The Iran war may end. What it has done to America’s alliances may not. That is the assessment taking shape among analysts, diplomats and former officials watching Donald Trump’s conduct over the past ten weeks — a period in which the United States launched a war, antagonized the allies who declined to join it, pulled troops from Germany, threatened to reduce forces in Italy and Spain, questioned its commitment to NATO’s mutual defense clause and downplayed Iranian attacks on a Gulf partner. The war itself has a potential off-ramp. The relationship damage is accumulating on a longer timeline.
“Trump’s recklessness with respect to Iran is resulting in some dramatic shifts,” said Brett Bruen, a former Obama administration adviser who now leads the Situation Room strategic consultancy. “U.S. credibility is at stake.”
The fraying did not begin on February 28, when American and Israeli forces struck Iran and triggered the conflict. Trump had already rattled traditional partners with sweeping tariffs, threats to absorb Greenland from Denmark and cuts to military aid for Ukraine. But the war accelerated everything. Iran’s retaliatory closure of the Strait of Hormuz produced an energy shock that landed hardest on European economies — countries that had no vote in the decision to go to war and no mechanism to avoid paying its economic price. Their political leaders said so publicly. Trump heard criticism where he expected solidarity, and he has been responding accordingly ever since.
The specific rupture with Germany crystallized the dynamic. Chancellor Friedrich Merz said openly that Iran was humiliating Washington at the negotiating table. Trump announced the withdrawal of 5,000 of the 36,400 US troops stationed in Germany within days. The Pentagon separately scrapped a planned deployment of Tomahawk cruise missiles to German soil. The message encoded in both decisions was identical: American military presence in Europe is no longer a strategic commitment extended unconditionally to allies — it is a reward distributed to governments that behave as Trump expects them to.
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Italy and Spain have been put on notice. Their leaders have been publicly at odds with Trump over the war, and he has said he is considering reducing American forces in both countries. “Italy has not been of any help to us and Spain has been horrible, absolutely horrible,” Trump told reporters, adding when pressed whether he would act on the threat: “Yeah, probably, I probably will. Why shouldn’t I?”
The White House has not softened the framing. Spokeswoman Anna Kelly acknowledged Trump had “made his disappointment with NATO and other allies clear,” noting that requests to use military bases in Europe for the Iran campaign had been denied by host governments. While insisting Trump had “restored America’s standing on the world stage,” she said he “will never allow the United States to be treated unfairly and taken advantage of by so-called ‘allies.'” The quotation marks around allies were in the original.
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Trump has also questioned whether the US should feel bound by Article 5 — NATO’s collective defense provision, the cornerstone of the alliance’s deterrence framework since its founding — if allies continue resisting his wartime demands. The suggestion that mutual defense commitments are conditional on political compliance rather than guaranteed by treaty is not a nuance that allied governments in Warsaw, Tallinn or Vilnius, sitting closest to Russian military power, are able to dismiss as rhetorical bluster.
The beneficiaries of that uncertainty are obvious. China and Russia are reading every allied hedge, every bilateral arrangement made outside the American security umbrella and every public statement of European strategic autonomy as a strategic opening. Japan has been accelerating its own security partnerships across the Indo-Pacific rather than waiting on Washington. Gulf states are recalibrating their dependence on a guarantor whose reliability is now openly debated in their own foreign ministries.
Whether Trump’s conduct since returning to office marks a permanent turning point or a turbulent parenthesis is the question analysts cannot yet answer with confidence. Most believe the erosion of US alliances will outlast the specific decisions driving it — that trust, once structurally damaged, does not recover automatically when the policy changes or the administration turns over.
The Iran war’s military chapter is approaching some form of conclusion. The alliance chapter is still being written, and the direction of the narrative is not encouraging for those who built their security assumptions around American constancy.