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President Trump’s war on Iran is turning out to be an even bigger calamity than it seemed just a few weeks ago. Not only has he proved unable to convert America’s vastly superior military power into any sort of geopolitical victory, he has also weakened our position worldwide.
The consequences of this erosion are likely to be longer-lasting than the (considerable) economic impact of Iran’s shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow transit for a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade, which—it’s worth recalling—was free and open before Trump launched his ill-considered war. (His advisers had warned him that the Iranians might retaliate by locking the strait; he ignored them, believing the war would be won very quickly.)
Even before the war, Trump’s trash-talking of our traditional allies—and of alliances as a concept—left many European and Asian leaders wondering if the U.S. would help defend them against aggression. Now they are openly fearing that the U.S. would be unable to help them much even if the president—Trump or his successor—might want to.
Friends and foes couldn’t help but notice that the vaunted U.S. military depleted half or more of its stockpile of certain high-tech weapons systems—including very expensive air-defense missiles—in the course of shooting down extremely cheap Iranian drones. (China’s strategy, in the event of a war, is to launch swarms of cheap anti-ship missiles against U.S. warships attempting to defend Taiwan. Russia’s military has reoriented to drone-dominant tactics being used by both sides in its long war on Ukraine.)
Compounding the anxiety, Pentagon officials announced that they had to delay a $14 billion arms sales package for Taiwan because some of the weapons are needed to shore up U.S. military capabilities in and around Iran. Early in the war, the Pentagon held up delivery of 400 Tomahawk cruise missiles to Japan, rerouting them to the Persian Gulf region. It also redeployed several high-tech THAAD defense missiles from South Korea, where they had long been stationed.
The leaders and citizens of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and other allied countries must wonder: If the United States doesn’t have enough weapons to fight a third-rate power like Iran without dipping into its vital foreign-based stocks and its export pipelines, how will it stave off an attack by a peer military establishment?
More unsettling still, Trump has been flashing every sign that he doesn’t care about the allies’ concerns or their fate. Right after his summit with China’s President Xi Jinping, Trump told reporters that he hadn’t decided whether to go through with the $14 billion arms sales package to Taiwan, adding that he might use it as a “bargaining chip”—in other words, he might sacrifice Taiwan’s security for an economic advantage in a trade deal with Beijing.
Around the same time, Trump announced that he was pulling 5,000 U.S. troops out of Germany, in revenge for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s refusal to help out in the war on Iran. Some noted that the withdrawal would have little effect on European security, as Germany would still house about 30,000 U.S. military personnel as well as some of the largest U.S. bases.
But numbers are not the point. Allies are assured, and adversaries are deterred, by appearances of strength and signals of commitment. Any withdrawal, especially when justified by hostile political pressure, sends a shivering signal to other NATO countries and a warm one to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
The signaling was intensified soon after, when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth informed NATO, through an envoy that he sent to its headquarters in Brussels, that—quite apart from the reduction of troops based in Germany—the U.S. was slashing the military assets that it had long ago agreed to mobilize in the event of a war in Europe. According to a report in Der Spiegel, the envoy said in a closed-door meeting that the U.S. Air Force would provide only half the previously committed number of long-range bombers and two-thirds the number of fighter jets. The U.S. Navy would make fewer destroyer ships available to NATO—and no submarines at all. The U.S. would also significantly cut back the number of armed drones. More details will be provided at the alliance’s summit in June.
U.S. officials justified the move by saying the Europeans had to start spending more on their own defense. Two things are worth noting. First, they already are spending more, partly at Trump’s prodding, partly at the growing alarm over the war in Ukraine (and Trump’s near-abandonment of aid to Kyiv). Second, military specialists have told me that, even with determined effort, it will take a decade for Europe to form an effective independent defense force—and, in the meantime, U.S. leadership of NATO will remain crucial.
For this reason, many Europeans are fearing that Putin may see the next few years as a window of opportunity to attack. In one sense, this may seem preposterous. The Russian army is unable to mount an offensive in its all-out war on Ukraine. Even in the opening phase of the war, when the Russians were predicted to win, they couldn’t maintain supply lines 100 miles or so beyond their borders. How, then, could they launch and sustain a military offensive farther west into Europe?
It’s a good point but maybe not the right question. Ukraine is putting up a much better fight against the Russians than any NATO country could, certainly if it lacked U.S. assistance. Were Kyiv to fall or be forced into a compromised “peace,” the NATO members would have reason to feel insecure. Another fear: Putin could invade Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania—one of the tiny Baltic nations on his border—with little difficulty. (He would probably then be faced with a fierce guerrilla war that could go on for years, but the initial occupation would be striking.) All three countries are members of NATO and therefore protected by Article 5, but even Article 5 doesn’t mandate rallying to an invaded member’s defense (it requires the allies only to meet and consider a defense).
It’s not only easy to imagine Trump letting those countries fend for themselves; he has all but suggested that he might. Asked after his summit with Xi whether he would defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack, Trump said he didn’t want to “travel 9,500 miles to fight a war.” Would he travel 5,000 miles to fight a war, especially on behalf of a country, like Estonia, that’s about the same size as Maryland? This shouldn’t be a question that anyone should have a reason to ask. The disturbing thing is that it’s a question whose answer, to any well-read observer, is uncertain at best.
America’s reliability as a guarantor of security has been a matter of debate for a long time. Back in the early 1960s, when the U.S. held a “nuclear umbrella” over Western Europe, France’s President Charles de Gaulle publicly doubted whether an American president would really “sacrifice New York for Paris”—i.e., whether he would respond to a Kremlin invasion by firing nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union, knowing that the Kremlin might fire nukes back against the United States.
But at least for many years, American presidents said they would defend the West at all costs, and once the U.S. built a large enough conventional military force, mainly in what was then called West Germany, the promise was taken seriously enough to hold the alliance together.
Trump has cast doubt on this pledge, to varying degrees, ever since he became president. His war on Iran and its myriad offshoots—the revelations of the U.S. arsenal’s inadequacies, the subsequent raiding of weapons stocks meant for U.S. allies, Trump’s railing against allies for (wisely) not joining his war, and his abandonment of tangible commitments to their defense—have hardened abstract doubts about whether American guarantees are reliable into concrete certainty that they are not. And so the allies are drifting away, to the extent they can, and they’re worrying because it will take a while for them to cut their ties with Washington completely.
Regardless how Trump’s war on Iran ends, the way he has handled the war has only accelerated America’s mad dash to isolation. It has long been noted that “America First” really means “America Alone.” We are now seeing this insight played out.
