NATO And The Conventional Wisdom

Just like that, Real Clear Politics ran comments on the Iran war today from both Roger Kimball and Victor Davis Hanson. As I've been saying, RCP reliably runs them as the conservative conventional wisdom, but they seldom add much insight to any issue, and sometimes they just get things wrong.

Hanson's point today is that the non-US NATO nations haven't been playing fair:

When NATO members in the past have operated unilaterally to defend their own national interests, they have often called on the U.S., as NATO’s strongest member, for overt help.

For nearly 40 years, the U.S. had offered logistical, intelligence, reconnaissance, refueling, and diplomatic support to the French in their unilateral and postcolonial efforts to protect Chad from Libya and, later, Islamists.

During the 1982 Falklands War, a solitary Britain faced enormous logistical challenges in steaming halfway around the world to eject Argentina from its windswept and sparse islands.

U.S. aid was critical to the effort.

. . . Currently, America has not asked NATO members to help bomb Iran . . . .

All the U.S. had initially asked for was basing support in disarming a common Western enemy that, for nearly half a century, has slaughtered American diplomats and soldiers and tried to kill a U.S. president and secretary of state.

But most NATO members could not even offer tacit help. Some damned the U.S. effort as either illegal or unnecessary.

But let's get real here. NATO was always an anti-Soviet alliance devised to contain Stalin and, to a lesser extent, Khrushchev. The Soviets removed Khrushchev themselves, largerly ending an expansionist threat to Western Europe. The two major "containment" conflicts of the Cold War, Korea and Viet Nam, didn't involve NATO. Nor did Soviet efforts to impose discipline within their sphere of influence in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

Neither US aid to France in defense of Chad nor aid to the UK against Argentina involved invocation of Article 5, which says that an armed attack against one member is an attack against all. That has been invoked only once, following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, in the Afghanistan-Iraq wars, which were post-Soviet, didn't much involve Russia, and were highly questionable affairs. It's also hard to imagine that the outcome would have changed at all if no other NATO countries had been involved.

The theoretical need for NATO faded once the Soviets themselves removed the expansionst Khrushchev. In theory, it completely disappeared after the Soviet Union collapsed. In practice, the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrated that even a second-rate non-NATO power could fight the Russian military to a protracted standstill, to the point that the US could seriously question whether its interests were threatened at all in that conflict.

The US aid to France in Chad and the UK in the Falklands was a lagniappe, pure and simple. It imposed no obligation on France and the UK; the only claim Hanson can make is we were nice to them; how come they can't be nice to us? But this neglects the bigger point: NATO was an anti-Soviet alliance, when the Soviet Union has been gone for decades. NATO for the non-US countries was a distraction: each of them had national defense interests aside from any Soviet threat, which they'd neglected to consider, somehow assuming NATO would solve everything.

Ukraine, not a NATO member, posed one puzzle. A bigger one is the Strait of Hormuz:

This post by Trump is pre-framing what's to come. Read along and you'll start to see it too.

When Trump tells the UK to "go to the Strait and just TAKE IT," the surface read is that he's venting at allies who didn't show up.

But the deeper move is priming the the public (and… pic.twitter.com/wXEFOesNYy

— American Debunk (@AmericanDebunk) March 31, 2026

The problem is that as a practical matter, no non-US NATO country or combination of countries has the capability to "go to the strait and just TAKE IT".

Germany’s defense minister on Monday ruled out sending naval forces to the Strait of Hormuz, saying such a move would risk dragging Germany into a conflict with Iran.

. . . He dismissed US President Donald Trump’s call for NATO allies to help secure the strategic waterway and stressed that Germany will push for a diplomatic solution and a swift end to the fighting.

"What does Donald Trump expect a handful of European frigates to accomplish in the Strait of Hormuz that the powerful American Navy cannot achieve alone? That is the question I ask myself," Pistorius said.

But that ignores the issue that the oil that can't get through the Strait of Hormuz to reach Europe is European oil. The US doesn't get oil via the strait. But Europe can only send a handful of frigates to defend its interests, yet it somehow expects the powerful American navy to act on its behalf, while sanctimoniously claiming the Iran war isn't its war. The problem is that even the most powerful non-US NATO countries can send only a handful of frigates to protect any national interests that can't be protected by invoking Article 5.

The problem is worse if US interests conflict with the rest of NATO. For instance,

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned Friday [January 16] that a decision on who owns Greenland doesn't belong to U.S. President Donald Trump.

. . . Carney urged NATO allies including the U.S. to “respect their commitments” as he stressed Canada’s support for Danish sovereignty over the strategically vital Arctic island, which Trump has threatened to seize.

"We are NATO partners with Denmark, and so our full partnership stands," Carney said in his first remarks on the intensifying diplomatic brouhaha. "Our obligations on Article 5, Article 2 of NATO stand, and we stand full-square behind those."

But even the Canadian armed forces are fully aware of the military reality behind any such insistence:

Canadian military planners recently conducted a rare conceptual war game simulating a US invasion of Canada, reportedly the first of its kind in about a century, according to a report by The Globe and Mail.

The scenario, described as highly improbable by officials and experts, was explored amid heightened rhetoric from US political figures. In the exercise, planners reportedly assessed that US forces could seize key Canadian strategic locations within a week, potentially in as little as two days.

Denmark itself wouldn't add much to an alliance with Canada to defend Greenland against the US:

Greenland is Denmark’s greatest strategic responsibility. Denmark’s military presence in Greenland, however, is minimal, consisting mostly of patrol units and surveillance. There are no fighters or air defenses or heavy ground forces. Instead, Denmark relies on administration, diplomacy, and—perhaps ironically—its alliance with the far more powerful United States. Sovereignty is asserted more through legal mechanisms than militarily.

. . . Denmark can be commended for assembling a capable and modern force, albeit one designed for coalitions and contribution not dominance. Denmark’s power lies in alignment, rather than autonomy, an arrangement of which US rhetoric may force reevaluation. Greenland underscores this reality: a defense posture that is dependent upon alliances is only as strong as those alliances are.

The problem at this point is simply that as long as Russia isn't now able to go even as far as the Soviet Union could in asserting control over countries in its own sphere, like Ukraine, as it once did in Hungary or Czechoslovakia, the value of NATO to the US as an anti-Soviet alliance fades. At the same time, the lagniappes the US has traditionally provided to NATO members become too expensive to keep handing out.

Meanwhile, those same NATO members are slowly waking up to the fact that they have national defense interests separate from those the NATO alliance was supposed to cover. And that becomes their problem, not the US's.