No ally was consulted before the bombs dropped on Iran.
Five weeks later, Trump is demanding those same allies help him fix a war they wanted no part of and threatening to dismantle the alliance when they say no.
The story of the US and its partners since February 28 is not just about Iran.
It is about what happens to the global economy when the world’s most powerful country decides that loyalty is a one-way street.
How did we get here so fast?
The speed of this breakdown is what gets lost in the daily noise of missile updates and oil price tickers.
At the start of March, European leaders were still trying to be constructive by condemning Iranian counter-strikes, calling for diplomacy, and carefully avoiding direct criticism of Washington.
Britain’s Keir Starmer walked the finest of lines. Even Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, arguably Trump’s closest ideological ally in Europe, kept the door open.
That goodwill evaporated quickly, and for a specific reason. European governments were not simply opposed to the war in principle.
They were being asked to participate in a conflict that their own legal frameworks made impossible to join.
NATO is a collective defence organisation.
It exists to protect members who are attacked, not to serve as a toolbox for military operations that were never discussed within the alliance.
When France, Spain, Italy and Poland all independently said no to US requests for bases, airspace and equipment, they were each arriving at the same legal and political conclusion on their own.
Trump’s playbook: punish the people you need
What followed was a masterclass in how not to run an alliance.
Trump posted on Truth Social that France was “VERY UNHELPFUL” for refusing overflight rights for military supply flights.
He told the UK — which has been trying harder than most to preserve the relationship — that it has no real navy and should “build up some delayed courage.”
He told all of them to “go get your own oil.”
He said the US “never needed” NATO’s help and called the alliance a “paper tiger” in an interview with The Telegraph.
Here is the strategic problem with all of that. The one thing the US genuinely cannot do right now is reopen the Strait of Hormuz alone.
The US Navy has assessed it as too dangerous to operate within range of Iranian drones and missiles in the Strait.
No NATO power comes close to having the capability to do it without American support. So Trump is publicly humiliating the only countries that could plausibly help him solve his most pressing military problem.
This also reveals something important about how this administration distinguishes between threats and strategy.
Threatening to obliterate Iran’s power plants, desalination facilities and oil wells in the same week you claim the war will be over in two to three weeks is not a negotiating position but the language of a decision-making process that has no clear endpoint and is being driven by domestic political pressure.
And that domestic political pressure is about gas prices.
Could the US actually exit NATO?
Trump told The Telegraph that leaving NATO is “beyond reconsideration.”
US Secretary of State Rubio, historically one of the most pro-alliance voices in the administration, publicly told Al Jazeera that allies’ behaviour has been “very disappointing” and that Trump will “reexamine” US commitments when the war ends.
Whether a US exit is legally and politically executable is a different question. Congress passed legislation in 2023 requiring Senate approval for any NATO withdrawal, which means Trump cannot unilaterally pull out overnight.
But that law addresses formal withdrawal — it does not prevent the US from hollowing out its commitment in practice.
Reducing troop deployments in Europe, refusing to invoke Article 5 in a crisis, pulling back intelligence-sharing infrastructure — all of that is available to a president who wants to make the alliance functionally meaningless without formally leaving it.
The value of NATO has never been the paperwork. It has been the credibility of the guarantee. Once allies — and adversaries — stop believing the guarantee is real, it stops functioning, regardless of whether the US is technically still a member.
That credibility is being damaged right now, in real time, not by a withdrawal letter but by a president telling his partners they are on their own.
Economic fallout from a US exit from NATO
The economic consequences of a functional or formal US withdrawal from NATO would extend far beyond defence budgets.
Europe could face an immediate and painful reckoning: the continent has for decades structured its security spending, and by extension its fiscal capacity, around the assumption of American protection.
Without it, Germany, France, Poland and others would be forced to redirect capital from social programmes, infrastructure and industrial subsidy into military hardware at precisely the moment when their economies are already absorbing an energy shock from the Hormuz disruption.
The rearmament bill would be measured in the trillions over a decade, crowding out investment and pressuring sovereign debt markets.
The euro would face sustained selling pressure as defence-driven deficits widen across the bloc, and European Central Bank rate policy would be caught between the competing demands of inflation and growth at a moment of acute fiscal stress.
For the US itself, the costs would be less visible but no less real.
The dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency rests not only on the depth of American financial markets but on the credibility of American power and the network of alliances that underpin it.
A US that has publicly abandoned its partners loses the soft architecture that makes dollar dominance self-reinforcing: the trust of allies, the predictability of American commitments, and the willingness of trading partners to hold US assets as a safe haven.
Markets have already begun to price some of this risk, with gold at record highs and the dollar softening against the Swiss franc and the yen.
A full rupture would accelerate that repricing sharply.
Global supply chains, which were rebuilt after Covid around the assumption of a rules-based order backed by US power, would face a second and more durable restructuring — one driven not by a pandemic but by the deliberate withdrawal of the guarantor of last resort.
The countries most exposed would be those in East Asia, where Japan, South Korea and Australia have built their own security and trade frameworks on the same American guarantee that is now being questioned in the North Atlantic.
If that guarantee fails in Europe, the premium on American security commitments everywhere rises, and the cost of the system that has underpinned global economic stability since 1945 becomes, for the first time, genuinely uncertain.
What does this look like from Moscow and Beijing?
Russia and China have watched five weeks of the US fighting with its own alliance structure and have done very little publicly.
They do not need to do anything. The damage is self-inflicted and accumulating on its own.
For Russia, the ideal outcome of this war was never anything to do with Iran. It was always the fracturing of NATO cohesion and the distraction of American political attention away from Ukraine.
And both are happening.
European defence budgets are accelerating, which is a long-term negative for Moscow, but the short-term gain of watching Washington and Brussels tear at each other is considerable.
For China, a US that is bogged down in a Middle Eastern conflict with no exit plan, alienating its Pacific allies Japan, South Korea and Australia in the same Truth Social post that renounced NATO, is a US that is strategically overextended in a way that creates room to manoeuvre on Taiwan and in the South China Sea.
The countries loudest in their silence right now — Beijing and Moscow — are the ones with the most to gain from the direction this is heading.
That alone should inform how investors and policymakers think about what this alliance breakdown actually is, and who it is actually serving.
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