by Stephen Soukup
As Europe drifts and critics wail, the war with Iran exposes a harder truth: alliances endure only so long as interests align—not because of shared values or sentiment.
The longer the war with Iran drags on, the
clearer it becomes that America’s allies have little interest in doing
things that allies traditionally do. Some European leaders have merely
said they will not participate in the war, that they have no interest in
fighting Donald Trump’s battles. Others have taken concrete steps to
hinder American efforts—notably, by denying American troops access to
bases in their countries or denying them permission to fly over their
airspace. Others still—namely, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Spain’s
Pedro Sánchez—appear to have determined that their nation’s welfare no
longer aligns with that of the United States, which is a legitimate
position but hardly one that would define an “ally.”
The clearer it becomes that America’s longstanding erstwhile allies
are unhappy with current arrangements, the more agitated President
Trump’s domestic opponents—on the Left and the Right—grow. They
are certain that Trump’s Middle East conflict is the straw that will
break the back of the camel that is the post-World War II global order.
He is an abomination, they insist, a simplistic fool who knows nothing
about the history and grandeur of NATO, the importance of the
trans-Atlantic partnership, or the bonds that tie “the West” together
and make its preservation the central purpose of American foreign
policy. He will destroy everything and leave the world and the nation
worse off because of it.
The more agitated President Trump’s domestic opponents grow, the more
obvious it is that most of those who purport to be “experts” on foreign
affairs have forgotten the first rule of realist foreign policy:
nations have no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies, only eternal
and perpetual interests.
This near-exact paraphrasing of the proposition dates to an 1848
speech by Lord Palmerston to the House of Commons. It is, however, a
notion that dates to antiquity, having been elucidated as far back as
the fifth century BC in Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue. More recently,
Charles de Gaulle used it as the justification to withdraw France from
NATO’s integrated command structure in 1966—yet somehow, amazingly, NATO
and the West managed to survive.
There are several profound ironies in the fact that the nation’s best
and brightest are unhappy with President Trump for starting a war that
they believe will destroy NATO and end the global order.
The first of these can be seen in Europe’s reaction to the current
war. The French and Spanish leaders, in particular, seem to have decided
that their nation’s interests are not the same as the United States’.
What this suggests is that the urge to blow up NATO is hardly Trump’s
alone. If Europe is willing to pursue its own interests, even when they
conflict with America’s, then the trans-Atlantic “friendship” has
already been damaged and has clearly evolved into something other than
an alliance.
The second of these stems from Trump’s critics’ belief that NATO is a
“values-based” organization in the first place, that it binds the
world’s “greatest democracies” together in an effort to ensure the
maintenance of an order based on their common ideals. In truth, NATO has
always been a realist organization, based almost entirely on the
understanding that nations have interests they must protect,
irrespective of naïve dreams of shared values and common hopes. NATO, it
should be recalled, was not created immediately in the aftermath of
World War II but rather four years and countless world-changing events
later.
When the war ended, the American side—led by the largely delusional
Franklin Roosevelt—approached the pending peace with fantasies about
global governance and camaraderie with Stalin and the Soviets. As I have
noted before
in these pages, the political scientist and historian of the Cold War,
Amos Perlmutter, wrote that Roosevelt’s “vision for a postwar world was
neo-Wilsonian, totally at odds with reality. He would help create a new
international order, presided over in an equal partnership by the two
emerging superpowers, the United States and the USSR, and buttressed by
the newly created world organization, the United Nations.” More
damningly, perhaps, George Kennan, a high-ranking diplomat in the
Roosevelt administration who served in the American embassy in the
Soviet Union, put it this way in his Memoirs:
The truth is—there is no avoiding it—that
Franklin Roosevelt, for all his charm and skill as a political leader,
was, when it came to foreign policy, a very superficial man, ignorant,
dilettantish, with a severely limited intellectual horizon. . . .
Roosevelt knew nothing about Russia and very little about Europe. This
in itself would not have been so bad. What was worse was that he did not
seek or value the advice of those who did know something about these
places and could have told him something about them.
