The Iran war has divided Europe and shattered the Atlantic alliance

 The war against Iran unleashed by the United States and Israel two weeks ago brings to the boil the clash of civilisations that has been simmering since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Despite the efforts of the mullahs to incite the entire Muslim world against the West, that conflict has so far been largely contained. Iran’s sporadic drone and missile strikes on the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have failed to provoke these states to distance themselves from the US, while the “Arab street” has remained quiescent.

Among the most important indirect consequences of the war, however, is the deepening rift between Europe and the US. The Atlantic alliance, on which the global Pax Americana has relied since 1945, has been exposed as a hollowed-out shell. Neither Europeans nor Americans see any obligation either to support the other, or to take account of the other’s interests.

The regime’s massacre of 20,000 to 40,000 Iranian protesters in a matter of days in January is one of the worst crimes against humanity of our time. That atrocity alone would justify the attack on Iran, on the grounds of “responsibility to protect”. Yet it has played only a subordinate role in the rationale offered by Donald Trump and his administration.

Nor has there been any consistency about the war aim. Is it regime change? Trump has toyed with the idea, but Benjamin Netanyahu ruled it out this week. Rather, Israel is intent on eliminating the military capabilities of the Iranian theocracy and its Lebanese terrorist branch, Hezbollah.

Trump initially seemed to think that electing a new supreme leader acceptable to him would be enough to end the war. But that hope was quickly dashed.

In other moods, he suggests that unless the Iranians accept unconditional surrender, the country could be so badly hit that it “could never be built back again”. Given that Japan was speedily rebuilt even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this implies a threat to leave Iran as a radioactive moonscape — which would be a step too far for the US military. An almost equally unpalatable but more likely scenario is Iran reduced to a failed state.

Or will the war stop, as Trump has also hinted, when the US runs out of targets?

In that case, the endgame may be nigh – but only if oil tankers can be guaranteed safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. The Pentagon admits that it cannot do this alone and has called on other interested parties to provide escorts. 

On Saturday, Trump explicitly called on China, France, Japan, South Korea and the UK to send ships to escort commercial vessels.  Would playing this necessary but subordinate role be sufficient for the Europeans to be reconciled with Trump?

Not only did Trump make no attempt to prepare European public opinion for his onslaught, his attitude to the EU throughout his second term has been consistently hostile. The president has even threatened to annex or compulsorily purchase Greenland, the sovereign territory of Denmark, a Nato ally.

The Danes have not forgotten how Bismarck seized their province of Schleswig-Holstein in 1864, nor Hitler’s occupation in 1940, but they never expected to be menaced by an American president.

Both Europe and America are, of course, divided on this war, just as they are on Ukraine. Opinion polls suggest that whereas a majority of Americans still back Ukraine and disapprove of Trump’s rapprochement with Putin, only a minority support his attack on Iran. This week Joe Rogan voiced the misgivings of Maga about this “crazy” war: “A lot of people feel betrayed,” the president’s favourite podcaster declared.

But the divisions inside the European Union are both more obvious and run deeper than in America. Insofar as there is a European consensus on the Iran war, it is the predictable one of timidity and equivocation. There has been broad agreement on the need to protect Cyprus, a fellow EU (but not a Nato) member state, from bombardment by the Iranian proxy Hezbollah.

A divided Europe

Of the two largest powers in the EU, France has taken a much more active role than Germany – despite the fact that Emmanuel Macron says the war is illegal. In both countries public opinion is sceptical on Iran, as it has been on Gaza.

Friedrich Merz stands out among European politicians as a principled hawk: he believes the attack on Iran is justified by Israel’s right to self-defence.

The German chancellor did not dissent when, as he sat next to Trump in the Oval Office, the president denounced the soft-Left Sir Keir Starmer and his Spanish counterpart, Pedro Sánchez, for their squeamishness about the US-Israeli operation. Merz, a tough-minded conservative, has no time for fence-sitters. For him, going along with Trump’s Middle Eastern adventure is a price worth paying to keep the US from abandoning Ukraine. Iran is primarily about Realpolitik.

The French, with their traditional interest in the Levant, have stepped in to defend Cyprus by diverting their only aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, from a Nato exercise in the North Atlantic and Baltic.

Together with the other regional EU nations – the Greeks, Italians, Dutch and Spanish – they have formed a naval task force to patrol the eastern Mediterranean. France is also sending warships to join the US Sixth Fleet in the Gulf and the Red Sea, where they will play a symbolic role in keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, so that oil and gas may continue to flow to supply the world.

This show of force by Macron is designed not just to serve a strategic purpose, but to appeal to patriotic sentiment at home. “Your presence demonstrates the power of France,” the president declared in a video, posing with sailors and airmen in the aircraft hangar on board the Charles de Gaulle against a backdrop of the Marseillaise. Nothing lifts the spirits at home quite like la gloire de la France.

Germany, by contrast with France, has maintained its focus relentlessly on the forgotten war in the heart of Europe: Ukraine. Only this week, the defence minister Boris Pistorius announced that 35 Patriot missiles would be dispatched to defend Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.

Yet the Iran war has brought succour to Vladimir Putin in at least two significant ways.

The sharp rise in oil and gas prices will be a huge boost to the Russian war machine, all the more so the longer the war continues. And in order to offset potential shortages caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Trump has now lifted sanctions on Russian oil. Although Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, insists this concession is for a limited period, Ukrainians suspect that this will quietly be extended.

Here again, the Nato allies are at odds. Macron immediately declared that the oil shock did not justify abandoning sanctions on Russia, which are virtually the only means by which pressure can still be exerted by the West on Putin.

Yet most Europeans are united by the fear of alienating Trump and being left to defend themselves against Putin without American help. Offering at least token support against Iran is being treated by the US administration as a test of loyalty.

One leader who certainly failed that test is the Left-wing Spanish prime minister Sánchez, who denounced the war as illegal and has permanently withdrawn his ambassador from Israel. In response to Trump’s threat to cut off all trade with Spain, Sánchez was defiant: “We will not be complicit in something that is bad for the world and is also contrary to our values and interests, simply out of fear of reprisals from someone.”

How big a problem is it for Europe that on Trump’s war against Iran, each EU member state has a different position?

Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, is perhaps the US president’s closest friend on the Continent. Unsurprisingly, she has refrained from criticising him directly. Yet even Meloni told her parliament that the attack on Iran was contrary to international law and that Italy would not be taking part.