Is The US Using Iran As A Pretext To Abandon Europe?
In the summer of 1987 Donald Trump visited Moscow; reportedly to discuss a hotel development deal. However he seemed to have returned with some newfound opinions regarding the United States and its European allies. He took out full page ads in several major publications with the purpose of criticizing United States foreign policy and deriding NATO allies for not paying their fair share for defense. Driving a wedge between the US and its European allies has long been a strategic objective of Moscow, and now in Trump’s second term that wedge appears to have been driven as deep as ever.
Though pressure from Trump has led to some positive outcomes with many NATO members increasing spending to meet these demands, it never quite seems to be enough and the primary questions remain whether or not the alliance can outlast the current administration, and whether or not the American people will choose leadership that understands the importance of the Atlantic partnership and our (at least on paper) shared outlook and values in coming elections.
Iran Conflict
The US-Israeli war on Iran, launched on February 28th, has dominated global attention since the first strikes on Tehran. Trump has framed it as a necessary campaign to eliminate Iran’s nuclear ambitions. This stated objective is shared, at least in principle, by many of America’s European allies. But as stated in another article, these actions seem to have been short sighted and have closed any diplomatic off-ramps. Iran’s retaliatory drone campaigns, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the resulting oil price spike have combined to deliver a significant economic windfall to Moscow. The Trump administration’s subsequent decision to temporarily waive Russian oil sanctions, framed as an emergency measure to stabilize global energy markets, removed what remained of the economic pressure on the Kremlin at the moment Ukraine needed it most.
The cascade of effects on Ukraine has been alarming to say the least. The Iran war is draining stocks of US air defense missiles that are crucial for Kyiv to shoot down Russian missiles, diverting Washington’s attention from Russia-Ukraine negotiations, and analysts have described Ukraine as the “ultimate loser” from the conflict. US-brokered peace talks have stalled with no new date for resumption. Meanwhile, Trump has told reporters he “doesn’t need Congress” to pull the United States out of NATO (a claim directly contradicted by the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which requires a two-thirds Senate supermajority for any withdrawal, but which he has shown little interest in acknowledging). The question that European policymakers are now asking quietly, and with considerable diplomatic restraint, is whether this is incompetence or intent.
Patterns
The argument that Trump’s Iran war is serving as a pretext for a broader strategic retreat does not require conspiratorial thinking. It requires only attention to the pattern of actions rather than the rhetoric.
While Secretary of State Marco Rubio offers reassurances about American commitment to its allies, and Speaker Mike Johnson speaks warmly of the transatlantic relationship, the administration’s actual conduct tells a different story. Trump has threatened NATO allies with tariffs. He has suggested that countries failing to meet defense spending targets should expect no protection under Article 5. He has repeatedly floated the idea of withdrawing from the alliance entirely. And now, with American forces deepening their commitment in the Middle East, the 82nd Airborne Division is deploying to the region alongside two Marine Expeditionary Units. Thus the military and political bandwidth available for European security has contracted sharply.
What is emerging is the rough outline of a doctrine, even if it has never been articulated as one: America’s strategic interests lie in the Western Hemisphere. Europe is a legacy commitment, expensive and underappreciative. This is not isolationism in the classical sense, it is a reorientation and withdrawal of the perimeter of American concern. A reorientation that is hard to see the logic and long-term positives of.
Potential Outcomes
It is worth examining what the world looks like if this reorientation succeeds; if America does retreat to its hemisphere, if the Atlantic partnership is allowed to atrophy, and if Europe is left to navigate the geopolitical landscape of the 2030s without a credible American security guarantee.
The picture is not comfortable. Europe is structurally dependent on external powers for the two resources that underpin both its economic productivity and its military capability. On energy, the continent has made genuine progress since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 forced a painful reckoning with its dependence on Russian gas, but the transition is incomplete and the vulnerabilities remain. On critical minerals and rare earth elements, the situation is considerably more acute.
The EU currently imports 95% of its rare earth materials, which are crucial for electric vehicles, daily technology, and defense systems. Recycling rates remain below 1%, and although the bloc has set goals for 2030, it is unlikely to meet them without major acceleration. The dependency is not distributed across a range of suppliers. China produces approximately 95% of the world’s rare earth oxides and supplies 70% of Europe’s imports. Europe depends on China for all of its heavy rare earth elements and 85% of its light rare earths, and for 98% of its total rare earth magnet demand.
These are not abstract figures. Rare earth elements are the foundational materials of modern defense systems such as radar equipment, sensors, guidance systems, drones. Since radar equipment, sensors, and drones rely on strategic rare earth elements European production of advanced military systems is at risk. A Europe attempting to rearm and defend itself without a reliable supply of these materials faces a structural contradiction immediately.
The implications are direct. A Europe deprived of American security guarantees, dependent on China for the materials it needs to build its defense industry, and facing a Russia emboldened by oil revenues and sanctions relief, would not be a Europe capable of charting an independent course. It would be a Europe facing two undesirable choices: accommodation with a Sino-Russian bloc that controls the resources it needs, or a ruinously expensive attempt at autarky that its fractured political landscape makes nearly impossible to sustain. This is not a hypothetical future. It is the logical conclusion of the current trajectory, extended forward by a decade.
European Security and Economy Without The US
To be fair to Europe, it is not passive in the face of these pressures. The response to Trump’s second term has been, by historical standards, remarkably coherent. Defense spending is rising across the continent. The UK and Ukraine signed a new defense partnership aimed at leveraging Ukraine’s anti-drone expertise and the UK’s industrial base. The EU’s €800 billion ReArm Europe initiative represents a genuine shift in the bloc’s strategic seriousness. At the UN Security Council, the US and Western allies overruled Russian and Chinese attempts to block discussion of Iran sanctions enforcement, 11-2. These are not the actions of a continent that has given up.
But European resolve, however genuine, has limits that are structural rather than political. The continent cannot replace American nuclear deterrence on any realistic timeline. It cannot replicate the logistics, intelligence architecture, and force projection capacity that American membership in NATO provides. And it cannot, in the near term, decouple from Chinese rare earth dependency without accepting a significant degradation of its industrial and defense capacity in the interim.
What Europe can do, and what its most serious leaders appear to understand, is buy time. Hold the line on Ukraine. Maintain the institutional architecture of the alliance. Accelerate rearmament. Diversify supply chains where possible, and wait for an American electorate that, historically, has tended to recognize the value of its alliances when the consequences of abandoning them become sufficiently concrete.
Uncomfortable Questions
Trump’s message since 1987 has served Moscow’s strategic interests unfortunately well. Whether Trump understood that at the time, or understands it now, is ultimately unknowable. What is knowable is that the message has never changed, and that its consequences after nearly four decades are now being felt in Kyiv, in Brussels, and in every European capital that has spent the past two years watching Washington with growing alarm.
The Atlantic alliance was built on the premise that American commitment to European security was durable, bipartisan, and structural. That it is not contingent on the personality of a single president. Fortunately systems are in place to help ensure this, but that premise is now under its most serious challenge since the alliance was founded.
Europe is responding with more seriousness and more urgency than at any point in recent memory. Whether that response will be sufficient depends, in the end, not on European will but on American choices that will be made at the ballot box, and in the halls of a Congress that has, so far, proven unwilling to translate its stated support for NATO into action capable of constraining an executive who has never believed in the alliance he inherited.
While the Iran war may or may not be a deliberate pretext, the abandonment of Europe, if it comes, will not arrive with a declaration. It will arrive gradually, through a thousand smaller decisions, until one day Europe looks west and finds the guarantee has quietly expired.