The war in Iran has revealed plenty about America’s ability to inflict damage on its enemies, Tehran’s capacity to resist pressure and Washington’s broader tendency to get itself stuck in the Middle East – a region several US presidents planned to extricate from. The conflict has been paused since 7 April due to a ceasefire that Trump extended earlier in the week. But it is nonetheless revealing a gradual systemic shift in the so-called international order that has been bubbling beneath the surface for years.

The movable object is none other than the transatlantic alliance which, through Nato, has bound the United States and most of Europe into a single security construct. That perennial institution, which security elites on both sides of the Atlantic have for decades held up as the pinnacle of what an alliance should be, is beginning to lose its lustre. This is thanks to the weight of diverging geopolitical priorities, divisions within Europe itself and President Trump’s propensity to treat European states as the equivalent of a lazy 25 year old who refuses to leave the house and get a job.

The war in Iran has exacerbated all of those elements, so much so that public acrimony is now par for the course. Mutual contempt now hovers over Nato and is fragmenting the alliance as its most important member, the United States, becomes steadily more irritated by what it views as a lack of........

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