swarming into Europe with no more thought for the jurisdictions they are entering than the Goths, Huns, Saracens and Vandals of the fifth century.

It appears that mere envy at the relaunch of America under Trump, with accelerating economic growth, collapsing crime rates, the end of illegal immigration, the debunking of green extremism, and the shaping up of the American military into an instrument of extraordinary power and precision, has driven much of Europe into the quagmire of moral relativism between their American benefactor and the evil terrorist state of Islamist Iran. One would have expected mere opportunism to produce better judgment than that.

The Americans will open the Hormuz Strait but they will shut it to Iran, including the large oil shipments to China, until the government of Iran is defanged and re-oriented. In those circumstances, where the United States had enabled the return of free movement of oil and its principal allies had deserted it, failed even token support of the American victory, who would blame the United States for imposing its own charges on shipments of oil that it had made possible to its catatonic allies?

 It is almost inconceivable that the Western Europeans and Canadians do not realize that the only chance of bringing peace to the Middle East is to destroy those regimes and terrorist movements that will be endlessly violent in their psychotic intolerance of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state.

Though the repugnance of the brutal Russian dictatorship and the failure of Russia ever to enjoy one day of good government by Western standards militates against this outcome, the United States could make a more productive alliance with Russia than it now enjoys with most of the NATO countries who chiefly owe their freedom over the last 85 years to the Americans. Western Europe is profoundly afflicted by a political and sociological death wish. The United States will not save them from that; only they can.

https://brusselssignal.eu/2026/03/pompous-europe-in-a-moral-quagmire-between-benefactor-us-and-evil-iran/