US allies balk at Trump’s appeal to help secure Strait of Hormuz
CNN
By Christian Edwards, CNN
(CNN) — Two months after Donald Trump disparaged NATO allies for what he cast as their lackluster efforts in Afghanistan, the US president has warned that the alliance faces a “very bad” future if those same allies fail to support the United States in securing the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran effectively closed after it was attacked by the US and Israel.
“It’s only appropriate that people who are the beneficiaries of the strait will help to make sure that nothing bad happens there,” Trump said Sunday in an interview with the Financial Times. “If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response, I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO.”
Trump’s latest threat against the alliance has put Europe in a bind. Since Trump’s return to the White House, European leaders have taken plenty of punishment from Washington — in the form of tariffs, tirades and territorial threats — so as not to jettison US support for Ukraine. Now, Trump appears to be upping his price, asking that US allies do “whatever it takes” to secure the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s oil ordinarily flows.
But this time, American allies have balked at Trump’s request to send warships to help transport oil through the strait, suggesting there is a limit to how far Europe will go to keep Trump onside in Ukraine and demonstrating the upshot of Trump’s derisive attitude toward alliances.
“This war has nothing to do with NATO. It is not NATO’s war,” a spokesman for
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Monday. “Participation has not been considered before the war and is not being considered now.”
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius also dismissed Trump’s request. “What does … Trump expect a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to do in the Strait of Hormuz that the powerful US Navy cannot do?” he asked. “This is not our war; we have not started it.”
The comments were a far cry from the tentative support that Merz voiced during a White House visit for the US-Israeli assault on Iran. Sitting next to Trump in the Oval Office on March 3, Merz said the US and Germany were “on the same page” in terms of getting rid of “this terrible regime in Tehran.”
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, also responded frostily to Trump’s request for help, saying the strait is “out of NATO’s area of action.” Officials in Italy, Japan and Australia also said their countries would not take part in efforts to reopen the strait.
Even countries that signaled a willingness to help did so only vaguely. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said his government is working with allies to reopen the strait, without providing details. Earlier this month, when Starmer considered sending British aircraft carriers to the Middle East, Trump told him not to bother. “We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!” he wrote on Truth Social.
Starmer’s vagueness may be a measure of the lack of good options that US allies have to spur Iran to reopen the strait. By contrast, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which now effectively controls the waterway, has “multiple options for making mischief,” according to retired Gen. Nick Carter, a former chief of Britain’s Defense Staff.
The IRGC has “everything from shore-based missiles and drones to armed speedboats to unmanned surface vessels and drones — and, of course, mines,” Carter told the BBC. Western militaries have not put “mine-clearing activity at the forefront of their naval capability,” he said, warning that sending warships to escort oil tankers through the strait would be “challenging.”
Julien Barnes-Dacey, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), said Europe’s strategy toward Iran was initially driven by “a desire to keep ‘daddy’ Trump happy” and maintain US assistance in Ukraine.
But the war in Iran is exposing the limits of that strategy, he said. Western ammunition stocks and missile interceptors are being depleted in the Middle East, while the surge in energy prices — and the Trump administration’s temporary sanctions waiver on seaborne Russian oil — has thrown a lifeline to Russia’s economy.
“The fact that Trump is not focused on Ukraine and is giving Russia sanctions waivers increasingly weakens the argument that aligning with Trump is a pathway towards securing European interests in Ukraine,” Barnes-Dacey told CNN.
In his interview with the Financial Times, Trump said he doubted that US allies would heed his call for assistance.
“We’ve been very sweet. We didn’t have to help them with Ukraine. Ukraine is thousands of miles away from us,” he said. “But we helped them. Now we’ll see if they help us. Because I’ve long said that we’ll be there for them but they won’t be there for us. And I’m not sure that they’d be there.”
Carter said Trump’s approach to alliances was “a bit ironic.”
“NATO was created as a … defensive alliance,” he said. “It 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. It was not designed for that at all. I’m not sure that’s the sort of NATO that any of us wanted to belong to.”
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CNN’s Sebastian Shukla contributed reporting.
