Dear NATO Members: I get it. You despise President Trump for all the right reasons. He has walked away from Ukraine. He has threatened to seize Greenland and annex Canada. He has coddled Vladimir Putin. He is eroding America’s democratic institutions and norms. He insulted each of you so much that the German chancellor recently barked back that Trump’s America was being “humiliated” by Iran. I get it.
Now get over it.
Get all your navies together and proceed to the Persian Gulf immediately to join the American armada to make clear that Iran will never, ever be allowed to decide who shall pass and who shall not through the Strait of Hormuz. And, if it insists on trying to do so, it won’t just be taking on the United States and Israel, it will be taking on the entire Western alliance.
For you to sit on the sidelines and let Iran’s malign regime, with its poisonous ideology, take hostage the Strait of Hormuz — as well as the modernizing Arab Gulf states lining it — would keep the world’s most critical oil lifeline in a state of permanent instability. This is not a small matter for Europe, which is highly dependent on gas from the Gulf to heat and power its economies, unless it wants to return to dependency on Russia.
I know this is a big ask, and it would be a lot easier if either Trump or the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, would ever summon the integrity to apologize for launching this war without NATO consultation, without any strategy for the morning after if things did not go as planned and without even a fig’s leaf of international legitimation from the United Nations.
Alas, these two reckless egomaniacs, who are nowhere near as smart as they think they are, have now boxed themselves in. Unfortunately, we are all in the box with them.
The situation they have created is bad enough. Worse, it is difficult to see how this war ends in a peace deal that doesn’t give a new lease on life to Iran’s Islamic regime. Any deal that requires Iran to give up its enriched uranium — and sets limits on future enrichment — would also require Trump to give Tehran an injection of cash by lifting sanctions.
But the last thing we should want is for those concessions to include any special right for Iran to set up a tollbooth to shake down ships that want to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. That is exactly what the Iranians are trying to engineer.
According to Lloyd’s List Intelligence, which monitors global shipping, Tehran has already set up a new agency called the Persian Gulf Strait Authority. With it, Iran is “positioning itself as the only valid authority to grant permission to ships transiting the strait,” Lloyds said. It added that the new Iranian authority had emailed it an application form for ships seeking passage, in order to approve transit and collect tolls from each ship passing through the strait.
If that or anything like that becomes the new normal for shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, who knows which other countries will add tollbooths on critical sea lanes off their shores?
Trump and Bibi have done nothing to earn such high-minded NATO support even though the future of Hormuz so directly impacts every member of the alliance. This leads to my sad conclusion: Our NATO allies will almost surely reject this appeal.
The necessary may now be impossible. Trump has so regularly denigrated NATO, undermining the alliance’s deterrence against Russia, launched the Iran war without an iota of consultation and been utterly indifferent to the devastating inflationary impacts and energy shortages the war has inflicted on NATO members that the people in these countries may simply not allow their leaders to help us.
That is especially likely at a time when Trump sounds more and more unhinged every day. Who wants to stand with him, other than the sycophants in his cabinet and party?
On Sunday, in a Truth Social post, Trump denounced the response to his peace proposal from “Iran’s so-called ‘Representatives’” as “totally unacceptable.” Mr. Trump, if they are “so-called Representatives,” why have you been negotiating with them for weeks and what good would a positive response have been? And maybe they are “so-called” because you and Netanyahu killed their “so-called” superiors, who might have had the authority to cut a serious deal. You thought the regime would collapse, but instead you hardened it.
Not surprisingly, Trump has called the new leaders of Iran “lunatics.” It took you that long to discover that, Mr. President? Did you not know that one of Ayatollah Khomeini’s most famous declarations was that Iranians did not topple Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979 “to get cheaper melons”?
Trump is so sure that everyone is corrupt because so many around him seem to be, either financially or ethically, that he can’t believe it when a pope or an ayatollah won’t bend to his will. They must be “lunatics,” he says. No. They are actually in it for their beliefs.
It is not only our NATO allies that I worry about. It’s also our Arab Gulf allies, who may be the biggest losers from this war.
Two dominant models are struggling for the future of the Middle East today. “The choice is either the Dahiya or Dubai,” Nadim Koteich, an Emirati Lebanese writer and strategist, told me.
The Dahiya is the name of the Shiite-dominated southern suburb of Beirut, a stronghold of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia, which seeks to impose on Lebanon the same kind of anti-democratic, anti-modern, anti-pluralistic, puritanical Islamic fundamentalism that the Iran regime has imposed at home. The Iranians are trying to do the same in Iraq and Yemen after failing to do so in Syria. Anything this Dahiya vision touches “is a kiss of death for a country,” as Koteich put it. “It turns it into another mediocre version of Iran.”
The United Arab Emirates pioneered a different model, originally built around the port city of Dubai. It proclaimed that the future belongs to those governments that produce noncorrupt, responsible bureaucracies, and that support moderate Islam, religious pluralism and an openness to the world and anyone eager to bring their talents. For the past few decades people from all over the Arab world, and beyond, flocked to Dubai for jobs, tourism and opportunity. And it worked.
The Emirates and the modernizing Saudis, Bahrainis, Kuwaitis and Qataris are far from perfect. They do very bad stuff sometimes. But compared to their predecessors and others in the region, this new generation of Gulf leaders offers a model of modernity that is envied and increasingly emulated throughout the Arab world.
This war has been a disaster for them, frightening away foreign investors, tourists and talent and burdening them with a future of huge new defense bills to deter Iran after the United States is gone. All that money will be diverted from economic development. Even though there has been a supposed cease-fire between the United States and Iran, Iran has reportedly been striking the Emirates with missiles and drones, which Iran denies.
The Dubai model is precisely the one Tehran wants to destroy.
“If you are a young person in the Arab world, you saw in the U.A.E. a country that respected the rule of law, worked hard to avoid this war and opened its doors to everyone who wanted to prosper — even to Iranians,” Mina Al-Oraibi, the editor of The National, the Emirates’ English-language daily, which is based in Abu Dhabi, told me. “There was even an Iranian-run hospital, an Iranian community school and an Iranian community club.” Meanwhile, she added, down the street in the very same Dubai, “Israelis were having weddings.”
“If that model gets damaged without anyone batting an eye,” Oraibi added — and if the Global South in particular starts to look at Iran as the only country that stood up to Trump and Netanyahu, and held them accountable for the destruction of Gaza — it will be a tragedy that will diminish the whole region.
So, I end where I began. I understand why our NATO allies want to watch Trump and Netanyahu reap what they sowed. But these two awful leaders have sowed the wind — and we will all reap the whirlwind if Iran comes out of this stronger.
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