By Noah Rothman
Thursday, April 02, 2026
Ahead of Wednesday night’s formal
address to a nation whose support for the Iran war Trump did not solicit in
advance, political media outlets forecast a speech that would have been
unlikely to reassure anyone.
Politico, for example, anticipated an address in
which the president declared premature victory in Iran. Trump was expected to
say that America’s work in Iran was all but done. He would insist that whatever
remains of the Iranian threat was everyone else’s problem. And after declaring
his intention to bug out, Trump would lay into America’s NATO allies — perhaps
even going so far as to announce his intention to withdraw the United States
from the Atlantic Alliance.
If that version of the president’s speech existed, it was
not the one he delivered. Trump didn’t declare the war complete. He didn’t lash
out at NATO. He didn’t even abdicate any American responsibility for
contributing to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, the president
established a sobering predicate for the war against the Islamic Republic, and
he outlined the successes the campaign has enjoyed so far while relating in as
much detail as information security allows about the mission still ahead of us.
Iran, Trump said, has been a malignant presence on the
world stage and a threat to American life for nearly half a century. They were
behind the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing and the roadside bombs that took over
600 U.S. lives in Iraq. They had a role in the October 7 massacre and the 2000
attack on the USS Cole. And they killed, he claimed, 45,000 of their own
citizens in the streets in January.
The regime had every intention of resuming its nuclear
weapons program, Trump added, and it planned to do so from behind an arsenal of
ballistic missiles that would render future efforts to disable that program
cost-prohibitive. The president restated the U.S. objective in this war:
“Systematically dismantling the regime’s ability to threaten America or project
power outside its borders.” And he described how America had made speedy
progress toward that goal.
Trump departed from his triumphalist tone, however, to
address Americans’ concerns about rising energy prices — an anticipated burden
associated with this war that he should have prepared Americans to bear.
But the pain Americans are feeling today would pale before the “decades of
extortion, economic pain, and instability” the nation and the world would
experience if Iran held the strait hostage from behind an arsenal of fissionable
weapons, he said. In addition, Trump (accurately) noted that Americans are more insulated from
energy price shocks than they were in previous decades.
The president did attempt to internationalize the
crisis in the Persian Gulf, noting (again correctly) that the U.S. is less reliant on the
commodities that transit the strait than other countries. Those nations “must
grab it and cherish it,” he said of Hormuz. If the world is feeling the pain
from this conflict, it can do two things: buy American energy exports and
“build up some delayed courage” to “go to the strait and just take it, protect
it.” Trump did not wash his hands of the crisis. “We will help,” he added. But
“the hard part is done, so it should be easy.”
And while the president did insist that America’s wartime
objectives are mostly secure, the work is not yet done. He forecast another two
to three weeks of high-intensity combat operations, at which point he will seek
a negotiated cease-fire. If no deal is possible, though, Trump said he would
intensify strikes on civilian infrastructure like Iran’s electricity generation
capabilities.
But the president did not prepare Americans for the
prospect of deploying ground troops to the conflict. Indeed, while he didn’t
rule much out, Trump did appear to put the kibosh on a fraught and complex
operation to secure Iran’s “nuclear dust” — i.e., its roughly 1,000 pounds of
60 percent enriched uranium. It’s buried beneath the ruins of Iran’s nuclear
program, which is “under intense satellite surveillance.” If it moves, so do
we.
The president’s ad-libbed moments were, as ever, unhelpful. He said the American economy is at present the
best it’s ever been. It was “dead and crippled” in January 2025, but now it’s
back, and with “no inflation.” He may be right to anticipate that the strait
will “open up naturally” when combat operations are complete, but that does not
convey to Americans that Trump is implementing a plan or that he even has one.
It sounds flippant to call this dangerous war in which 13 U.S. service
personnel lost their lives “a little journey.” And Trump did not solicit America’s
patience with the conflict and the hardships they must endure to support it.
But he was justified in asking Americans to observe some
perspective. In each of America’s wars in the last century or more, he said,
from World War I to Iraq and Afghanistan, the fighting was measured in years.
Iran, by contrast, has unfolded over the course of just “32 days,” he said,
pausing for effect and allowing his voice to drop a full octave. Ending Iran’s
“sinister threat to America,” Trump closed, is “a true investment in your
children and your grandchildren’s future.”
NATO Off the Hook?
Prudence might have prevailed last night, but the outrage
in this administration toward America’s European allies is real.
“It’s like these m*********ers always talk about Article
Five,” one irate “person close to the White House” said in remarks to Politico that forecast the direction this speech
might take. “Okay, well, Iran has been blowing up our soldiers and ripping
their wings off for, you know, half a century, and we finally responded, and
now they’re going after all our major non-NATO allies and the United States,
and you guys are not only saying we’re not going to help but you’re closing
your airspace to us — really?”
It’s a fair point. And it’s one that not only the
president but also his appointees share.
Asked earlier this week if the president was
reconsidering America’s role not just as NATO’s primus inter pares but
as a member of the Atlantic Alliance, Trump said the matter was “beyond
reconsideration.”