And speaking of Kennan, he is best remembered by history as the man
who created the language and the policy paradigm that would set the
foundation for the hardheaded, realist Truman Doctrine. And that
doctrine, in turn, would recognize the importance of a strong and
reliable trans-Atlantic partnership, leading to the establishment of
NATO in 1949. On February 22, 1946, Kennan—then the chargé d’affaires
at the American Embassy in Moscow—sent what would come to be called
“the Long Telegram,” an eight-thousand-word missive in which he laid out
the “process of decision-taking in the Soviet Union” and warned that it
was “wrong and useless to attempt to appeal to subjective feelings on
the part of Soviet statesmen or negotiators.” The bottom line, Kennan
argued, was that “there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence” with
Soviet Russia, that the United States would be unwise even to attempt to
achieve such an end, and that it would be far better served to
“contain” Soviet aggression at a series of checkpoints.
Kennan’s telegram alarmed the rest of the Truman administration, many
of whom were as naïve about the Soviets as the late FDR. Kennan was
recalled from Moscow and, shortly thereafter, was put in charge of
creating the State Department’s Policy Planning Office, which was
intended to establish a program for dealing with the mounting economic
and social problems in Europe.
Kennan’s telegram and his advocacy of “containment” morphed into Dean
Acheson’s “domino theory,” which became the Truman Doctrine, described
by Kennan in his famous “X” article in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.
Officially titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the essay argued
that the antagonism demonstrated by Soviet leadership toward the Western
democracies at that time could not be mitigated by diplomacy because it
was inherent in the internal system of power in the USSR. It argued
that the United States government should establish a program to provide
economic and technical aid to the non-Communist nations of Europe, not
because of “shared values,” but for purely transactional reasons: the
United States would provide the money, the arms, and the manpower to
deter the Soviets, while Europe would serve as the frontlines in the
battle against the Communist menace. While most Americans (of a certain
age) think of “containment” and “the domino theory” as aspects of
American foreign policy in Asia (Korea and Vietnam), in truth, they were
developed to apply in Europe, to save the western half of the continent
from the fate of their neighbors to the east.
The third profound irony in the “experts’” constant laments that
Trump’s unilateral “war of choice” might destroy NATO is that the modern
presidential propensity to wage war without congressional approval is
derived almost solely from the negotiations around the establishment of
NATO. The Europeans were concerned that the clause in the U.S.
Constitution that vested Congress with the right to declare war would
cause a delay in American help if Russia invaded Western Europe. In
response, the Truman team advanced the “covert operations initiative,”
codified in National Security Council Directive 10/2. The directive
formally authorized the Central Intelligence Agency—established less
than a year earlier—to coordinate intelligence gathering across agencies
and to conduct covert activities “against hostile foreign states or
groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups. . . .”
Although seemingly benign and even necessary, 10/2 provided the
justification for many of the CIA’s early adventures, as well as
Truman’s deployment of American troops to Korea on June 30, 1950.
The late, great historian/journalist David Halberstam described the
“police action” in Korea as “the last thing anyone, civilian or
military, wanted to do.” Nevertheless, Truman determined that it was in
the nation’s interests and that going to Congress for approval was
unnecessary and would just “slow down the process.” National Security
Council Directive 10/2 was formulated and written in response to
Europe’s concerns regarding NATO, but it was first used by Truman to
fight Communists in Asia. The rest, as they say, is history.
In other words, the idealist trans-Atlanticists who spend their days
carping at Trump might be better served by assessing and addressing
their misunderstanding of history—especially the history of NATO. It was
and always has been an organization based almost entirely on foreign
policy realism and the perceived shared interests of the
American and European peoples. If those interests have changed—as
Europe’s kvetching suggests—then so be it. NATO can still be an
important tool for American foreign policy, but to do so, it must adapt
to the post-Cold War realities, and the Americans and their erstwhile
allies must find new interests that hold them together.
Stephen Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/04/06/nato-iran-and-the-interests-of-nations/
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
