President Donald Trump is fighting a two-front war, and neither is going well.
The first, the kinetic fight against Iran, is blowing up plenty of Iranian military positions and killing a slew of Iranian officials but has also produced one of the biggest oil shocks in history. Faced with ballooning oil and gas costs, businesses and households from Europe to Asia are now instituting measures to conserve supplies. Republican lawmakers are increasingly petrified of how the war may impact the midterm elections. Trump, floundering for a result he can categorize as a win, is apparently in ceasefire talks with the Iranians.
The other battle is between the United States and its traditional allies in Europe. Trump, never shy about expressing his disgust for NATO when it fails to meet his expectations, is spending almost as much time lobbing rhetorical grenades at the continent as he is in dropping bombs on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In Trump’s telling, he is doing the world a favor by degrading Iran’s military capacity and preventing the country from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Europe, meanwhile, isn’t lifting a finger to aid the assault. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, it seems, are no better in Trump’s eyes than Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new supreme leader.
Per usual, Trump has leveraged the media to push his narrative. Starmer, he repeats, “is no Winston Churchill.” Spain, he says, better shape up or the U.S. will stop trading with the country. The French, Trump wrote on March 31, are not only unhelpful but actively hindering U.S. military operations by closing its airspace to U.S. military aircraft. NATO, Trump claims, is a “paper tiger” only interested in taking U.S. assistance without offering anything in return. He is now so angry about the situation that a U.S. withdrawal from defense alliance is apparently on the table.
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