NATO members are not legally required to join any member's military operations that are not formally sanctioned by the alliance or not aimed at protecting the homelands of the membership.
But they often do just that.
Some NATO members joined the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq on the theory that, in the post-9/11 environment, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were dangers to all Western security.
They followed the precedent set by America's 1999 intervention in the distant Balkans, leading a three-month NATO campaign to dismantle Slobodan Milosevic's often bloody ambitions of a Greater Serbia. The U.S. also joined the 2011 U.N.-approved, and French- and British-inspired, NATO "coalition of the willing" bombing campaign in Libya.
That effort proved a seven-month misadventure – especially since the targeted Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi had given up his nuclear weapons program and was desperately trying to cut a deal with the West.
When NATO members in the past have operated unilaterally to defend their own national interests, they have often called on the U.S., as NATO's strongest member, for overt help.
For nearly 40 years, the U.S. had offered logistical, intelligence, reconnaissance, refueling, and diplomatic support to the French in their unilateral and postcolonial efforts to protect Chad from Libya and, later, Islamists.
During the 1982 Falklands War, a solitary Britain faced enormous logistical challenges in steaming halfway around the world to eject Argentina from its windswept and sparse islands.
U.S. aid was critical to the effort.
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So America stepped up to help with intelligence, reconnaissance, the supply of some two million gallons of much-needed gasoline, and crucial restocking of Britain's depleted Tomahawk missiles.
The American tilt to Britain prompted anger from most Latin American nations of the shared Western hemisphere, as well as from many Hispanic American citizens at home.
No matter – President Ronald Reagan rightly saw the importance of solidarity with a NATO member and a long-time American ally. So he gave Britain a veritable blank check for American aid.
Currently, America has not asked NATO members to help bomb Iran – even though Europe, not the U.S., was in range of Iranian ballistic missiles, and soon perhaps nuclear-tipped ones as well.
Europeans are far more vulnerable to Iranian-inspired Islamic terrorism. They are more reliant on foreign oil from the Middle East, some of it passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
All the U.S. had initially asked for was basing support in disarming a common Western enemy that, for nearly half a century, has slaughtered American diplomats and soldiers and tried to kill a U.S. president and secretary of state.
But most NATO members could not even offer tacit help. Some damned the U.S. effort as either illegal or unnecessary.
The American public watched the British waffle for days over permitting Americans to use their Diego Garcia base.
The Spanish banned American use of their NATO bases and airspace.
The Italians refused a request from American bombers to land and refuel at a Sicilian NATO base.
Many NATO heads of state rebuked the U.S. to their domestic audiences while, in typical two-faced fashion, publicly offering empty verbal support for the U.S. effort.
The NATO response to an Iranian missile aimed at fellow NATO member Turkey was anemic.
Even worse was the pathetic British reaction to another Iranian missile launch at a British base at Akrotiri, Cyprus.
Yet a successful American effort in neutering a theocratic Iran was clearly of benefit to Europe. So is preventing the international waters of the Strait of Hormuz from becoming a toll booth run by the Iranian mullahs.
Such passivity was in sharp contrast to the five-year-long Ukraine War on the borders of Europe.
Ukraine was not in NATO.
Ukrainian politicos and ambassadors had sometimes played an intrusive, partisan role in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 American presidential elections.
Nonetheless, there were urgent European requests for the U.S. to honor the spirit of NATO solidarity and to get across the Atlantic as quickly as possible to protect the territorial integrity of Europe.
Yet continental Europe is not intrinsically weak. The combined population of the European Union and European NATO members is around 450 million – a population more than 100 million greater than that of the U.S.
These same European nations enjoy an aggregate annual GDP of more than $22 trillion, 10 times the size of the Russian economy.
European diffidence comes on top of the perennial American effort to harangue NATO members to honor their 2 percent of GDP defense commitments – especially in the case of deadbeat Spain and Canada, who for years welched on their pledges.
Trump's harangues were not what was undermining NATO.
Instead, he ripped off a happy-face scab and exposed a festering wound of increasingly anti-American hypocrisy beneath.
If you wanted to wreck the alliance, there would be no better way than to follow the duplicitous examples of Western European NATO members.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of "The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won," from Basic Books. You can reach him by emailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
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