Top US allies escalating their defiance of Trump

U.S. President Donald Trump with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, January 21, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

During former Joe Biden's four years as president, he warned that if Donald Trump ever returned to the White House, it would pose a dire threat to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — which Biden viewed as vital to the United States from a national security standpoint. Biden applauded Sweden and Finland when they decided to join NATO and hoped that more European countries would do the same.

But U.S. relations with longtime NATO allies took a turn for the worse after Trump became president again, from tariffs to Trump wanting to buy Greenland to Trump calling for Canada to become "the 51st state." And the Iran war is only adding to the tensions.

In an article published on April 10, Bloomberg News' Wes Kosova stresses that NATO allies, frustrated over Iran, are becoming bolder in their defiance of Trump.

"An unusual thing happened when Donald Trump demanded America's allies help him end his war against Iran," Kosova explains. "They said no…. In waves of social media posts, the president not so subtly hinted that he'd walk away from NATO if his counterparts didn't comply. Trump, who'd grown accustomed to European leaders contorting themselves to avoid the worst of his wrath over tariffs and NATO dues, might have expected that they'd grudgingly go along this time too. Instead, they rejected his commands in uncharacteristically blunt terms."

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, for example, described the Iran war as "not a matter for NATO" — and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, similarly, said, "This is not our war, and we're not going to be dragged into it." Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was highly critical of Trump's "illegal, absurd, cruel war."

"This week's shaky ceasefire agreement highlighted the president's isolation from some of the U.S.' most steadfast friends and has exposed his weakening powers to force other nations to do what he wants," Kosova notes. "The two-week pause in hostilities wasn't the result of behind-the-scenes footwork by the leaders of France, Germany or the UK. It instead took an intervention by distant Pakistan, whose citizens Trump has barred from immigrating to the U.S., to provide the escape the president was seeking from a conflict that had escalated beyond his control. Trump largely kept allies in the dark about his war plans."

According to Sascha Lohmann of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, "almost nobody on the record" in European NATO countries is "saying we should support" Trump's war against Iran.

Lohmann told Bloomberg News, "There may be a certain pain threshold that he could inflict, and then, the allies would just jump and support it. I would be skeptical."

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