NATO & Supposed U.S. Allies Make Clear That Current Fight Is Not Theirs
In a joint campaign called Operation Epic Fury, the United States and Israel launched the largest, most sustained set of airstrikes ever carried out against Iran’s Islamist regime, explicitly tied by President Trump to the goal of eliminating an enemy that has destabilized the Middle East for nearly half a century.
If the regime falls, it will be the single most consequential international development since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union – the “Evil Empire,” as Ronald Reagan called America’s principal Cold War adversary.
Unfortunately, the American-led, American-underwritten alliance that claims credit for being instrumental in ending Communist totalitarianism – and bills itself as history’s most powerful and successful military coalition – is proving largely irrelevant in confronting the driving force of Islamist totalitarianism.
I’m referring, of course, to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In the current conflict with Iran, NATO’s conduct is impossible to overlook. While the U.S. and Israel carry out major assaults against a declared enemy of the West, the alliance confines itself to issuing cautious statements, adjusting missile‑defense postures, and monitoring developments – its European members at pains to insist they are not part of Washington’s campaign. The refusal by Turkey – a full NATO member ruled by an Islamist despot – to allow its airspace to be used for operations against Iran only sharpens the point.
An organization that bills itself as the collective shield of the transatlantic world is standing on the sidelines while its most important member battles the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism – an oil-rich country that has squandered its wealth on developing nuclear weapons and building arsenals of ballistic missiles and attack drones along with an axis of proxy terrorist groups and militias responsible for thousands of American deaths.
NATO’s response to Iran’s retaliatory attacks on U.S. bases in the Middle East is especially indefensible in light of the history of European-Iranian relations since the overthrow of Iran’s pro-Western monarch, the Shah. The Islamist regime has waged a protracted campaign of extraterritorial terror in Europe, treating the Continent as an open field for assassination and terrorist bomb plots.
In the first decade-and-a-half after the 1979 revolution, Iran mounted more than 60 assassination operations against exiled Iranians in Western Europe, successfully killing at least a dozen dissidents and former officials on European soil.
European and Israeli services in the past two years have exposed IRGC‑run networks that pay local criminals and gang members to photograph synagogues, Jewish schools, Israeli diplomatic and business sites, and even individual Jewish families’ homes as potential targets.
Yet Iran’s record of aggression inside Europe hasn’t altered NATO’s craven stance. The position of the alliance toward the mullahocracy remains one of self-limiting weakness – even in the face of an increasingly menacing missile threat.
In addition to becoming the largest state sponsor of terrorism, Islamist Iran built the largest and most diverse ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East. Western defense assessments stress that Iran lacks intercontinental‑range missiles and cannot yet reach the U.S. homeland, but note that its current inventory is more than sufficient to threaten European NATO territory, forward‑deployed U.S. forces, and critical infrastructure from the Eastern Mediterranean into central Europe.
NATO’s own decision to build a layered missile‑defense architecture in Europe – Aegis Ashore sites in Romania and Poland, radar in Turkey, and missile‑defense‑equipped ships in the Mediterranean – explicitly cites the evolving Iranian ballistic missile threat, and recent alliance statements again single out “ballistic missiles and drones emanating from this region” as a serious and growing concern for European security.
No matter. The uncomfortable truth is that when push comes to shove, European governments have shown that they don’t fear Iranian missiles as much as they fear entanglement – meaning that supporting, let alone participating in U.S.-Israeli military action, might invite retaliation or domestic backlash. Hence, the scramble among NATO capitals to emphasize that the current conflict is Washington’s war, not theirs.
The European response underscores something deeper about NATO’s structure. Its collective‑defense clause – Article 5, so often invoked as sacred text – is riddled with escape hatches. It applies only to attacks on Allied territory in Europe or North America and a narrow set of designated areas. Much of today’s contested areas – Iraq, the Gulf, even the Red Sea – falls outside NATO’s scope. Iran can therefore strike U.S. bases or personnel across those regions without technically crossing the NATO line.
Even if the clause is triggered, the obligation it creates is deliberately elastic. Each ally will take “such action as it deems necessary.” The phrase gives every government license to calibrate – or minimize – its involvement. Statements, sanctions, token troops, or nothing at all qualify as compliance.
The 9/11 precedent showed how this works in practice. After the mega-terrorist attacks on America, the only time NATO ever invoked Article 5, the promise of collective defense translated into symbolic and carefully bounded measures: AWACS patrols over U.S. airspace, naval surveillance in the Mediterranean, and intelligence coordination. The real wars that defined the era – Afghanistan and Iraq – were conceived, commanded, and fought not through NATO but by the U.S. and its own coalitions of the willing. NATO endorsed and even managed parts of these efforts, but it never defined the fight.
The same could be said of the Cold War. It was won through containment and deterrence strategies driven from Washington and backed by America’s nuclear umbrella and economic strength. NATO’s deterrent effect was always derivative.
Today, NATO’s claim to centrality in Western security appears less a fact than an aspiration. Precisely when the alliance’s value should be most visible – during real wars – it becomes clear that the U.S. supplies both the initiative and the muscle, while Europe provides commentary and caveats. European nations express sympathy for the U.S. while maintaining that, legally and politically, they have no obligation to share the risks of escalation. The effect is to confirm that NATO’s practical value to U.S. hard security can’t be considered collective defense in any meaningful sense.
The cost of maintaining this arrangement isn’t trivial. On paper, NATO looks inexpensive. The U.S. contributes roughly $500–600 million annually to the alliance’s common budgets – a rounding error in a U.S. defense budget approaching one trillion dollars. But that figure obscures the larger imbalance. The U.S. accounts for some two-thirds of total NATO defense spending, even before considering the direct costs of sustaining Europe’s security. Direct U.S. spending to maintain forces, infrastructure, and readiness in Europe is about $30–35 billion per year, with the total rising further when one includes the broader global force posture required to underwrite European defense. For this outlay, the U.S. gets an alliance that avoids its wars while continuing to rely on American power for its own defense.
The conflict with Iran lays bare the divergence between Washington’s willingness to act and Europe’s aversion to risk, and exposes not only NATO’s military irrelevance but a deeper problem – a European political class that has spent decades accommodating Islamist movements at home while subcontracting its security to the United States.