U.S. President Donald Trump looks on during a press conference at the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands June 25, 2025.
As the consequences of President Donald Trump’s decision to launch war on Iran continue to spiral, Nobel-winning economist Thomas Friedman is begging for help from a group that the floundering U.S. Commander in Chief has “denigrated” again and again: NATO.
Addressing the international security body via the New York Times, Friedman acknowledged, “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,” he pleaded. “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.”
According to Friedman, there are two main reasons the U.S. needs NATO’s aid on Iran.
First, there is the fact that, as it stands, the situation has such drastically negative implications for the world, not only in regard to the current issue of Iran and the Hormuz Strait, but in terms of the precedent it sets for other nations in the future.
“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,” writes Friedman. “That is exactly what the Iranians are trying to engineer… Tehran has already set up a new agency called the Persian Gulf Strait Authority,” which is positioning Iran as “the only valid authority to grant permission to ships transiting 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?”
Second, Friedman says that NATO must step in because not only does Trump have no strategy for correcting the situation, but “sounds more and more unhinged every day.”
“On Sunday, in a Truth Social post,” noted Friedman, “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.”
“I understand why our NATO allies want to watch Trump and Netanyahu reap what they sowed,” Friedman says. “But these two awful leaders have sowed the wind — and we will all reap the whirlwind if Iran comes out of this stronger.”
While he hopes NATO will come to the rescue for the good of all, Friedman is not optimistic about the likelihood of such an outcome.
“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,” he noted. “This leads to my sad conclusion: Our NATO allies will almost surely reject this appeal.”