LONDON — President Donald Trump has berated and threatened America’s NATO allies. Now he wants these same countries to help unblock the Strait of Hormuz — and their response has not exactly been enthusiastic.
“This is not our war, we have not started it,” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told reporters Monday.
That appeared to sum up the mood among U.S. allies, with leaders from Berlin to London expressing reservations about Trump’s demands and indicating they had no immediate plans to provide military support to reopen the crucial waterway.
Iran effectively closed the trade route in response to the American-Israeli assault launched last month. This sent global oil prices surging and threatened an international economic shock, something economists had warned about before the war began.
Follow live coverage here.
Trump called upon “countries of the world that receive oil through the Hormuz Strait” to “take care of that passage,” as he put it in a post Sunday on Truth Social. In an interview with the Financial Times the same day, he went further, warning that NATO would have a “very bad future” if its members did not help free up the strait.
It was “a bit rich” for Trump to be asking help from countries he had previously insulted, former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves told NBC News in a telephone interview Monday.
Earlier, Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna called on Trump to provide more information. Europe needed to understand Trump’s “strategic goals. What will be the plan?” he asked.
Though often wary of risking the president’s ire, many European governments have been reluctant to be pulled into the war with Tehran.
Some, such as the leftist government of Spain, outright refused the Hormuz demand.
“Spain will never accept any stopgap measures” to keep the strait open, Defense Minister Margarita Robles said, “because the objective must be for the war to end, and for it to end now.”
Even in Italy, whose Prime Minister Georgia Meloni has previously cast herself as something of a Trump whisperer, the government declined to get involved.
Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani told reporters that “diplomacy needs to prevail.”
In Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been criticized by Trump for not taking part in the initial attack on Iran.
Starmer told a news conference Monday he was “working with all of our allies, including our European partners,” to “restore the freedom of navigation” as quickly as possible.
“Ultimately, we have to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to ensure stability on the market,” he said. “That is not a simple task.”
But Starmer made it clear that he would not be drawn into “the wider war,” and that any Hormuz mission should be a broader effort — including the U.S. and Gulf states — rather than something for NATO.
Meanwhile, Japan and Australia said they had no plans to send ships to aid Trump’s request.
There are other proposals on the table, such as top European diplomat Kaja Kallas on Monday floating a similar deal to the one in 2022 that ensured Ukraine could export grain amid Russia’s invasion.
But the proposal to expand the mandate of a European Union naval force currently in the Red Sea to include the Strait of Hormuz was rejected by member states. “For the time being, there was no appetite in changing the mandate of the operation,” Kallas said.
The wrangle over the strait marks the latest point of tension between the Trump administration and Washington’s historic friends across the Atlantic.
Last year, the president refused to rule out using military force to seize Denmark’s semi-autonomous island of Greenland. He then claimed incorrectly that NATO allies had not fought on the front lines in Afghanistan — which caused dismay and anger across the continent.
“It’s a bit rich — after you’ve been threatening Denmark and insulting the memory of around 1,000 NATO troops who fought in Afghanistan — to say, ‘Oh, you all have to come and help us now,” said Ilves, who was Estonian president between 2006 and 2016. “If countries send troops and something happens to them, is he going to make fun of them again?” he added.
“It’s a political nonstarter from the get-go,” he said. “I’m not sure what he expected.”
Ultimately, much European skepticism over Trump’s Hormuz demand seemed to stem from their wariness of the war itself.
“The European answer must be: The way to end the problem is to end the war, not to join it,” said Sven Biscop, a director at the Egmont Institute, a Belgian think tank. He said the main thing was “not be intimidated by threats on NATO” by Trump.
Asked for comment on the European reaction, the White House directed NBC News to comments made by press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who told reporters that these countries should help out because they “are benefiting greatly from the United States military taking out the threat of Iran.”
She added that “the president is absolutely right to call on these countries to do more to help the United States to reopen the Strait of Hormuz so that we can stop this terrorist regime from restricting the free flow of energy.”
Despite several ships being bombed as they attempt to cross the strait, Iran denies it has closed the narrow neck of water entirely. After the U.S. and Israel launched the war, it said it would attack vessels from those countries or their allies.
“From our perspective the Strait of Hormuz is open, and only closed to enemies,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote on Telegram.
[/gpt3]