“We’ve been there automatically, including Ukraine,” Trump told The Telegraph. “Ukraine wasn’t our
problem. It was a test, and we were there for them, and we would always have
been there for them. They weren’t there for us.”
America’s allies may be used to the president’s casual
hostility toward NATO, but his skepticism is now being echoed even by
the Atlanticists in his administration.
“Ultimately, that’s a decision for the president to make,
and he’ll have to make it,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News host Sean Hannity
on Tuesday on the subject of America’s relationship with NATO. “But I do
think, unfortunately, we are going to have to re-examine whether or not this
alliance that has served this country well for a while is still serving that
purpose, or has it now become a one-way street where America is simply in a
position to defend Europe, but when we need the help of our allies, they’re
going to deny us basing rights and they’re going to deny us overflight.”
At the outset of the Iran war, British Prime Minister
Keir Starmer’s government attempted to block the United States from using its
airfields to stage attacks on Iranian targets. The Spanish and Italian
governments have denied U.S. military assets involved in the campaign
overflight rights. The U.K., France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands have
mused lethargically about the acute threat posed by the perpetual throttling of
commodities traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Still, they’ve done little but
complain about the position in which they find themselves.
Yet, the threat to Europe posed by Iran extends well
beyond the Persian Gulf. Iranian terror cells are active inside Europe. They are engaged in efforts to
execute deadly attacks on European facilities and civilians. Iran developed the
capacity to hit European soil with long-range ballistic missiles in violation
of its self-set limits. Iran is threatening European energy security — a threat
it long held in reserve — taking the Continent hostage in ways it recognizes as
unacceptable when it’s the Russians doing the hostage taking. And whether they
like it or not, Trump is correct when he observes that Europe and Asia rely
far more directly on the commodities that transit the strait than the United
States.
No honest broker could begrudge the Europeans a little
pique. Trump administration officials spent the first year of the president’s
second term gratuitously antagonizing America’s European allies, including
threatening military action against them. Trump’s Pentagon berated NATO allies
for failing to see to affairs within its theater of operations in Europe, only
to pivot now to displays of irritation over NATO’s refusal to act outside its
theater.
But Europe has succumbed to the same irrational pique to
which Trump is often prone.
An American reassessment of its role in NATO would be
felt most acutely by the nations on the alliance’s frontier with Russia, but it
would not end there. The United States benefits immensely from the preservation
of security on the Continent. History has proven that the United States cannot
extricate itself from European security, and uncontained conflicts in and near
NATO have a gravity that predictably compels U.S. involvement. A fissure would
be bad for everyone, but neither Brussels nor Washington seems capable of
seeing beyond their own navels.
Yes, Trump cannot unilaterally withdraw the United States
from NATO. That is a Senate-ratified relationship, and, in 2023, Congress
passed language confirming that the president cannot “suspend, terminate,
denounce, or withdraw the United States.” Well, the law certainly hasn’t
prevented the president from issuing any denunciations. Trump can’t just pull
out of NATO, but he can frustrate its activities and render its mutual
defense provisions all but defunct. “If Trump decided military force wasn’t
necessary, the treaty might still exist de jure, but the American security
guarantee for European allies would be a dead letter,” the Wall Street Journal’s Marcus Walker wrote.
But Trump has had those tools at his disposal for years —
years he also spent lambasting the NATO alliance. Trump’s grievance is not with
NATO per se but some of its constituent members in what Donald Rumsfeld once
derisively deemed “old Europe.” In the end, the president bet that a rational
appraisal of Europe’s interests in the Middle East would create the conditions
for cooler heads to prevail.
NATO’s success as a deterrent against aggressive action
from its adversaries is self-evident. It wouldn’t be the longest-lived military
alliance in human history if its value were debatable. But the work of
generations can be undone in a fit of all-too-human, albeit reckless and
shortsighted, mutual vexation.
ADDENDUM: During her appearance at the Democratic
Socialists of America forum on Tuesday night, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez caused a stir far beyond the
convention hall when she was asked if she would oppose all future
“spending on arms for Israel,” including defensive ordnance. “Yes,” she
confidently replied.
New York magazine wondered whether AOC’s new
standard, which apparently includes even opposition to funding for interceptors
that limit the deadly effect of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian rockets, would
catch on across the Democratic Party. It seems it has.
In the hours since, Democratic progressives and moderates
alike endorsed AOC’s position (even as she
subsequently softened it). It seems only a handful of Democrats, like
Representative Josh Gottheimer, recognize that limiting the deadly effect
of Iranian and terrorist missiles saves not just Jewish lives but Arab lives as
well, insofar as it reduces the Israeli imperative to conduct dangerous
expeditionary missions outside its borders to neutralize the threat from its
point of origin.
AOC deserves some credit for forcing her fellow Democrats
to abandon the ambiguity to which they once clung. It’s not so much that an
anti-war faction within the party has captured the Democrats. They’re not
anti-war at all. They’re just backing the other side.
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