What Do They All Want from the Iran War? The Great Game, Part Six: Europe

Victor Davis Hanson

Start with the premise that with few exceptions, the Europeans despise Trump but need the U.S. military to protect them from both Russia and any potential anti-Western nuclear power with ballistic missiles.

They cannot square that circle. Their hearts want to subvert the Americans, but their heads tell them the end of crazy Iran means no more existential threats to Europe from the Middle East, no more Arab terrorist proxies in the region, and fewer subsidized terrorists in their own countries.

Indeed, if the regime falls or even if it is just bankrupt, it is likely that Muslim minorities in countries like the UK, Germany, and France will be seen as more radical and anti-Western than Muslims in a new Iran and a rapidly changing Gulf.

On the other hand, Europeans think, like the American Left and paleo-Right, that a win over Iran is a win for Trump. Victory only increases his influence and power and might lead perhaps to regime change in Cuba next and more tough-love lectures to Europe to straighten up.

What would Europe say if the Chinese and Russian proxy regimes, anti-Western, and all terrorist supporters—Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba—for the first time in decades were no longer sources of global discord, thanks to the hated American president?

In other words, any geostrategic victory for the West, if engineered by U.S unilateralism, is considered a setback for the European (failed) model and a win for its American antithesis.

Western Europe is on a suicidal death spiral from infertility and doomed demographics, open borders and unassimilated Islamic illegal aliens, green energy lunacy, a war against natural gas, oil, and nuclear power, disarmament, unfunded socialist entitlements, declining economic competitiveness, mostly industrial stagnation, and endemic anti-Semitism.

To rearm to sufficiently protect itself and its global interests, Europe would have to reject its entire current leftist paradigm to create a growing economy strong enough to afford a credible European defense that would have fully partnered with the U.S.

But as the historian Livy said of the malaise of the late Republic, Europe cannot live with its current disease and yet cannot live either with the medicine needed to cure it.

So, expect passive-aggressive European confusion, damning the war, and then bragging that it will patrol the Strait of Hormuz but only after the Americans have taken the risks to clear it. If Iran is freed, expect Europe to claim the new regime as a brethren socialist parliamentary government and descend for business investments—all impossible had not the hated orange man risked his presidency to intervene, as Europe denied the U.S. use of joint NATO bases, airspace, and landing rights, while demagoguing America as a neo-imperialist warmonger.

In the end, Europe has shot itself in the foot. It could have kept quiet about allowing the U.S. its NATO privileges to use its airspace and bases, while nonparticipating in the war. It could have shown “concern” but not stooped to its loud “this is not our war” cheap attacks on the U.S.—and thereby kept the NATO partnership strong.

Why did it not?

Because Europe was more scared of Iran than it cherished its special relationship with America. It remembered that it had drawn the U.S. into the 1999 bombing of Serbia, risking a nuclear standoff with Russia, to save a non-NATO Kosovo.

It knew it begged the U.S. to join its misadventure in Libya—a seven-month bombing campaign that ensured a further impoverished chaotic mess.

The UK knew in 1982 that its ill-fated expedition to reclaim the Falklands would have been impossible without the assistance of the United States, which sided with the UK at the expense of offending its entire Western Hemisphere Spanish-speaking neighbors.

France knew that for nearly two decades it had called on the U.S. for logistical and intelligence support for its unilateral postcolonial interventions in Chad. The U.S. never balked at these requests, and in the cases of Libya and Serbia likely conducted 70-80 percent of the air missions.

So, what is the status now of NATO?

When the U.S. is willing to solve a half-century plague upon the West and provide a benefit to the global order, Europe would not even extend to America a fraction of the support it received for its own military initiatives.

The result? NATO will remain. But it will become de facto a bilateral alliance of mostly Eastern European and a few smaller Western nations, should push come to shove, which one day will surely happen.

Verdict: The European leadership has committed one of the most colossal blunders in modern trans-Atlantic relations. It believes its animus is only due to Trump and will pass when Trump leaves; but half the U.S. will not forget, and the next time Europe—shrinking, disarmed, energy short, borderless—seeks a superpower to save it from a nut in the Middle East, a rogue European apostate thug, another Putin in Russia, or a China, good luck with and goodbye to all that.