The American president and secretary of state have signaled that the defense umbrella provided to Europe under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty is no longer a priority for the U.S. government.
This cannot have been a surprise in European capitals, but apparently it nonetheless is being treated as a shock.
On Wednesday, the U.K. Telegraph ran a story that quoted President Trump disparaging NATO as a “paper tiger” and noted the rough treatment Secretary of State Rubio had given to the Europeans over the perceived purpose of the alliance in the wake of the denials from Italy, France, and Spain to allow the United States to use military bases and/or flyover rights to support Operation Epic Fury. Here how Breitbart summarized that piece:
President Donald Trump says he is reconsidering America’s membership of NATO after not a single member heeded his call for aid in securing the Middle East from Iranian threats, he told a British newspaper.
It was “actually hard to believe” the hard refusals of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO’s) European members, that the instinct to rally to the flag of a fellow member when called wasn’t reflexive, U.S. President Donald Trump has told The Daily Telegraph.
In remarks that follow and acknowledged U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Monday statement that America’s membership of the alliance would have to be “re-examined”, President Trump confirmed he was reconsidering America’s engagement and added: “I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way.”
Rubio’s indictment of NATO might actually have been more substantial than Trump’s:
WATCH: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio says that the United States “is going to have to reexamine” its relationship with NATO once the war against Iran has concluded
@insiderpaper pic.twitter.com/LU4ew5DEf3
— crimsonbearz (@crimsonbearz) April 1, 2026
In 2023, while still a senator, Rubio co-authored a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act that would prevent a president from removing the U.S. from NATO without a two-thirds vote of the Senate or some other superseding legislation. That’s being thrown in Rubio’s face today, though in 2023 NATO signatories weren’t actively denying the U.S. military the use of NATO airspace and/or American bases like Sigonella in Sicily. Rubio hasn’t gone back on his word; the situation has changed.
In 2023, it was difficult to believe that the U.K. would (1) try to unload the military base at Diego Garcia on the (essential) Chinese puppet state of Mauritius and (2) deny U.S. bombers the use of Diego Garcia in operations against Iran. It turned out that Iran — who had lied about the maximum range of its massive inventory of missiles — fired a pair of them at Diego Garcia, which assumes a range large enough to hit London.
Not that the Iranians would want to hit London. Doing so could damage real estate properties owned by principals of the Iranian regime, not to exclude its supposed Supreme Leader Mojtada Khamenei, who may or may not be dead.
The argument against cooperation with the U.S. military as it prosecutes the war in Iran is essentially that Trump didn’t consult with the Euros before launching it, and that those base-use and flyover requests were not made according to bureaucratic standards. And the Euros don’t want to be dragooned into Trump’s war of choice.
When it’s far more likely the Euros would face Iranian nuclear terrorism given the now-established maximum range of their missiles than would Americans.
Rubio’s current question — what’s in it for us? — is the correct one.
Because if Spain, for example, says that its national interests lie in siding with Iran against Trump, or merely professing neutrality between the nation protecting Spain and the world’s leading terrorist state, then in no productive sense is Spain an ally of the United States.
We are not asking for troops. Or planes. Or missiles. Or money. We already know the Spanish won’t give money; they’re the only NATO country refusing to up their defense budget per Trump’s demand. We asked that we could fly supply planes over Spanish territory so as to resupply the Israelis. That’s it. Spain’s woke communist regime wouldn’t even allow that.
And now France’s woke communist regime won’t allow flyover rights, which isn’t the first time that has happened. The French refused flyover rights for the bombing runs on Libya in 1986 to retaliate for terrorist attacks killing U.S. servicemen in Germany, but they demanded bombing runs on Libya in order to get better oil contracts for Total S.A. some three decades later.
Yes, there are many Americans nostalgic about NATO. Access the arguments on X and you’ll find protestations about European troops serving side by side with Americans in Afghanistan or Iraq.
That was a generation ago, you know. And it’s 100 percent clear that a Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, or Dirty Pedro Sánchez would supply no troops for an American-led expedition into a hostile country in 2026.
While the Eurocrats were busy jailing grandmothers for Facebook posts and turning cities into sharia no-go zones, Trump finally said what every realist has known: NATO died years ago. The U.S. isn’t leaving Europe — Europe left the West. And the Euros are busy transitioning their countries into colonies of Dar-al-Islam.
Trump is dragging the Euros into the Iranian conflict anyway, of course.
What you’ve heard is that the U.S. cannot reopen the Strait of Hormuz and as such Iran is winning the war. Except the Strait of Hormuz isn’t the source of any American oil. Europe gets its oil from the Strait of Hormuz; America doesn’t. And Trump noted that when he told the Euros they needed to pull their own weight in getting it reopened.
Logistically, that makes sense. Sending American ships to force open the Strait means the potential for casualties from seaborne and airborne drones, missiles, and other threats, but if the Royal Navy, or the French Navy, or the Spanish Navy (such as it is) were to conduct missions to escort tankers out of the Persian Gulf, would the Iranians still attack? And if they did, what would the response be?
It’s an obvious move for Trump to make.
Resistance to it — and the resistance initially was total; Trump was accused of “begging” his “allies” to bail him out over Hormuz — doesn’t come from principle, and it doesn’t even come from Trump derangement. It comes from weakness, and the recognition of it by the weak.
One of the things we’ve learned from Operation Epic Fury is how utterly dysfunctional and degraded the current Royal Navy is. When the Iranians shot up Britain’s bases on Cyprus at the beginning of March, they couldn’t even deploy a single warship to provide any defense. Secure Hormuz? Better to scoff at Trump and pretend your indignation than take on your own cause and fail miserably.
And Trump and Rubio know this.
Rubio’s categorization of NATO as a one-way street is probably the single most accurate thing an American diplomat has said in a century. NATO, for all its past glory, is a welfare plan. It’s corrosive to the national character of its dependents, who have squandered its benefits by engaging in cultural, economic, and political self-mutilation — enabled by that security umbrella and the national childhood it has given them.
What it’s giving America now is red ink, and the well is rapidly running dry.
Trump can’t pull America out of NATO unilaterally. At least not officially. But he can reduce U.S. involvement to a skeleton staff. We’re already canceling joint training operations and other manifestations of the alliance’s military power, because what’s the point?
And when our participation is sufficiently downgraded, NATO just goes away on its own. At that point, the various rump armies of, at least, Western Europe will likely be turned against their own people, restive as they’ll be from the destruction of their national energy supplies and power grids, the demographic collapse and failed assimilation of their “newcomers,” and the betrayal of the democratic ideals NATO countries pledged to so long ago. Most of those countries will soon face the sorts of existential national crises that make them inoperable allies anyway.
And when those days come, we do not want to be allies faced with the prospect of nation-building in what’s left.
Our interests and those of countries run by the Starmers, Sánchezes, and Macrons of Europe no longer coincide. They do not act like allies anymore because they are not allies and have not been for some time.
Increasingly, belatedly, we are acting accordingly.
So be it.
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