Nato is facing an existential crisis as the Iran war exposes its limitations in the Middle East and mounting frustration over how to deal with its number one critic, Donald Trump.
Across the transatlantic alliance, alarm bells are ringing as it tries to persuade the US President that it has a meaningful purpose, hence hurried proposals to play a role in safeguarding freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.
Conversations The National held this week with Nato insiders from across the alliance, from Southern Europe to the Baltics, reveal a shared determination to avoid a public acknowledgement of a split within the alliance that could embolden its enemies. Many fear that validating Mr Trump's accusations they are free-riders would accelerate US withdrawal from Europe, and leave the continent exposed to Russia.
How fast Nato will be able to change and adapt to new realities remains an open question. "We know Nato has to change. You just have to look at Ukraine, the Middle East, and Greenland," a European diplomat said. "We just don't know how it will change, and how fast."
Mr Trump has repeatedly threatened to withdraw from the alliance, prompting German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to say he does not want Nato "to split" over the Hormuz issue. His British counterpart Keir Starmer on Friday issued a rallying call for European members to do more to show its worth.
Attempts at convincing Mr Trump that Nato is defensive in nature and that reopening Hormuz by force falls outside its remit have fallen flat. The US president has reportedly demanded concrete plans on Hormuz within days, following a tense exchange with Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte in Washington earlier this week.
Mr Rutte, heretofore nicknamed the "Trump whisperer", has acknowledged the unease. On Thursday, he told the Reagan Institute in Washington that everybody in the room had "a knot in their stomach about the future of the transatlantic Alliance".
The dispute comes just months after another shock to the alliance when Mr Trump demanded the US should annex Greenland, an autonomous territory of Nato member Denmark. “It all began with, if you want to know the truth, Greenland,” Mr Trump said on Tuesday. “We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us. And I said, ‘bye, bye.’”
Hormuz headache
Mr Trump's threats have triggered a diplomatic flurry in Paris and London, where talks have taken place in order to share views with international partners, including non-Nato countries in Asia and the Gulf, on how to deploy a defensive operation in Hormuz. But this would only take place once hostilities are over.
Mr Merz also wants the mission to be backed by the UN Security Council, but Bahrain's attempts to have a resolution voted last week was vetoed by Russia and China despite French efforts to broker compromise language.
Trump's target
At Nato headquarters in Brussels, some officials believe Mr Trump is taking aim at individual European states more than at Nato as a structure, and that the best response is a mixture of initiatives from Nato, European states individually, and the European Union. The EU has deployed naval missions in the Red Sea, Bab Al Mandeb and Hormuz in the past.
Leaders have emphasised the strategic value of Nato to the US, including by highlighting the access they gave the US to European military bases in the past weeks, while also promising to do more.
"It’s the single most effective military alliance the world has ever known," Mr Starmer said on Friday after a Gulf tour. "Do we Europeans need to do more? Yes, I’ve been making that argument for the best part of two years, to our European partners as much as anybody else.“
Not Europe's war?
At Nato, there is belated recognition that Middle Eastern wars are intertwined with Europe's conflicts, largely due to the Russian-Iranian alliance. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday revealed that his country's forces had shot down Iranian made Shahed drones during the war, without specifying in which states they were operating.
Kyiv has accrued experience fighting Iranian-made drones because they are also used by Russia against Ukraine. Mr Zelenskyy's offer of drone expertise to the Gulf "has had a very positive outcome," he said on X.
Adapting to evolving warfare tactics such as Iranian drones poses significant challenges for Nato. There is an understanding that the alliance needs to readjust its tools to intervene in a region rife with non-traditional security threats, including Iran-backed paramilitary groups.
Analysts warned that the immediate priority remains the eastern flank, particularly amid uncertainty over future US commitment. "The truth is that in the east, European soil is being attacked by Russia. This is objectively a greater and more imminent threat right now," Kristina Kausch, deputy managing director at the German Marshall Fund, told The National.
She also warned that a more European-led Nato may cause friction with Mr Trump, who has been reluctant to give up on the US's decision-making powers despite his push for more European financial contribution to the alliance. "We're going to see more sovereign decisions that are going to be diverging from defence decisions of the United States," Ms Kausch said.
Views differ on what a European-led Nato could look like. A second European diplomat said it would not automatically come at the cost of Nato’s southern flank. “It could also imply more focus on the region because of its geographic proximity to Nato,” they told The National.
Withdrawal from Iraq
The alliance's constraints in the Middle East were underscored last month when one of its best success stories, the Nato Mission in Iraq, moved its mostly European personnel from Baghdad to Nato's Joint Force Command in Naples, Italy. This came one month into the Iran war and amid attacks by Iranian proxies against European military forces stationed in Iraqi Kurdistan, causing the death of a French soldier.
Launched in 2018, the mission was based in a US base in Baghdad's Green Zone. On X, it said it continues its work in a limited manner from Italy, though it remains unclear how, and Nato did not respond to The National's request for comment.
In its last post before its withdrawal, the mission had highlighted training of Iraqi soldiers in computer-assisted simulation. The mission is widely viewed as having boosted Nato's reputation in the region after a disastrous 2011 intervention in Libya.
While there is widespread support among allies for it to return to Iraq once conditions allow, it is also expected to change its format, maybe to a more civilian-led role. "Nato's strategy in the region has been more about empowering governments to effectively fight [hybrid] threats," Ms Kausch said.
Stabilisation
The launch of a new mission similar to the Iraq one is unlikely, but there is appetite to deepen existing bilateral partnerships via Nato's strategic partnership programme. It provides advice in practical matters including budgetary military planning to countries like Mauritania and Jordan.
At the same time, some Nato states on its southern border, such as Spain, are keen to maintain momentum in deepening engagement with the Middle East, in line with what Nato calls a 360 degree approach – shorthand for expanding its focus from the east to the south of its borders.
There is a possibility that leaders from the region could be invited to the next leaders' summit in Ankara in July, though it is still early days and its agenda has not been finalised yet. In a recent commentary, Oana Lungescu, a former Nato spokesperson and current distinguished fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, wrote that it would "seem strange" for the Middle East to be ignored in Ankara.
"Secretary General [Mark] Rutte could suggest putting stabilisation in the Middle East on the summit agenda to showcase support for the US by inviting Ukraine as well as partners from the Gulf and the Indo-Pacific to contribute. This is not Europe’s war, but it does affect Europe’s security, so Nato’s European members cannot just stand on the sidelines," Ms Lungescu said.
