“We're in fairly uncharted territory with a president waging war with no support and indeed growing opposition to it among virtually all his European allies.”
Mark Landler
0:25Trump's war against Iran — launched without notifying European allies — has fractured the transatlantic alliance to a degree not seen in modern history, rating an 8 or 9 out of 10 in severity according to NYT correspondent Mark Landler. European leaders are refusing to join offensive operations, citing Iraq-era trauma, skepticism that military strikes can actually eliminate Iran's nuclear program, and the legal reality that Article 5 of NATO simply doesn't apply when the US struck first. Yet Europe can't escape the consequences: diesel above $9 a gallon in Germany, skyrocketing natural gas prices, and Iranian missiles hitting European military bases are pulling the continent into a war it explicitly rejected. Listen to understand why the US-Europe split is more structurally fragile than previous Trump-era tensions — and why both sides may be too dependent on each other for a clean break to be possible.
The Daily's introduction, an overview of the ongoing Iran war, and Europe's resistance to President Trump's demands for assistance, setting up the main discussion.
“For the first time in recent history, the US has gone to war without any of our European allies joining us. And it seems clear that President Trump is very mad at them because of this, to the point where Trump is now strongly suggesting again that he's going to leave NATO, that the US is going to pull out of NATO.”
This quote highlights an unprecedented breakdown in transatlantic alliances and raises significant questions about the future of international cooperation and US foreign policy.