President Trump’s growing frustration with NATO members’ refusal to join U.S. efforts to either unblock or block the Strait of Hormuz has become a defining feature of the current crisis. European governments are indeed economically dependent on Gulf oil and LNG, but they also believe the United States initiated a war of choice without consultation, without a coherent diplomatic strategy, and without an accurate assessment of the risks such a conflict would pose to the global economy. The result is a widening gap between Washington and its allies at the very moment when alliance cohesion should be the United States’ greatest strategic asset. Instead, the President’s rhetoric — escalatory, improvisational, and often directed at allies themselves — has produced a backlash that makes NATO members even less willing to join the military campaign against Iran.

The sequence of events matters. The U.S. attacks on Iranian desalination plants and other infrastructure came on the heels of the President threatening to “invade” Greenland, a territory of a NATO ally. That episode, dismissed domestically as political theater, was interpreted in Europe as a signal that the President was willing to use coercive rhetoric against allied territory for domestic political effect. When combined with subsequent statements threatening to “destroy Iranian civilization” — language widely viewed by legal experts as describing a war crime — the credibility of U.S. strategic judgment came under renewed scrutiny. Allies were forced to ask whether joining a U.S.-led operation would implicate them in actions that violated international law or crossed long-standing legal and ethical boundaries.

The pattern did not stop there. The administration issued thinly veiled threats against the Vatican, and the President publicly labeled NATO allies “cowards” for refusing to participate in the Hormuz operation. These statements were not interpreted as isolated outbursts but as part of a broader rhetorical posture that treats allies as obstacles rather than partners. In alliance politics, language is not decoration; it is a signaling instrument. When the head of state of the alliance’s leading power uses rhetoric that delegitimizes allies’ security concerns, questions their courage, or threatens their territory, it erodes the trust that underpins collective defense.

The President’s subsequent claim that the United States would likely not honor Article V if NATO countries were attacked — because NATO did not come to America’s defense in the Iran war — further destabilized the alliance. This framing ignored a basic legal reality: the United States did not invoke Article V because Iran did not attack the United States; the United States attacked Iran. By presenting NATO’s refusal to join the U.S. campaign as a betrayal equivalent to failing to respond to an attack on American soil, the President reframed alliance obligations as conditional on political loyalty rather than treaty-defined triggers. That shift is not merely rhetorical. It signals to allies that the United States may reinterpret its commitments based on political grievances rather than legal obligations.

European governments have also taken note of the President’s habit of referring to NATO as if it were an external group unrelated to the United States, despite the fact that the alliance was established by the United States and has had an American military commander for over 80 years. This distancing language suggests a conceptual reframing of NATO — from a U.S.-led collective security institution to a burden imposed on the United States by ungrateful partners. For allies, this raises the question of whether the United States still sees NATO as a strategic multiplier or merely as a political foil.

The private concern among European capitals has already begun surfacing publicly in ways that would have been unthinkable a year ago. British Prime Minister Starmer, one of the United States’ closest allies, stated publicly that he was “fed up” with the economic instability caused by Trump’s actions — and in the same breath placed Trump alongside Vladimir Putin as a destabilizing force affecting British families. He had previously told reporters that Trump’s threats to destroy Iranian civilization were “not words I would use — ever use,” citing British values and principles. Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez closed Spanish airspace to U.S. military aircraft and stated that his government would not “applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.” These are not the words of allies managing a tactical disagreement. They are the words of leaders recalibrating a relationship.

Then came the late-night Truth Social post: an AI-generated image depicting the President as Jesus, circulated during an active military conflict with global economic stakes. In ordinary times, such imagery might be dismissed as political theatrics. But NATO’s collective defense architecture does not operate in ordinary times, and it does not run on theatrics. It runs on a foundational assumption: that the person at the top of the U.S. command structure is making decisions through a coherent strategic framework, not a personal mythology. The issue is not whether the post was appropriate. The issue is what it reveals about the decision-making environment inside the White House — who has access, who has influence, and whether judgments about escalation, nuclear posture, and alliance coordination are being filtered through a lens of messianic self-narrative. The post drew immediate condemnation from Trump’s own conservative base, Republican members of Congress, and religious leaders across denominations. NATO heads of government have not commented on it publicly — the norms of alliance diplomacy make that close to impossible — but the post arrived in European capitals already primed by months of escalating concern about the President’s judgment, discipline, and grip on strategic reality. What allies cannot say in press conferences, they are saying in closed-door meetings, in accelerating investment in European strategic autonomy, and in the increasingly blunt public language of leaders like Starmer.

In the long term, this erosion of trust may prove more damaging than any single policy decision. NATO cohesion depends on the belief that the United States will act with strategic discipline, respect allied sovereignty, and uphold the norms that have governed the alliance since 1949. When rhetoric repeatedly crosses those boundaries — and when the behavior of the alliance’s leader raises unspoken questions about the reliability of U.S. command judgment itself — allies begin to hedge, diversify their security partnerships, and quietly plan for a future in which the American anchor cannot be taken for granted. The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz has exposed these fractures. But the fractures run deeper than any single conflict. What is at stake is not merely allied participation in one military operation. It is the credibility of the United States as the foundation of the postwar security order it created.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)