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President Donald Trump said NATO and most other allies rejected his calls to help secure the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway through which about 20% of the world’s crude oil passes each day in normal times. Speaking in Washington during a St. Patrick’s Day visit with Ireland’s Prime Minister Micheál Martin, Trump said he had been unable to rally support behind his war of choice in Iran, which he described as being conducted for the good of the world. He framed the refusal as an allied failure to reciprocate for U.S. backing and said he was pressing partners to prevent Iran from securing a nuclear weapon.
Trump said the U.S. was not getting support “despite the fact that we helped” NATO “so much,” and he complained that allies had not agreed to send naval help despite the strategic importance of safeguarding the strait. He pointed to the size and cost of the requested assistance, saying, “You would have thought they would have said, ‘We’d love to send a couple of minesweepers.’ That’s not a big deal. It doesn’t cost very much money. But they didn’t do that,” according to the AP report.
The dispute over Hormuz security came as the Iran conflict entered its third week and began to reverberate through the global economy, with shipping risk affecting countries far beyond the immediate region. Trump said he was still comfortable with a scenario in which the conflict’s burden rests largely on the U.S., and he told reporters, “We don’t need any help, actually.”
Within Europe, the European Union’s top diplomat pushed back against the idea that the bloc should be drawn into what the U.S. describes as the need to address threats from Iran. Kaja Kallas said “This is not Europe’s war. We didn’t start the war. We were not consulted,” and she said the 27-nation bloc did not want to be “dragged into this.” Trump called the moment a “great test” for NATO and said rejecting his request amounted to “a very foolish mistake.”
France’s position also diverged from Trump’s request, though it offered an alternative framework for assistance. Macron said France was ready to help secure the Strait of Hormuz only as part of a mission separate from the current Middle East war, saying, “We are not a party to the conflict, and therefore France will never take part in operations to reopen or liberate the Strait of Hormuz.”
The U.S. military announced that it was continuing strikes near the waterway. Tuesday, U.S. Central Command said the military had fired multiple 5,000-pound deep penetrator bombs on hardened Iranian missile sites along Iran’s coastline near the strait, after assessing that Iranian anti-ship cruise missiles targeted at the sites posed a risk to international shipping through the Hormuz.
Trump also criticized a broader pattern of allied reluctance, saying partners in Japan, Australia and South Korea, as well as China, rejected his calls to help secure the strait. He contrasted that resistance with allies’ dependence on tens of billions of dollars in U.S. backing for Ukraine, and he said the U.S. has spent hundreds of billions fortifying Europe and Asian defenses.
In parallel with the allied-deployment dispute, the Trump administration sought additional diplomatic pressure on Iran’s regional power network. The AP report said the State Department reached out to numerous countries to encourage them to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, moves that would lead to sanctions against those groups and their members. It said a cable sent to all U.S. diplomatic missions on Monday urged diplomats in countries that had not yet made such designations to act quickly given what the report described as widespread retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli operation launched over the prior two weeks.
The Hormuz fight also reflected Trump’s longer-running approach toward alliances. The AP report described Trump’s hot-and-cold relationship with NATO, including criticism that bloc members spend too little and questioning of U.S. commitment to NATO’s mutual defense principle. NATO, the report said, described itself as a defensive alliance and said it had no plans to get involved in the U.S.-led war with Iran, while acknowledging NATO troops’ earlier deployments to Afghanistan and its 2011 air campaign that helped topple Libya’s late leader, Moammar Gadhafi.