A NATO That Doesn't Support U.S. Action Shouldn't Exist
A NATO That Doesn't Support U.S. Action Shouldn't Exist
President Donald Trump’s declaration that, for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, “the party is over” was treated like a barbarian shout in the salon. Yet his statement has the impolite virtue of being true. For 75 years, Europe has hosted the most expensive open bar in history, all of it paid for by the United States, and called this dependency an “alliance.” Now, when the bill is presented and the host suggests perhaps the guests might behave as if they own something besides opinions, they are scandalized.
Nothing has exposed this charade more clearly than the recent confrontation with Iran. The most revealing actor was NATO Europe, which, at the precise moment when it had the strongest interest in American protection, chose instead to lecture, obstruct, and deny access to bases that exist only thanks to American power and American money.
By obligingly parading its missile capabilities, Iran reminded the world of a basic geographic fact: Europe is closer to it than the United States. Those sleek Iranian rockets can reach European cities more easily and more quickly than they can cross the Atlantic.
Whatever else may be said of them, the ayatollahs have done the math. From their vantage point, London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome lie far nearer than New York or Washington. If anyone has a direct, existential interest in seeing Iran’s capacity contained, deterred, and destroyed, it is Europe.
Yet when the United States seeks to use NATO-linked bases, built, supplied, and effectively guaranteed by American taxpayers to confront precisely this threat, Europe responds not with urgency but with sanctimony. Washington must ask permission, fill out forms, and submit to debates in parliaments that cannot fund their own armies, much less fight their own wars. America carries the burden; Europe holds the clipboard.
Harnessing American Power
The absurdity would be comic if the stakes were not deadly. The continent that cannot defend itself against Iran’s missiles insists on the right to constrain the one power that might actually do so. NATO has become the strange arrangement in which the guardians must ring the doorbell at the very house they underwrite, while the children decide if they may enter.
This, more than anything, demonstrates that NATO is not our friend in any serious political sense. Friendship implies shared risk, shared burden, and reciprocity. What we have instead is dependence disguised as partnership, veto power disguised as consultation. The alliance serves increasingly as a mechanism for Europeans to domesticate American power: to harness it for their security while subjecting its use to their sensibilities. The United States provides the missiles; Europe provides the misgivings.
The strategic reality beneath all this theater is simple enough: the United States does not merely “constitute” NATO, it is NATO. Remove American nuclear guarantees, American command-and-control, American intelligence, American air and naval power, and American satellites, and what remains is a conference schedule.
Trump’s “paper tiger” metaphor flatters; a paper tiger at least suggests the outline of a beast. NATO without the United States would be a filing cabinet with good branding.
Obstruction on Iran
Europe’s behavior during the Iran crisis is particularly revealing because, for once, the threat is more obviously aimed at Europe than the United States. In the Russian case, they oscillate between fear and commerce: in public, Europe strikes a heroic pose against Moscow with denunciations of aggression, solemn invocations of the rules-based order, declarations that “Ukraine must win.” In practice, however, it has spent years bankrolling the very Russian war machine it deplores through its purchases of Russian energy.
But with Iran’s missiles, the trajectory is simple and the target clear. Those trajectories arc toward Europe.
Yet still they obstruct. Still, they insist that the United States must not use “their” bases, “their” territory, for operations that might inflame opinion in Tehran or among their own delicate electorates. The same leaders who cannot field serious forces, who cannot meet even the modest 2 percent defense spending goal, suddenly discover the courage to say no to the only nation that stands between them and the consequences of their evasions.
At this point, the language of “shared values” becomes farcical. What value, precisely, is shared when the nation willing to act must plead with nations unwilling even to allow access to airfields that they did not fund, cannot defend, and could not operate without American support? The real shared value is comfort. Europe values its comfortable moralism; America has so far valued the comfortable illusion that this arrangement is equal and noble.
The Iran episode also exposes the deeper insult in NATO’s current form: that the United States should require European permission at all. The United States underwrote the deterrent and alone possesses the capacity to project power beyond the continent. Yet it is a supplicant before parliaments that could not, if left alone, defend themselves against precisely the threats they now ask the United States to confront more “responsibly.”
Inversion of Dependence
This inversion of dependence into authority is the essence of the problem. NATO was originally conceived as a way for the United States to extend its power to fortify a devastated but serious Europe against a mortal Soviet threat. Today, it functions as a device whereby an unserious Europe channels, constrains, and when convenient, repudiates the very power that keeps it alive. Thus the ally becomes a leash-holder.
All the while, the basic hard fact remains: the only thing standing between Europe and potential Russian or Iranian annihilation is the same American power they so enjoy condemning. Their militaries, hollowed out by decades of welfare-state priorities and philosophic pacifism, could not withstand a determined onslaught for long. This is as obvious in Moscow and Tehran as it is in the Pentagon. Only in Brussels is it politely ignored.
Trump’s truth that the party is over invites a sober reconsideration. Alliances are not sacred relics but political arrangements. An alliance in which one party finances, supplies, and risks everything while the others preen, obstruct, and moralize is not an alliance; it is a liability. NATO must put up or shut up.
Dimpee Brar currently serves as the director of engagement for Allies for a Strong Canada.
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