The President Who Undermined Nato Now Needs It
Allies remember who questioned Article 5, threatened Denmark and softened toward Moscow. Now Trump expects their ships, their soldiers and their trust.
After years undermining Nato, insulting allies and appeasing authoritarian rivals, Donald Trump now demands their help in a war widened by his own choices.
Donald Trump has spent years teaching the world a brutal lesson about alliances. To him, solidarity is not a principle. It is a transaction. Loyalty is demanded, rarely returned. Commitments are treated as leverage. Threats are dressed up as strategy. And now, having helped drag the West into yet another grave and avoidable crisis in the Middle East, he turns to the very allies he has mocked, undermined and endangered, and demands help.
There is a fitting ugliness to this moment.
This is, after all, the same president who treated Nato not as the most successful defensive alliance in modern history, but as a protection racket. The same man who cast doubt on Article 5, the alliance’s core promise that an attack on one member is an attack on all. The same man who menaced Denmark, a Nato ally, over Greenland in language more befitting an imperial bully than the leader of a constitutional republic. The same man whose conduct over Ukraine signalled to Vladimir Putin that the Atlantic alliance was vulnerable to vanity, grievance and fracture at its centre.
For years, Europe’s democracies have had to absorb the implications of Trump’s worldview. He has weakened confidence in collective defence. He has fed the Kremlin’s preferred narrative that the West is decadent, divided and too self interested to hold together under pressure. He has treated democratic allies with contempt while speaking of autocrats with a familiarity that often sounded perilously close to admiration. In that sense, the damage did not begin with the current crisis over Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. It began much earlier, in the steady corrosion of trust.
That corrosion matters. Alliances do not survive on military hardware alone. They rest on credibility, restraint and a shared belief that power should serve law rather than appetite. Trump has spent much of his political life attacking precisely those foundations. He has not merely argued for a tougher bargain with Europe. He has normalised the idea that democracies are there to be extorted, humiliated or abandoned if they fail to flatter him sufficiently. That is not realism. It is vandalism.
Now comes the predictable reversal. After backing an Israeli course that has widened the war and destabilised a region already collapsing under the weight of miscalculation, Trump wants others to help contain the consequences. The demand is as cynical as it is revealing. European governments are told that because they benefited from American support over Ukraine, they now owe Washington support in the Gulf. But this is a grotesque distortion of what alliances are for. Support for Ukraine was not a favour granted by a capricious patron. It was, or should have been, the defence of a principle central to European and transatlantic security, that borders cannot be redrawn by force and sovereign nations cannot be surrendered to imperial conquest.
Trump never seemed to understand that. Or worse, he understood it and did not care.
That is why his appeal now rings hollow. He wants Europe to behave as though the alliance still operates according to mutual obligation and strategic trust, after spending years hollowing out both. He wants Britain, France and others to rush towards a military problem not of their making, while offering little assurance that he has either a lawful plan or a serious endgame. He wants the benefits of leadership after discrediting the very idea of responsible leadership.
Britain is right to resist being hustled into that trap.
The British national interest is not served by becoming a supporting actor in an improvised war whose political rationale has been unstable and whose regional consequences are already severe. The duty of a British government is not to rescue an American president from the fallout of his own recklessness. It is to protect the British people, defend the country’s security, uphold international law and preserve room for sober judgement when others are acting out of panic, rage or vanity.
That does not mean indifference to the danger in the Gulf. The disruption of the Strait of Hormuz carries real consequences for energy prices, shipping and wider economic stability. Britain has legitimate interests in maritime security and in preventing further regional escalation. But legitimacy of interest does not automatically confer wisdom on every proposed response. To send forces into a combustible theatre without a clear legal basis, a coherent multinational framework and a credible political strategy would not be strength. It would be strategic laziness masquerading as resolve.
Sir Keir Starmer is therefore right to insist that Britain must not be drawn into a wider war. That is not weakness. It is what seriousness looks like. A British prime minister should not commit servicemen and women to military action because Donald Trump, having insulted allies for years, has suddenly rediscovered the utility of alliance. Nor should Britain accept the poisonous idea that democratic friendship requires silent obedience to American adventurism.
The deeper issue, though, is not only the immediate crisis. It is the pattern. Trump has repeatedly shown that he is prepared to undermine democratic institutions, both abroad and at home, whenever they obstruct his impulses. In the United States, he has attacked the judiciary, poisoned public trust in elections and treated constitutional limits as personal affronts. In Europe, his rhetoric and conduct have emboldened those who would like to see liberal democracy weakened from within. He does not simply unsettle adversaries. He unsettles the democratic world itself.
That is why this moment deserves more than tactical disagreement. It demands moral clarity. The problem is not merely that Trump is asking too much of Nato after giving too little in return. It is that he has spent years degrading the principles that make such an alliance worth defending in the first place. He has behaved as though democratic nations exist to service his needs, absorb his chaos and clean up after his mistakes.
They do not.
Britain should defend its allies where its treaty obligations, security interests and democratic principles require it. It should stand with Europe against Russian aggression. It should support lawful collective security. It should help preserve freedom of navigation through genuine international cooperation. But it should not be dragooned into a war widened by deceit, impatience and the familiar fantasy that force can substitute for strategy.
Trump made a politics out of letting allies down. He cast doubt on their security, mocked their anxieties and treated their democracies as weak, parasitic and expendable. If he now finds that those same allies are unwilling to answer his demands on command, he is not the victim of ingratitude. He is confronting the bill for his own conduct.
And he has earned it.