‘Not our war’: NATO and the Iran crisis

Mark Webber explores the impact of the Iran crisis on NATO, highlighting the trend towards an increasingly Europeanised alliance built on deeper ties and increased spending which he suggests will continue regardless of the outcome of the conflict. 

For NATO, these are hard times for optimism. Still, NATO’s upbeat Secretary General, Mark Rutte is not to be deflected. In mid-February, on the back of a seeming resolution of the Greenland crisis, Rutte claimed the alliance was ‘the strongest it has been since the fall of the Berlin Wall.’ In the midst of the US-Israel war with Iran, Rutte has managed both to commend the campaign and to suggest the allies will come out of it more united, not less.

Can one square this Panglossian position with the reality of the latest transatlantic trauma? President Trump, who never needs an excuse to belittle NATO, has suggested the alliance ‘faces a very bad future’ if its members do not help the US reopen the Straits of Hormuz, shuttered by Iran. A week ago, the UK along with nineteen NATO allies plus Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea expressed their ‘readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait.’ No discernible movement has, however, occurred since. At NATO HQ in Brussels, there has been no discussion of a coordinated maritime effort.

The war has impacted the alliance directly. Iranian missiles have been intercepted by NATO-supplied air defences in Turkey, the NATO training mission in Iraq has been withdrawn and US F35s have been transferred from the Cold Response exercise in Norway to the Gulf. Individual allies have been unwilling to join the US-Israeli campaign, but bases in several countries, including the UK, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and Portugal have been used to facilitate ‘one of the most logistically complex operations the US military has been involved in for decades.’ Only Spain has refused the US access to its bases.

Practical support has thus not been inconsequential. But politically, the United States has acted in isolation. NATO’s major allies – Germany, the UK and France – have kept their distance. Trump’s current European bête noire, Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez has publicly condemned the ‘illegal’ war. Even Trump’s supporters – the leaders of Italy, Hungary and Slovakia – have questioned the wisdom of the American campaign.

On Iran, just as with Greenland, NATO is divided between the United States and the rest. This could well feed an ongoing animus in the Trump administration. Trump (or, for that matter, his fellow NATO sceptics, Vice-President J.D. Vance and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth) could turn against the alliance at any moment. None of this bodes well for NATO’s next summit (scheduled for July in Ankara). By that point, the war will either be over on terms declared by the Trump administration or will have entrapped the American military in an unwinnable conflict. Either outcome is perilous for transatlantic unity. A self-defined victory would propel Trump toward further destructive acts of adventure. Failure, meanwhile, could have very similar results, as Trump chooses new targets to compensate for the Iranian misadventure and criticises allies to deflect blame for his own strategic ineptitude. Whether propelled by ambition or ire, action against Cuba seems increasingly likely. This would be a marginal issue for NATO. But a reprise of Trump’s hankering after Greenland would return the alliance to crisis mode.

The NATO allies have dealt with the demands of the two Trump administrations through a mixture of deference (agreeing to ambitious defence spending targets), detachment (as currently over Iran) and political resolve (as with the Greenland crisis earlier this year). In parallel, they have taken serious steps to reduce their military dependency on the United States. Some of this is out of urgent necessity. The Trump administration’s severance of military aid to Ukraine means the Europeans now fund the lion’s share of arms transfers to that embattled country. In addition, Europeans have deepened defence cooperation within the EU. They have also cooperated through overlapping minilateral and bilateral defence initiatives. This ‘clustering’ of defence is not new. The British-led Joint Expeditionary Force has been operational since 2015; the European Air Transport Command was established in 2010. Yet such initiatives have accelerated in recent years. Between 2022 and 2025, European states signed among themselves 135 bilateral defence partnerships.

NATO itself is quietly becoming Europeanised. And this, tellingly, has America’s support. In recent months, the Pentagon has helped execute a reform of the NATO command structure that will see Americans relinquishing oversight of NATO Joint Force Commands (JFC) Norfolk and Naples (where a Brit and Italian will take up command). German officers already command NATO’s two other JFCs at Brunssum and Ulm. US commanders will retain NATO’s tactical land and air commands and will acquire from the British oversight of NATO maritime command. The US is not, therefore, rushing for the exit. This is a gradual shift, but it is a planned one aimed at greater European responsibility. The US also wants greater European effort – the ability to field, according to Under Secretary of War, Elbridge Colby, a ‘preponderance of the forces required to deter and, if necessary, defeat conventional aggression in Europe.’ Here too there is marked progress. Defence budget increases alongside Finland and Sweden’s accession to NATO have boosted Europe’s military standing. In a conventional war with Russia, NATO would still struggle if the United States was not fully committed. However, the steps needed to correct this deficiency are, according to a recent Atlantic Council report ‘well within the capabilities of [the] NATO allies.’

Three long-term trends now seem evident irrespective of the Iran war or, indeed, Trump’s disparagement of NATO. First, a security architecture is developing in Europe – involving the EU, a Europeanised NATO, clustered defence, and a de facto wartime alliance with Ukraine – which is not reliant on American design. The Trump administration is through the alliance engaged with but not seeking oversight of this network. Second, Europe’s centre of strategic gravity is now in the east and north. NATO ally Turkey has been exposed by the Iran war, but there are no moves afoot to galvanise NATO’s ‘southern’ agenda. NATO’s frontline is adjacent to Russia and here leadership on defence spending and military mobilisation is being demonstrated by Germany, Poland, the Baltics and the Nordic states, not by NATO’s traditional European big hitters France, Italy and the UK. Third, these developments, require strategic deftness. Clinging to the hope that America will rediscover its transatlantic vocation amounts to strategic paralysis. If, to return to Rutte, NATO is to be strong it will be so on the back of its European component.

By Mark Webber, Professor of International Politics, University of Birmingham