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/
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