By Opposing Iran War, European Allies Risk Their Future and Disappoint Rubio, a ‘Big Supporter’ of NATO

With NATO nations “bragging” about refusing to help eliminate Iran as a threat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is saying that America’s role in the alliance is “going to have to be reexamined” soon. “Well,” he asks of the alliance, “what is in it for the United States?” Mr. Rubio told Al Jazeera on Monday that America “identified a grave risk to our national security” in Iran and judged military action “needed.” Yet “countries like Spain, a NATO member” whom “we are pledged to defend,” is opposing America “and bragging about it.”Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez of Spain has called America’s actions “reckless,” “illegal,” and “unjust.” He has also closed his country’s airspace and denied access to joint-operated military bases where the U.S. Air Force refuels, repairs, and rearms.As a senator in 2023, Mr. Rubio cosponsored legislation prohibiting any president from leaving NATO without a two-thirds vote in the Senate or an act of Congress. The law was to be a bulwark against President Trump, seen as hostile to the alliance. The secretary’s thinking, though, has shifted.“I’ve been,” Mr. Rubio said, “a big supporter of NATO” in part because “these basing rights give us leverage and give us flexibility in operational capability.” He said that “if NATO is just about us defending Europe … but then denying us basing rights when we need them, that’s not a very good arrangement.”On Tuesday, Italy joined Spain and France in closing its airspace and rejected an American request to land at a military base. Echoing Mr. Trump’s language, Mr. Rubio said NATO “cannot be a one-way street.” The alliance “has to be mutually beneficial.” NATO members faced an analogous choice in 1986 when President Reagan launched Operation El Dorado Canyon to strike Libyan “terrorist centers.” After France closed its airspace, R. Emmett Tyrrell wrote in a column that they were “condemning American airmen to all the dangers attendant with a military mission” now thousands of miles longer.Mr. Tyrrell suggested a flight plan “leapfrogging” over “the military cemeteries where American men lie face up, forever gazing into the skies of France.” When, in 1966, President Charles de Gaulle withdrew from NATO’s military command and expelled all Americans in uniform, President Lyndon Johnson had a similar thought.“Does that include,” Johnson asked, “the dead Americans in military cemeteries as well?” By contrast, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher allowed the Libyan strikes to launch from the U.K. “What’s the good of having bases,” she asked, “if, when you want to use them, you’re not allowed to by the home country?”Thatcher “made America realize,” she said, “that Britain was her real and true friend and that no one else in Europe was. They’re a weak lot, some of them in Europe, you know? Weak. Feeble.” Unlike Thatcher, Prime Minister Keir Starmer decided against letting Americans use U.K. bases.Mr. Starmer shifted after Iran fired two missiles at Diego Garcia, a U.K. territory in the Indian Ocean. One failed. The United States Navy knocked down the other. With no way to intercept future volleys, and London now within Tehran’s reach, the prime minister allowed America into Britain’s bases for “defense” only.On Monday, Mr. Starmer said Iran “is not our war,” as if Britain has no stake in who prevails. Europeans may think such things rebuke Mr. Trump alone, not America as whole. They may believe that traffic on the one-way street will resume once he’s gone, although Mr. Rubio is a leading contender to succeed him.America’s “setbacks,” as Thatcher told Europe in 1981, “are setbacks for us.” As the Iran conflict unfolds, expect disillusionment with NATO allies to spread. They refuse to help while offering scorn in a time of war — and even close the skies at which so many Americans gaze up at from their graves, having laid down their lives to keep Europe free

By Opposing Iran War, European Allies Risk Their Future and Disappoint Rubio, a ‘Big Supporter’ of NATO

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